HOW TO Control everything the easy way
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FIND YOUR FAMILY Windows 10’s app controls and family features work across all your Microsoft-powered devices, not just your PC, so to set them up you need to use your Microsoft Account online. Go to account.microsoft.com and look for the Family section in the main window. Click on Manage Your Family. If you haven’t already set up accounts for your family members, you can do that here.
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SEE WHO’S THERE You’ll now see the Your Family section, which provides a dashboard so that you can see what you’ve set up for each family member as well as for yourself. There are two quick links below the details of each child: See Devices, where you can see what hardware they can access, and Add Money, to fund their app purchases. Select See Devices to access the device limits screen.
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PICK A DEVICE Windows enables you to set time limits in two ways: across all devices, so it doesn’t matter whether it’s the family PC or the Xbox One, or with different limits on different devices. We’ll go for the same across everything, so we’ll toggle the Use One Schedule For All Devices switch on. The Microsoft Account page will now update to show you the current settings for all your devices.
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SET THE TIME LIMIT You’ll see a calendar like the one in our picture. The grey bits are the times when the child isn’t allowed access to any of the devices, and the blue bits show the times when access is granted. You can adjust these settings by setting specific time ranges, such as after teatime until before bed, or you can set a daily maximum instead. That latter one is in the Time Limit column.
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CHOOSE THE TIMES You’ll often find you want to limit specific times, so to block access to the Xbox One until after homework is done so we set our screen time to be disabled until about an hour after our child gets home from school. To change the time settings, just click on one of the blue bits for the day you want to change. You’ll now see this screen where you can set start and end times.
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ENABLE ACTIVITY The next thing we want to set is perapp limits. Before you can do that you’ll need to enable Activity Reporting if you haven’t already done so: if it isn’t on you can’t have per-app access. To do that, select the Recent Activity link and turn on Activity Reporting with the switch towards the middle of the screen. This also turns on weekly email reports, but you can turn those off if you want.
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LIMIT UNWANTED APPS You can now click on Set Limits to start creating per-app settings, and once again you can do this on a per-device basis or apply it across all the devices your child can access. If you want to block age-inappropriate games that’s better done in the content controls, but per-app limits are ideal if you want to enable access for doing homework in PowerPoint while blocking Minecraft.
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SET AGE RATINGS We mentioned content restrictions: select that link and you can set minimum age ratings and create a list that differentiates between the apps you don’t want to block, such as those essential for homework or creative play, and the apps you do. That might mean web browsers or other software with open internet access. The age ratings will filter out games such as the 18+ Doom.
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SET UP SPENDING LIMITS Older children often want access to the Microsoft Store, but you won’t want them to run up huge bills or buy inappropriate things. If you click on the Spending link at the top of the screen you can require parental approval for any purchase and get email confirmation of everything your child buys, or you can add funds to their Microsoft account for them to spend.
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FIND MISSING DEVICES The Find My Child link at the top of the Microsoft Account window enables you to find the location of your child’s device(s) on a map, and it’s useful for finding mislaid phones. This needs a Windows 10 phone or an Android device that’s running the Microsoft Launcher app, and of course they need to be connected to the internet either via the phone network or public Wi-Fi.