With Christmas Holidays approaching and devices no doubt in Santa’s sack for delivery we thought it might be useful to provide some info on an app that can help to ‘guide our children to good content’  and set time limits during the school holidays. 

Google Family Link is a free app that works with Android and iOS devices to allow parents to keep track of their children’s digital activity. 

It connects your Android or iPhone to your kid’s Android phone or tablet, and allows you to set and tailor certain digital ground rules that work for your family, such as:

• Manage the apps your child(ren) can use
• Approve or block the apps the child wants to download from the Google Play Store, including setting a G or PG only rating on what apps they can view in the Store.
• Keep an eye on screen time, and set time limits
• See how much time your child(ren) spends on their favourite apps with weekly or monthly activity reports, and set daily screen time limits for their device
• Set device bedtime
• See your child(ren)’s location
• Remotely lock your child(ren)’s device when it’s time to play, study, or sleep.

To set up, a parent downloads Family Link onto their own device and creates a Google Account for their child through the Family Link app. In order for Google to link a parent’s account and identify and help them track what a child is doing on their device, they will need to have a child’s Google account.

It is essential to set up a child’s Google account to identify the child’s device and link it to the parent device to manage how they use their device. Unlike a normal Google account, you can set restrictions remotely on what apps children can access and when they can be used.  For example a child’s Google account restricts access to YouTube until they are 13 years, but will allow access to YouTube Kids.

You will need a device that runs on Android Nougat (7.0) or higher an iOS 9 or higher, so any new device will work.

You can find out more information about Google Family Link https://families.google.com/familylink/