How to set up Skype / IM for my nephew?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My nephew - 10 going on 11 - wants to use Skype to chat to his friends. His parents are fine with this in principle and have asked me to look into it. I’ve looked into it and my first impression is of alarm. He’s only a child and Skype seems to be pretty much unguarded. Ideally I’d like a protected whitelist, so that he can only talk to selected people and only they can talk to him. I know you can set Skype to only allow calls from and to Contacts, but I’d like to lock that down.

I’ve looked at Skypito but that’s not been updated in 5 years.

2

I haven’t looked into skype’s locking options, but if they’re not up to what you’re looking for you could see about doing video chat through a gmail account. It wouldn’t prevent him from adding contacts, but I don’t think you’d have random people able to contact you like you can with skype.