Ensuring your kids’ safety

If you’re a parent whose kids know more about the digital world than you do, help is only a download away.

There’s an app that you can use to monitor and limit your youngsters’ activities on the PC, tablet, smartphone, game box and other gadgets. Now if you don’t know what an “app” is, you’re really in trouble.

Family Safety is an application that you can download if you have Windows 8. It allows you to create accounts for everyone in the family, but it’s best that you first talk with your children, especially the teenagers, about what the software does so they won’t feel that you are invading their privacy.

Where Family Safety works best is in keeping young users safe on the Internet.

The app allows you to track your children’s activities on the PC and the Web. Monitoring begins when you turn on Family Safety for your child’s account.

Family Safety gives you activity reports via e-mail that summarize how long your children were on the computer, the websites they visited and the games and apps they used. Also what they Googled or downloaded, or both.

You can choose to do a quick run-through of your child’s computer activities, or you can go into more details.

You can also change permissions and other settings anytime, blocking or allowing specific websites or other content. You can even limit the kids’ computer time.

The report will contain the top five sites your children have visited and a complete list of every website they visited in the last week and those the child tried to view, including those that the app considers questionable or possibly inappropriate. The e-mail indicates whether Family Safety allowed the site, or blocked some or all of its content.

How much time did your child spend on the PC today? What apps and games did your child use more frequently? Did he/she make downloads from the Windows Store? The answers will be available through the app.

If you don’t agree with the way Microsoft has categorized a website, you can have the settings changed to either allow or block your child’s future visits to that particular site.

If your child downloaded a game from the Windows Store and then played it for 45 minutes, that game will appear in both the Windows Store downloads and the apps and games sections of this page.

Not confined to Internet use, Family Safety indicates when and for how long your child used the PC during the week.