Parental Controls are very important today, especially in the light of horror stories of kids racking up bills worth thousands of dollars for IAPs while playing games on their iPhone or iPad device. Thankfully, with the latest iOS devices, you have more control over your kids activities on the mobile device. For instance, you can lock your device with a passcode or Touch ID so that your kids won’t be able to access certain apps. And you can choose to make those restrictions temporary or permanent. In this tutorial, we take a look at how you can Guided Access and Restrictions features to setup parental controls on the iPhone 6.
How to Setup Parental Controls with Guided Access
Guided Access is a great feature to use when you want to restrict others from accessing certain features of your phone temporarily. For instance, if you are handing over the phone to your boss to show him a picture you took, you might want to block access to other personal photos you have and using Guided Access to do that is one way of ensuring that your boss doesn’t go ahead and start scrolling through the rest of your photos. You can check out our previous article in case you want to know how that works.
When dealing with kids, we’ll take a scenario where you have just picked up a bucket load of books from iBigToy Inc, which were on sale a couple of days ago and decided to let your children access only those books and nothing more. In such a situation you can use Guided Access to ensure that they access only those books. When they are done with them, you can use your passcode or Touch ID to remove the access and use your iPhone normally.
To Set Parental Control with Guided Access:
1. Go to Settings->General-> Accessibility-> Guided Access.
2. Tap on Guided Access to enable the option.
3. Tap on Passcode Settings and in the next screen tap Set Guided Access Passcode. In the Set Passcode screen, enter a passcode. Reenter it again to confirm the PIN. Alternately you can enable Touch ID. In this tutorial, we’ll stick to using passcodes.
4. Now you’ll want to apply guided access on the app you want your kids to use. Open up the app in question, for instance that book I told you about and press the Home button three times to view the Guided Access option.
5. Tap Options at the bottom of the screen and if necessary, disable any of the options you see on the screen such as Touch, Motion, Hardware buttons or set the time limit for using the app. Your child will not be able to come out of the app unless the Home button is triple clicked again. And then only after entering the passcode can you exit Guided Access.
6. Tap Start at the top of the app and now you can hand over the iPhone to your kids.
How to Apply iOS Parental Controls with Restrictions
Restrictions offer a more rigid option to apply restrictions on your device and they are permanently enforced. For instance, you could set up your iPhone to forever prevent them from using Facebook, or use In-App-Purchases, or install apps that have a specific rating and so on. You can also set up device-wide restrictions on viewing certain websites like YouTube or disabling specific General device settings. You get the point!
These settings cannot be modified or changed without inputting the passcode and therefore provides a strong sense of security if you are a worried parent. To set up Restrictions on your iPhone 6:
1. Go to Settings-> General-> Restrictions.
2. Tap Enable Restrictions and you’ll be prompted to enter a Restrictions passcode. You will have to reenter the passcode again.
3. Now you’ll be back on the Restrictions page from where you can see the list of apps that you can allow your kids to use. Tap on a specific app to prevent access to it.
To restrict access to content that has explicit content, especially Music, head over to Music, Podcasts, & iTunes U and disable the option. Similarly, to restrict certain websites, adult websites or all websites, in the Allow Content section, tap Websites and apply the necessary restrictions. To disable IAPs, in the Allow section tap In-App-Purchases to disable it. You can go through each of the options, evaluate it and see which ones work best for you.
There are plenty of privacy options that can also be restricted. For instance, you can prevent the kids from tampering your Contacts list or Calendar data, or you can prevent kids from playing Multiplayer games and adding friends because you know that’s just going to cause a whole lot of problems later on.
As I mentioned before, Restrictions offer a greater degree of control over the kind of stuff your kids get access to. If you intend to let your kids play around with your iPhone, be sure to enforce these regulations so that you don’t end up with a frightful bill for a silly game or find an embarrasing selfie doing the rounds on social networks from your account.
Guided Access and Restrictions also work on an iPod Touch so if you do own one, be sure to enforce the same parental controls on that one too!
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