How to Set Up Parental Controls on Your Computer

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Today’s Internet can be a pretty exciting place, offering browsers excellent resources for researching various subjects, a plethora of recipes for foodies, news and current events and much, much more. In fact, anything and everything you can think of (and plenty that you wouldn’t dream of) can be found on the Internet.

Therefore, it is important that children who are not yet old enough to view certain types of material be protected from inappropriate websites. Thankfully, computers today also come with many options for setting up parental controls. These settings will keep children from being able to access or even find certain types of websites when they are using the computer. There are a few different ways you can apply parental controls.

Setting Parental Controls on Your Router

Many homes today typically have more than one device that can be used to browse the Internet. To set parental controls on all of them with little fuss, it is best to do so using the router. The router is the piece of equipment that delivers the Internet signal to all the devices in your home, so setting parental controls on the router will take care of all those devices at once.

Many routers already have parental control options built-in. If yours does, you can simply follow the instructions in the manual to set up the controls according to your specifications. If your router doesn’t have built-in parental controls, you can usually find instructions in the manual or on the Internet relating to how to change specific settings on the router, such as blocking specific websites.

Setting Parental Controls on Your PC

The last few Windows System Software releases offer built-in parental controls. You can block specific websites from access, restrict certain applications from use and even restrict the computer from use for certain times when children and teenagers are logged in.

Using Parental Control Software

Windows and third-party companies such as Norton also offer parental control software that gives you greater control and choice on setting up parental control options. Web filtering is typically a feature of parental control software, which provides much greater success in ensuring that a wide variety of inappropriate websites cannot be accessed by children and teenagers when they are logged in to their user accounts.

Take the time to research the different types of parental control software available so that you can choose the one the best suits your needs. Also, read the reviews to see which software applications work best, as not every application may work to 100-percent satisfaction.