PARENTAL CONTROLS: Protecting young people from inappropriate online content.

Parental controls are designed to help protect children from inappropriate content online. These controls can be used in various ways, for example to help ensure that children access only age-appropriate content, to set usage times, to monitor activity, or to help prevent in-app purchases.

This week's blog comes from the UK Safer Internet Centre, who offer a wealth of information on keeping safe online. https://saferinternet.org.uk/

Best practices for parents and carers

Decide what’s right for your family Creating a family agreement allows you to have conversations about setting boundaries. It’s important that you involve yourself in your child’s online world, so as a simple starting point you could ask them what their favourite websites or games are, and why they like them. The filtering options that you put in place may also change over time, as your children get older and more independent, and their technology use changes too. Check your settings regularly Children can become accomplished users of technology and may learn how to disable or bypass the parental controls in place. Therefore, it’s important to talk to your children from the outset about why the settings are there, and the importance of respecting them. Regularly checking the filtering on your family’s devices could also form part of your agreement. Give children the skills they need No parental controls or filtering options are guaranteed to be 100% effective. They are a very useful tool to improve the quality of online experiences, but they cannot offer a ‘complete’ solution. It is therefore essential to talk with your children about their online activities, so they know what to do if they encounter inappropriate content. Establish some rules If you have parental controls from your internet provider on your home WiFi, these will not cover the use of 3G, 4G or 5G at home. Similarly, if your child goes to a friend’s house where there are no controls in place, they may be able to access unrestricted content. For these reasons, it’s important to educate your child about the potential risks online and establish rules concerning the sites that are suitable or inappropriate to visit.