Parental controls by device: the current menu path for each

Nine guides, each followed on a real device from the first tap, each carrying the date it was last walked through. Start with the wizard if you are not sure which device matters most.

Setting up parental controls is not difficult. Finding the current menu is, because platforms rename settings and occasionally move the whole control panel into a new app, and most guidance on the internet describes a version that no longer exists. That is the problem these pages are built around.

Start with the wizard

All setup guides

Which device to do first, and what that decision is really about

Households usually start with whatever they find most alarming, which is often a console. The better order is by hours: the device a child actually spends their time on carries most of the risk, and for most families that is a phone, not a games machine.

The second consideration is who else is in the room. A console in a living room is a different proposition from a phone behind a bedroom door, and the setting that matters most changes accordingly: content ratings for the shared machine, contact and overnight rules for the private one.

If a single device has to be done properly and the rest left for another evening, choose the one that goes to bed with them. That is where the sleep is lost, and lost sleep is the effect with the clearest evidence behind it.

What these controls cannot do

They do not follow a child to a friend’s house. They do not cover a browser installed outside the ones you configured, or a second account created quietly. They do not read messages, and on most platforms they should not, because covert monitoring costs the channel that would have brought you the next problem early.

Being clear about this is not a reason to skip the setup; it is the reason the setup alone is never the plan. The technical layer removes the accidental exposure and the unlimited spending. The household rules cover intent, and the two are not substitutes for one another.

The same honesty applies to web filtering, which is the layer most parents ask about first. What a filter genuinely catches, which one your devices already include, and when a paid product earns its fee has its own page: filtering software, explained.

Why safety guides go stale, and how to tell

When a platform ships an update that moves a setting, every guide describing the old path becomes actively misleading. Most are never revised, which is how a parent concludes that the controls do not exist or that they are broken.

Each page here shows the date it was last followed, step by step, on a real device. If that date is older than the last system update on your device, believe your screen over the page, and if you tell us, the guide gets re-walked. That date is the only quality claim these pages make.

The devices you do not control

Every household has some: a grandparent’s tablet, a school laptop with its own policies, an older sibling’s phone, the console at a friend’s house. No setting you apply at home reaches any of them, and pretending otherwise is how a plan quietly develops a hole.

Two things work. Account-level restrictions travel with the account, not the hardware, so a supervised login used on somebody else’s machine still carries its content ratings and its spending limit. It is worth checking which of your settings are account-level rather than device-level. And for everything beyond that, the rules are the only layer that travels, which is the whole argument for having them written down.

It is also worth one short conversation with the other adults involved. Most grandparents are glad to be told what the arrangement is instead of being left to guess, and a shared answer about purchases and bedtimes removes the most common source of friction between two households.