We’ll show you how to set parental controls on iPad and enable content filtering to control what your child sees on the Internet.
Most parents will share an iPad with a child or teen, and now your child is more likely to have their own iPad for playing games, reading books, doing homework and other activities like surfing the web and participating in social media.
When giving your iPad to a small child or even an older child, you have two concerns: protecting the device from them and protecting them from what’s on the device. A great iPad case and parental controls will solve these problems.
Learn how to set up parental controls on iPad.
Apple includes a powerful set of parental controls that let you close apps, stop kids from downloading and purchasing new apps or making in-app purchases, and it even has a way to hide apps. Apple also includes a built-in website filter to keep adult content off the iPad without the need to purchase special software or change settings on your router.
If you share an iPad with your child, you must toggle these restrictions on or off each time you switch between the iPad yourself and the child using your iPad. If they have their own iPad, you can set this up once and be done with it.
When iOS 12 comes out this fall, you’ll be able to set certain time limits.
After disabling the restrictions, you need to go through and enable each one again next time.
There are several kid-safe tablets that offer better parental controls that you can set and forget. But if you’re sticking to the iPad, here’s how to set them up.
Unlock iPad’s Restrictions
Set iPad parental controls.
and go to .
Each time you do this, you will be asked to set a 4-digit password and enter it a second time. Make sure it’s something you can remember, but your child won’t understand. Avoid your birthday, birthdays, and simple strings of numbers.
Setting App-Based Restrictions
You can check which apps the kid can use on the iPad here. Turn the setting off to stop them from connecting to the internet, using the camera, purchasing new apps, or downloading new apps.
You can control access to many apps, but not all with iPad parental controls.
In this section, you can also turn off the option to make in-app purchases. This allows you to control spending on games that encourage this behavior.
If you scroll further down you will see options to set content ratings for Music, Podcasts, Movies, TV Shows, Books, Apps Siri and more that let you filter by ratings. Apple’s App ratings include ads shown in apps, so you’ll also block bad ads in many apps.
Apple assigns ratings, but ratings for movies are ratings assigned by the MPAA, like what you see in the cinema. Keep in mind that your own ideas about a rating may not always match those assigned by Apple or others.
By scrolling further down, you can make changes to how kids interact with Game Center and information shared under Privacy settings, and even lock account changes or set a volume limit.
How to Block Websites on iPads
Any iPad running iOS 7 or later includes an option to set up iPad web content filtering right out of the box. This is also in Restrictions and does a good job of limiting what your child can see, but like all automated solutions it’s not perfect.
Go and if you have already left that area.
and . On this page, you can choose whether you want to allow or limit access to all websites.
If you select Restrict Adult Content, iPad won’t be able to access adult websites, but note that this may limit access to some sites a child needs to access for school and may not block every site you don’t want your child to access. access.
If you need a more limited set of rules, you can set iPad to only allow access to certain websites. There is no reporting option to let you know what websites the iPad is trying to visit in iOS 11, but with iOS 12 you will be able to see more information about how kids are using the iPad.
How to Keep Kids Out of Your Email on iPad
Apple won’t let you keep kids out of your email, calendar, or iMessages, but at least you can prevent them from making changes to the account.
One solution is to use an app like Gmail and then sign out every time you hand over your iPad, but that’s pretty cumbersome. This will continue to be a pain until Apple adds support for multiple users.
Setting Media-Based Restrictions
Kids will want to watch videos, especially while traveling. You can keep iTunes available, but disable inappropriate movies, TV shows, and music.
Under Allowed Content, you can set a rating level for movies based on MPAA ratings and TV shows based on US content ratings. Unfortunately, you can only disable open music and podcasts, not a wider range than that or all music.
How to Block Location Sharing
There are several good reasons for kids to broadcast their location to an app or iPad to their friends, so it’s a good idea to turn location services off.
Under Allow changes, tap Location. The applications you see on this screen may differ from mine. Toggle them all to Off, then toggle Location Services to Off as well.
After doing that, choose to lock them.
However, if you’re worried that your child will leave or lose the iPad somewhere, leave Find My iPad turned on as well as Location Services.
