How to Set Parental Controls in iOS 7

You just bought your son or daughter a fancy new iPad Air or iPad mini with a Retina display, but you really don’t want them exposed to the crazy world that is the internet, or you may just be afraid they’ll spend money. all your money is on in-app purchases. Fortunately, Apple has included a number of parental control options in iOS 7 that will take your worry out of handing the device.

Of course Apple makes it easy to tweak settings and the like, but it’s a bit hard to find and you need to know what to look for to get there. We’ll show you how to access parental controls in iOS 7 and walk you through some settings you can change to keep your teens safe, while also preventing them from spending all your hard-earned money.

Setting Parental Controls

Accessing parental controls in iOS 7 is easy, but is not listed under “Parental Controls”. Open the app, tap on it and scroll down until you see it. If you have never entered this area before, you will see it at the top. Tap this to start setting up parental controls.

When you tap Enable Restrictions, you will be prompted to create a Restrictions Passcode so that unauthorized people cannot break in and change these settings while you are not looking. You will be asked to enter the password twice at first, but you will only need to enter the password once when you want to go back and change the settings after the setup process. After creating a password, it’s time to dive deep into the parental control settings.

What Can You Restrict?

I’ve never dived deep into iOS 7’s parental controls (because, you know, I’m not a kid), so I was pleasantly surprised to see a lot more options than I initially expected. Of course, one of the biggest settings many parents will restrict is in-app purchases. You can easily find this towards the top; just tap the toggle switch to its right and you’re ready.

In this list, you’ll also see other apps and features you can turn off, such as the camera, Safari, FaceTime, and Siri. You can also prevent your child from installing and deleting apps.

The next section, and this is mostly where you can restrict what your child can view based on the rating of a particular movie, TV show or app that they can download and try to play. You can block music with obscene lyrics and select movies to watch specifically based on their MPAA rating. You can block movies entirely if you want (but who could be that cruel?).

The next section, titled, will let you allow or disallow changes to certain areas of your iOS device. For example, you can set it so that your child cannot turn off GPS and make changes to various default apps such as Contacts, Calendar, Reminders, Photos. Apps and features that allow changes are a different section titled further down.

The last section is about Game Center, Apple’s central gaming hub that tracks scores and achievements for compatible games. In this section, you can easily prohibit your child from playing multiplayer games (because playing with others is apparently not welcome) and you can also disable the ability to add friends (again, making friends is really not welcome). Of course we’re kidding, and there are some situations where parents would want to enable this, such as to prevent their kids from being cyberbullied.

Be proactive

In the end, it’s important to be proactive as a parent. You hear stories all the time about kids using their parents’ iOS device only to find out that they’ve been collecting massive iTunes Store bills for going on a careless shopping spree for apps and in-app purchases. By restricting your child to do this in the first place, you save yourself tons of headaches as well as keeping your virtual wallet away from your kids.