Getting Started With Parental Controls

What Is Parental Controls? What Do I Need To Do for My Family? Creating User Accounts Setting Initial Access Levels Activating Parental Controls

What Is Parental Controls?

Parental Controls is a set of tools that allow you to put limits on what each child in your family can do and see online. Parental Controls gives you three important forms of protection:

  • Email—you can specify with whom they can exchange email while using their AT&T Mail accounts.
  • Instant messaging—you can restrict with whom they can exchange instant messages while using Yahoo! Messenger.
  • Web filtering—you can restrict the types of web sites, as well as specific web sites, that your children can access.

Parental Controls consists of two components: information that’s stored on the Yahoo! server and a piece of software—the Parental Controls client—that you activate on all computers where you want to control Internet access. You need both of these components for Parental Controls to be as effective as possible.

Parental Controls includes both server settings and client software

 

How Parental Controls Stores Your Settings

All Parental Controls restrictions are stored on the Yahoo! server as part of the account information for you and your family members. As the primary account for your family’s account, you can create a sub account for each family member and then view and modify all the Parental Controls settings for these accounts from any computer that has Internet access and a web browser.

 

How Parental Controls Enforces Your Settings

For Parental Controls to enforce your settings, it needs to know who’s trying to use a restricted product or service. In other words, Parental Controls needs the user to sign in to his or her Yahoo! account before it can check whether that account’s Internet access is limited in any way.

  • Email and Instant Messaging—Restrictions are always enforced.

    AT&T Mail and Yahoo! Messenger always require the user to log in, so Parental Controls can access and enforce any restrictions on your child’s account whenever your child uses these services. This means that Parental Controls can apply the restrictions on Mail and Messenger no matter what computer your child uses (including Macintoshes). The Parental Controls client isn’t required.

  • Web filtering—Restrictions are enforced only on computers with an active Parental Controls client.

    For services that don’t normally require a user to log in to the Yahoo! server, such as browsing the Internet, Parental Controls can only enforce the web filtering settings on computers where you’ve installed and activated the Parental Controls client. This means that if your child uses a computer that doesn’t have the Parental Controls client installed (for example, at school or at a friend’s house), any web filtering restrictions that you’ve set are not enforced because Yahoo! doesn’t know that your child is online.

    It also means that, once the Parental Controls client is active on a computer, anyone (including you!) who wants to access the web using that computer must sign in with his Yahoo! Member ID or Yahoo! ID before he can browse the Internet, participate in a Yahoo! group, and so on.

Parental Controls enforces different settings on computers with or without an active client.

 

What Else Does Parental Controls Do?

Beyond letting you control your children’s access for web browsing, email, and instant messaging, Parental Controls also allows you to:

  • Control the amount of time they spend online.
  • Get report cards providing feedback on their online activities.
  • Allow permission slips asking for access to other web sites or communication with other friends.

See the tutorials listed in the Related Tutorials section for more information about these features.

 

What’s Next

Before you start using Parental Controls, let’s look at different ways you could set it up for your family.

Note: For important information about using Parental Controls with Microsoft Windows Vista™, see AT&T Help.

Help Topics


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Words to Know

  • Member ID: the name by which a person is known to the Yahoo! network.
  • Permission slip: a message that Parental Controls sends to a parent on behalf of a child who is requesting Internet access beyond his current restrictions.
  • Primary account: the person who has financial responsibility for a household’s AT&T account; same as "primary member".
  • Report card: a summary of your child’s online activity for the past week.
  • Sub account: an account linked to the primary account, typically for another member of the household; same as "member account".
  • Yahoo! ID: the name by which a person is known to all Yahoo! networks.
  • Yahoo! Messenger: an application that lets you communicate using your voice, text, or other means with one or more people over the Internet in real time (instantly).