To limit or block your children’s phone use

The moment comes soon when a son or daughter wants to use the smartphone, because friends already have it, because from middle school it already becomes indispensable. Preventing it is difficult and also inconvenient from a social point of view.

Instead, to leave children free to use the smartphone without exposing them too much to the risks of addiction and safety, it is possible to use settings and apps to limit phone use block its use after a certain period of time and prevent some applications, so you don’t always have to monitor intrusively.

READ ALSO -> How to block some sites on your PC

1) Phone lock on Android

On Android devices the parental control system is integrated in various forms and with various apps depending on the type of manufacturer. For this reason we have collected in this chapter only the methods that can be replicated across all Android smartphones or tablets from any manufacturer or with any operating system version still supported.

App and purchase lock

The first parental control we can apply it to the Play Store, so as to prevent anyone from installing unauthorized apps or paid apps without our consent. To activate app control, open the Play Store app, press the profile icon at the top right, press Settings and we expand the menu Familyactivating the voice Parental Control.

Now let’s choose a secure and unidentifiable 4-digit PIN and configure the various categories of the store, starting from the Apps and games section: let’s make sure it is the PEGI filter is active based on the age of our child (from 3 to 16 years). Once the filter has been configured, tap on the button at the bottom Salva to make the changes effective; we can replicate the same changes for the category Film and for the category Musicaso as to avoid the appearance of content that is not suitable for the age of our children.

Still from the same screen we can press on Manage approval requests to choose how to approve requests that children will send from their phone to their parents’ phone; the best choice is to use Google accounts by setting up an account Parent and an account Son.

App Google Family

The second parental control that we can use on Android smartphones or tablets is Google Familywhich allows us to monitor our children’s devices remotely, adding them to a single family group.

To use this app correctly we must install theapp for children’s phones el’parental control apptaking care to add everyone to the same family group (to remotely control all functions.

Once the family group has been configured we will be able to decide which apps they can use Our children, the time of use of the phone or of each individual app, monitor their movements via always active GPS and authorize or deny the installation of one or more apps.

Our advice is to talk about it openly with your children and to relax the control sporadically or as they grow, so as to increase the sense of responsibility in step with the level of control applied.

Other parental control apps

Other parental control apps that we can install on an Android phone are the following:

• TimeoutIQ it is a parent app for supervising children, free to control a device, easy to use and with very good graphics.
• Parental Control Children’s Space: one of the most effective control apps for minors, with real-time notifications on requests and authorizations.
• Secure Web Parental Control: an app similar to the previous one but useful for controlling and blocking the contents of unwanted web pages;
• Kidslox Parental Control: another very useful app for expanding the parental control system on Android, with app blocks and GPS monitoring;
• Kaspersky SafeKids; directly from the manufacturer of a famous antivirus we will be able to use a powerful parental control to monitor the activity of our minors and always know where they are with GPS monitoring tools;
• Norton Family parental control: another popular app for monitoring children’s activity, authorizing or denying access to apps, controlling usage time and authorizing purchases from the Play Store.

To delve deeper into parental control on Android and find out how to block apps already installed on the system and which apps we can let minors use without any danger, we can also use the App to block the opening of applications on Android.

2) Phone Lock on iPhone

From the point of view of parental control, Apple is definitely ahead, given that parental controls are present on all iPhoneseffectively making it useless to install new apps to monitor your children.

Usage time

To configure the usage time (first form of effective control) we open the app Settings on the child’s or teenager’s iPhone, take us to the menu Usage time and immediately configure a security code to protect future configurations by tapping on Use code “Screen Time”. Once the security code is created, we use the menus Pause of use, App limitations, Always allowed e Content and privacy to set various parental controls on your device.

For example, if we want to block the use of social networking apps after 10 minutes of use, let’s go to App limitationslet’s tap on Add usage restrictionwe choose as category Social network (or one of the others present) and finally we set 10 minutes (or any other time you like) as a limit of use.

To block sites prohibited to minors, simply go to Content and Privacy -> Content Restrictions -> Web Content and set Limit adult websites o Only websites allowed to apply the right level of control over Internet browsing. Other filters can be customized by visiting Content and Privacy -> Content Restrictions and acting between the various menu items present, so as to apply restrictions to downloadable and usable apps, films, music tracks and books, as well as applying a filter to the words used by Siri.

Family account

If we want to approve a request from a minor remotely without having to take their iPhone every time we advise you to set up Apple accounts in the Family Sharing platformso that we can authorize the purchase of the app (we will be responsible for paying with our payment methods) and always monitor the activity carried out by all Apple devices assigned as minors within the family group.

For further information we recommend reading the official guide on In Famiglia.

Conclusions

If we want to extend security to the entire home network including PCs, notebooks and gaming consoles, we recommend you read our dedicated guides on how to protect children and family from the dangers of the Internet It is on parental controls and parental controls on PC and internet: 5 ways to keep children safe.