My twelve year old has saved my money his pocket money and bought himself an iPod touch. On this modern piece of technology I understand he can access the interweb, I assume there are parental controls I can use to have some governance over his access, Can anyone advise.

Worried Parent

"Can anyone advise."

Erm Apple ?

Talk to him about it? Any tech savvy kid will get round parental controls in minutes.

http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/parental_controls

but second the suggestion to talk about it too.

You can't get the mpegs to run anyway, cough cough or so I hear anyway cough.

i see why you may have serious concerns, but the likelihood of him seeing what you post on STW are quite slim

It'd probably take him about 10 seconds of Googling to realise he could just re flash it to defaults from iTunes anyway, even if there were any effective way of blocking. Might be something on the AppStore though if you want to pursue it.

You can't get the mpegs to run anyway, cough cough or so I hear anyway cough.

I hear you can on certain sites 🙂

Not selectively, only disable the Safari browser entirely (and other stuff, as per clubber's link).

At home you can change over your router's settings to use OpenDNS ( http://www.opendns.com/ ) which can do content filtering by preventing certain types of site from resolving. Obviously, that'll only work on your network though, if he gets on a network elsewhere that will give him access.

I assume there are parental controls I can use to have some governance over his access

Hands off it! Its his and his alone! Fair play to the lad for saving up his money!
.
.
.
Anyway he won't ACTUALLY go blind.

Thanks for (most of) those suggestions, we will talk to him and generally he is fairly responsible about using the internet and such but they are male and human and will want to look at more than facebook. Getting round those restrictions will mean he hasn't just stumbled upon a site or onto the internet "by mistake" and we can discuss matters further… 😉

You're probably better off configuring the router to filter certain content or words. Alternatively, just look out for hairy palms and failing eyesight.

I have my sons' I-Touch linked up to my I-Tunes.

That way I can see what they are purchasing/downloading.

After questioning on his download 'habits', he quickly realised that I could see 😆

No probs since.

suggest some of the 'better' pron sites?? 😉

I had dirty mags under my bed from the age of 12, and was regularly buying Playboy at 16. Where there's a raging hormonal adolescent, there's a way!

So long as he doesn't objectify women, realise that some stuff is just plain 'wrong' and that there's no pressure to get his mack on ASAP, he'll turn into as rounded an individual as I am. Ahem 😕

Filtering your own internet connection will work best, but you can bet a neighbour has an unlocked unfiltered one he could use.

Talk, talk, talk…