Keep your kids safe on iPhone and iPod Touch
With Christmas approaching, many young kids will be getting an iPod Touch into their hands for the first time. Or if you’re like me, sometimes you’ll let your kids play on your iPhone or iPod.
The accesibility kids have to unsafe and inappropriate sites online is scarey. There are some simple things you can do to help keep your kids from accidently ending up somewhere they shouldn’t. These are simple settings to help keep your kids safe on these devices.
- From the main screen, go to Settings.
- Then go to General
- From the General screen scroll down to Restrictions.
- In the Restrictions window, select Enable Restrictions at the top.
- You will then be prompted for a passcode (do not forget it and make sure your kids can’t figure it out). You will need to enter it twice.
- Then you will be able to set various resctrictions pictured in the screen below.
- Notice if you go into Movies or TV Shows you will see a screen where you can set ratings.
- You can also set age restrictions for apps from the App Store. Note, it only prevents downloading, not seeing the information about the app.
Things you may want to consider when setting the restrictions:
- You may want to turn off the Location app—do you want people to know where your child is via their GPS locator. Most likely not.
- You may want to turn off the YouTube app since there’s no way to set a filter there and I would have to rely on YouTube via Safari. Will cover this next week.
- You may want to turn off the permission to install apps without your permission. Turning this “off” removes the App Store button from the Touch entirely. I figure that they could just come up to me and ask me if he wanted to install an app since he would need my iTunes password anyway. In my opinion, the App Store is still a little too much of a free market, and because of this, there are far too many apps on there that kids shouldn’t be exposed to.
Thank you so much for all the information that you have given!
I cant thank you enough!
I have 9 year old twins and was /am very nervous as to what can accidently been seen on line even if they search a cartoon character..
but I do not know what to do but I have forgot the passcode that I put on one of their phones and have been trying to figure out how to get past it or fix it. she is unable to use her touch can you help me with this one?
a desperate mom
Hi Lisa
Thanks for the feedback. It will motivate me to keep at it. I had this happen as well. This part won’t help now – but I make sure my kids tell me their password so I can log it too because this same thing happened to me. They aren’t allowed to change it without my permission. There were some things out there I found that are supposed to help you recover the password but I didn’t have any luck. We had to reset the whole phone. Now if there is a backup you can then restore the backup but anything that isn’t backed up will get deleted. Sorry not to have more help. Are you mac or PC? There are supposedely some programs you can download to retrieve. I honestly didn’t try too hard because I knew we had everything backed up. Let me know if I can help anymore.
Kari