Parental Controls
Parental Controls: Online Gatekeeper for Kids
Screen time overdose for children is a serious issue now. A piece of BBC News back in 2015 suggested that kids aged 5–16 spent six and a half hours a day glued to their screens. That figure is even more alarming today. It seems you can’t tear them away. Even little kids are more interested in fiddling with their tablets. Yet parents cannot stop worrying about their kids being exposed to inappropriate content and indulging in their tablets for too long. It’s impossible to simply isolate them from the internet. This makes it particularly important to monitor and manage content and time online.
The problem of technology shall be tackled by technology. The technology of Parental Controls provides an easy solution to help you manage your kids screen time.
What Are Parental Controls?
Parental Controls of a router provide a smart management tool for families to manage what content is available for their kids and how much time they are allowed to access the internet. Based on parental requirements, Parental Controls generally fall into the following categories.
Content filter. This restricts access to content that is deemed unsuitable for kids of a certain age, such as adult content like pornography or graphic violence. An ICM survey showed that almost a quarter of kids under 12 had been exposed to online pornography. Filtering such explicit content is conducive to kids.
Time restriction. Restricting kids’ time online helps prevent them from becoming addicted to the internet.
Usage management. This enables parents to limit their children’s internet access to certain websites.
Monitoring. This allows parents to track the websites and applications their kids have been surfing.
Parental controls of TP- Link HomecareTM take the needs of parents into consideration and are user-friendly.
The HomecareTM Parental Controls of TP-Link Routers
Parental Controls is one of the three functions of HomecareTM, providing a relatively comprehensive mechanism of smart networking management.
Parental Controls feature:
1. Powerful user profile. You can set different controlling rules for different devices by creating profiles and adding devices into these
profiles. Rules target these profiles. Up to 16 profiles are supported with a maximum of 16 devices under each one.
2. Customized filter level. Set individual filter levels for each profile. There is a preset filter level for each of the four age groups—Child, Pre-Teen, Teen, and Adult. Of course, parents are the ones to decide the age-appropriate content for their kids. Therefore, parents are allowed to add to or delete content from the filtering list.
3. Time Limits. Time limits restrict time kids spend online. To make it more flexible, you can set different access time on weekdays and weekends. Bedtime sets time periods during which kids’ devices cannot access the internet. Parents can cross the frustration of tucking kids in off their list.
4. Insights. Today, you may have no idea what you kids are doing on the Internet. Things are more secretive now with the smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices. The Insights feature shows what websites your kids visit most and how much time they spend. This brings peace of mind to parents. Further, you can block a certain website as you see fit from the frequently visited list.
5. Pause. In special cases where you want your kids to quit their tablet while internet time is still available, you can disable the internetconnection of their devices by a simple clicking of the signal.
How to Set Parental Controls?
Having gained a knowledge about what Parental Controls can do for you, you might want to know how to set the function. Please refer to the FAQ “Using HomeCare parental controls on a TP-Link Router” via https://www.tp-link.com/us/faq-1707.html.
Parental Controls of a TP-Link Router offers a parents an easy and smart way to manage time and content online. Parents have more control on childs’ internet usage and kids are forced to make better use of the internet, a win-win result for both kids and parents.
Comment
My teenager has figured out mac id spoofing. All the stuff here becomes useless with mac id spoofing as the controls are based on mac id as the identifier.
The time limit settings also do not work. If I want to disconnect say at 2300 hrs and reconnect at 0600 hrs then it will work only once.
If the router gets reset than default time is set to 0000 and the only way to connect is to wait for 6 hours for router time to reach 0600 hrs or to login into the router and connect manually.
hello sir which tp link router good for web filter
i have requirments from some peoples. they wants to block some website, so which model good for this things
Tp-Link Parental Control is good. But i think there are still more rooms for improvements. I would like to share my experience as a Parent on using Parental Control.
1), Break Time. There is no way, i could set break time. On weekends, when time limits is set to 4 hours. Very often they will accessing the internet non stop for 4 hours. Which i think it is not heathy at all. It could be nice if we could set internet access 2 hours from 10:00 to 12:00, and 2 hours from 14:00 to 16:00.
2) Time Limits. We found the grouping of Weekdays and Weekends is not fit for a practical use. Friday and Saturaday nights we want to relax a bit on the time limits, while on Sunday we want to limit internet time as normal school days. Understand there are different time limit needs for different parents. The ideal would be allowing user to select any of the days in the week in setting up time limits, and not limited to the 2 groups.
Hope to hear from tp-link soon.
Best regards
Damien