How to set up an Android phone for kids

Family Link is Google's new app for monitoring our kids' Android smartphones. It is useful to prevent them from accessing content that is not appropriate for their age

Those who have a young child know perfectly well the attraction that the smartphone generates in children. The phone is a device that can help distract and sometimes even train the little ones, but it should be used with great caution. Here then is a series of tips, easy to execute, to set up a smartphone for children.

We begin by saying that there are basically two ways to monitor the use of children or pre-teens with the smartphone. We can install apps on our smartphone or give them a phone with special applications, useful for monitoring and blocking the main threats of the Net. In this sense a useful service, provided by Google, is Family Link. The application allows the parent to create a whole series of settings and restrictions on their child's phone in order to avoid unpleasant inconveniences. Let's see how Family Link works.

How Family Link works

Family Link allows you to create and register a Google account on your child's Android phone. This way we can set some rules to limit the use of certain apps, or to prevent the child from using the Internet before going to sleep or when they have to do their homework. We can prevent children under the age of 13 from accessing the Google Play Store or an email account.

How to install Family Link

To install Family Link and use its services you need two Android smartphones, one of the parent and one of the child. At the moment the application is being deployed worldwide and to work it needs Android Nougat but soon Google will expand the number of compatible devices and operating systems. If we have all the requirements we download the app from the Google Play Store, then open it and register a Google account for our child. At this point we enter the data of the child (name and date of birth) and we will have completed the registration. After that we have to take our child's smartphone, download the app and register our child's account. From then on, we can monitor his or her usage.

What we can do

Through the Family Link app, we can control a wide range of aspects. For example, the sites we can visit on the Internet, the applications we can download and those we can't, and even monitor the location of our child's smartphone remotely. Setting restrictions on the Google Play Store is also very useful to prevent your child from buying expensive apps or downloading age-inappropriate games and content. The same goes for surfing the Web. But using apps like Family Link doesn't mean that we won't have to monitor our child personally. Dangers also exist in services such as Facebook and the like. Social that the app doesn't monitor beyond the time of use.