My nearly two year old can navigate YouTube better than most adults. I have already realised that trying to keep internet devices away from her isn’t working. Plus sticking Peppa Pig on the iPhone keeps her quiet while I’m trying to fix stuff. This means I need to child safe my internet.

I have a new TP-Link TD-W8968 router and Plus Net ADSL. We have a macbook and two iphones. The router has a settings page for Parental control. It says “Parent Control function can be used to control the Internet activities of children/guests and limit the access to specified websites during specified time period.” but doesn’t really give me any more guidance than that. It would appear that I can manually add websites that I deem safe. OK for now, but soon she’ll be web browsing so that’s hardly practical.

At the moment she is too young to understand any form of good parenting talk of what to look at and what not to look at. A few clicks on Youtube and she ended up a particularly disturbing trailer for a horror film. The trailer was 18 certificate IMO, but was freely available with no warnings. I want to block this sort of content from our devices. Where do I start?

Download all the content that you want to your device and turn the wifi/mobile off – pretty simple really!! Or even supervise her!

I don’t think (I may well be wrong) you can block undesirable YouTube videos. You could block all of YouTube, but you may not want that.
Suggest you look at what your router does, or investigate something like OpenDNS (which may be what the router uses).
But nothing is 100%.

A lot of routers won’t do much filtering but Open DNS isn’t too bad.

Youtube videos normally require you to sign up to view anything of adult content and apart from signing up to youtube education or using youtube safesearch by buying some swanky web filtering kit it’s all or nothing i’m afraid.

Plusnet have parental control built into their security package. I don’t use it (my only child is 30) but it’s described on their web site:

http://www.plus.net/support/security/spam/plusnet_protect_user_guide.shtml#parentalcontrolfeatures

The security package is:
£2 a month for Plusnet Essentials customers
free for Plusnet Unlimited customers

Our router shuts down between 11pm and 7am.
We signed up to OpenDNS. Looking at using Plusnets stuff.
We always have computers in public rooms.
Eldest OAB’s phone is on Vodafone, who supply a free guardian app (that is really good) and limit content as standard.
We supervise (i.e. in and around room, listening and talking) when online.
School and us have had conversations with the lads about online stuff, as well as other ‘delicate’ issues 😉
.
and sorry but

My nearly two year old can navigate YouTube better than most adults. I have already realised that trying to keep internet devices away from her isn’t working.

You are the parent. Sort it out. She is two. Internet is not needed – and certainly not supervised.

She is two. Internet is not needed – and certainly not supervised.

I know exactly what you mean, and in an ideal world I would agree completely. 95% of the time she is fully supervised. However, on a couple of occasions she’s picked up an iphone and started flicking through Youtube. What worries me is there seems to be so much content that really isn’t suitable for kids (or adults), that has no adult filtering on it all. I don’t need this content coming into the house in the first place. If I can block it that’s one less thing to worry about.

Thanks for the tips on plus net filtering and the Open DNS. I will investigate further.

I have knives in the house. Big sharp things for the kitchen, little sharp things for the workshop/garage. If there’s a two year old in the house, I make sure they are somewhere out of the way. Can you not follow this example with your phone?

+1 for OpenDNS, works from the router, so better, IMO than device specific filtering and you can tweek it a lot. Perhaps if you sign into youtube and set it to filter explicit content then it may be safer?

However, on a couple of occasions she’s picked up an iphone and started flicking through Youtube.

My daughter has done this. Our ipad and iPhone now have the keypad lock come on as soon as they are off. Requires passcode to then access anything. This was learned (nearly) the hard way with a 3 year old and almost in app purchases. Amazing what can happen with random taps on a screen…

Use “Guided Access” mode on the iPhone to lock her into whatever app you want her to play with. That way she can’t exit it and start browsing for teh boobies.

matthewlhome: turn off In App Purchases in Restrictions. (I’d also recommend turning off the ability to delete apps or change your acoounts).

Blacklist Lemonparty and Blue Waffle

Graham – i quickly found how to turn off the app restrictions 🙂 fortunately before anything was bought.

Will have a try with the guided access too – thanks.

My nearly two year old can navigate YouTube better than most adults.

**** genius, my nearly 3 year old cant so must be thick as shit, still on the plus side only 15 years to go until the uni fund becomes a new bike fund!!