Parental controls setup, by device and by age: the guide that gives you the exact menu path

Pick the device, pick the age, and get the steps in the order they appear on the screen. Parental controls setup goes wrong far more often through out-of-date instructions than through difficulty, so every path here carries the date it was last walked through.

Most households do not fail at this because the menus are hard. They fail because they follow a guide written for a version of the system that no longer exists, hit a screen that does not match, and stop. So this tool does one narrow thing well: it asks which device and which age, then hands you the current path for that combination and nothing else.

Start here

Parental controls by device

Every platform hides its controls somewhere different, and several have moved them into a separate parent-side app in the last two years. Working through parental controls by device instead of by principle is the only approach that survives contact with an actual screen.

• iPhone & iPad · Screen Time, 6 steps
• Android · Family Link, 5 steps
• Windows PC · Family Safety, 5 steps
• PlayStation 5 · Family and Parental Controls, 6 steps
• Xbox · Family Settings, 5 steps
• Nintendo Switch · Parental Controls, 4 steps
• TikTok · Family Pairing, 5 steps
• YouTube · Supervised accounts, 4 steps
• Roblox · Parental controls, 5 steps

The list is deliberately short. These are the devices that account for nearly all of what children actually use at home; a guide for every smart appliance in the house would be longer and less useful.

What the setup actually changes, and what it does not

A finished parental controls setup does four things: it filters what can be bought, it limits when the device works, it restricts who can make contact, and it applies an age rating to content. That is a real amount of protection, and it is worth the fifteen minutes.

What it does not do is follow your child to a friend’s house, cover a browser they installed themselves, or intervene in a group chat on a platform you did not configure. Treating the settings as the whole answer is the single most common mistake here: the controls hold the door, and the conversation decides what happens when your child is standing outside somebody else’s.

What to open up, and when

Under five, the useful settings are the blunt ones: a single locked-down profile, no store access, no browser. Between five and eight, add time limits and keep contact off entirely; at that age the value is in the routine, not the filtering.

From nine to twelve, content ratings start doing real work and contact becomes the live question, usually because of a game, not a social app. Thirteen to fifteen is where a heavy configuration begins to backfire: the more locked the device, the more attractive an unmanaged one becomes. Loosen deliberately and say that you are doing it. Sixteen and over, the money and privacy settings are the ones still worth keeping.

The wizard asks for the age band because the same device deserves different answers at six and at fourteen. A nine-year-old on a properly configured account is in a better position than a fourteen-year-old with nothing set at all, which is why age matters more here than the brand of phone.

Using this guide with a teenager in the room

With anyone over about twelve, do the setup together and narrate it. Say which settings you are switching on, which you are deliberately leaving off, and what would have to happen for the remaining ones to come off too. A teenager who watched the configuration happen argues about it; a teenager who discovers it later works around it.

It also has a practical benefit: they will tell you which app actually matters to them, which is usually not the one you were about to restrict.

Why safety guides go stale, and how to tell

Platforms rename settings, move them, and occasionally relocate the whole control panel into a new app. When that happens, every guide on the internet describing the old path becomes actively misleading, and most of them are never updated, which is why so many parents conclude the controls do not exist.

Each platform page here shows the date it was last followed on a real device, from the first tap. If the date is older than your last system update, trust your screen over the guide and tell us; if it is newer, the path should match exactly. That date is the only quality claim this tool makes, and it is the one that matters.