What You Should Know About Parental Controls

 What You Should Know About 

Parental Controls

If you're a first-time mom or have young children, chances are you're worried about keeping them safe online. To do this, knowing the parental control tools  is essential.

Although this concern may seem advanced when you have a baby, the truth is that the dangers on the internet appear at an earlier age, so the anticipation with which you dedicate yourself to research how to keep them safe will work in your favour.

In fact, it is estimated that in Chile  20% of children have strangers as contacts on their social networks , a figure that shows the importance of informing your children from an early age.

The common thing among those born between 2010 and 2025, belonging to the so-called  “tactile generation” or “Alpha”,  is to have access to the internet much earlier, a situation that has been enhanced by  confinement  and classes through the internet.

To give you an idea of ​​how important  parental control is , you should know that in Chile  complaints of grooming and improper sexual abuse registered an increase of 19% in relation to 2018 , and that  Tik Tok , one of the most used social networks by minors, is one of the main means used by bullies to approach them.

But what is parental control?

It is a series of practices that allow parents to monitor and set limits on what their children consult on the web, either through services such as Google; social networks such as Facebook, YouTube and Tik Tok; or streaming apps like Netflix and Amazon Prime.

In the case of minors, this form of control cannot be considered an invasion of privacy and responds to purposes such as avoiding exposure to inappropriate content, preventing situations of harassment, emotional problems related to the use of social networks and even unauthorized purchases.

As a first security measure, install a parental filter:

• The application or software you choose will allow you to remotely monitor the child's activity.
• It will report how many hours you surf the internet, which pages you visit and with whom you interact.
• It will allow you to create a "blacklist" of sites and block certain words.
• In some cases, you can send notifications in real time if the child is exposed to risky content.
• To install a device parental control filter, follow this  tutorial .

Some parental filters you can try

• Qustodio: it is the most used application for this purpose in the world, as it is free and highly effective.
• Norton Family and Kaspersky: they have a free version and a paid version, which offers greater benefits.

Parental control Google

You can use Google parental control to block sexual content in a few easy steps:

• Enter the browser.
• At the beginning of the search, click on "Preferences", "Search settings", "Safe Search filters", "Hide explicit results", "Save".

YouTube parental control

To have greater  parental control YouTube  there are three alternatives:

• Open the account you want to protect. Click on the “Settings” option and then on “Restricted mode”. This way, YouTube will filter adult content automatically.
• If you find violent or inappropriate content, you can cancel it, following these steps: go to your YouTube account, find the channel you want to block, press the three vertical dots that appear on the side of the video. Click on "Report" and specify the reason.
• To prevent YouTube from recommending content from a specific channel, press the three vertical dots that appear next to the video and choose the option "Don't recommend the channel" or "I'm not interested."