My 6-year-old (young Whatsit Jr.) likes playing the games on the PBS Kids and Nick Jr. websites. All fine and good, except that I have better things to do than sit next to him watching him play “Diego Goes Surfing” or whatever for half an hour, and I’d like some way to ensure that he doesn’t accidentally go off-site and wander out into the big bad Internet. Is there some way, preferably free although I am open to suggestions for software, to restrict the Internet to one or two specified sites only?
Kiosk mode?
Don’t but any net nanny software. It’s not that a six-year-old could break it, as much as you are allowing a thirdparty to decide for you what to access or not.
The better option is to change the settings on your computer or router to deny all access. Then merely create exceptions of what sites may be accessed. Try this site as it provides instructions to do just that —> http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/browser/restrictie.html
If you have a router, most can be configured for such access restrictions. Routers are not very expensive these days, and you don’t need a fancy (expensive) one to do what you want.
How exactly to do this will depend on the specific router, so you will need to apply the manual.
Some third party apps, such as Cyber Sitter can be configured to allow you to put in a whitelist that can be easily updated–if/when your kid asks to go to a certain site you can check it out and if you approve add it to the list. I’m not sure about Cyber Sitter in particular, but some third party apps also allow you to specify which programs or internet usage can be accessed in time blocks or just completely put the computer off limits entirely. It also allows monitoring for attempted navigation to non-whitelisted sites. Your kid is a bit young to be worrying about for most of the features but the monitoring can grow along with him. At forty bucks it’s a pretty good deal…
The router solution is the easiest, cheapest, and only one guaranteed to actually work. Cyber Sitter, Net Nanny, and so on are all punting the responsibility to a third party that has a reputation of being dishonest.
If you have windows vista there are parental controls you can use. I’m not 100% sure you can limit web access to specific websites, but I think you can. If you do have vista go to control panel the parental controls panel should be there.