For example, you might be able to purchase a “power up” for a character for ten dollars. When you are using an app on a Kindle Fire, you may be offered the opportunity to buy real things with real money. That also goes for a special subset, what are called “in-app purchases”. Generally, I would turn this off for children who are not responsible for their own finances. While you have seven days from purchase to “return” a Kindle store book for a refund, that is not the case with other digital content. This allows you to turn off the ability to purchase content (e-books, videos, apps) directly from Amazon. Next, let’s go through some of the concepts. You can tell by looking at this Amazon help page: With one click, a child could buy a $600 Amazon Instant Video (you won’t be buying it if you click here, but I thought you might be interested in what it was), and unlike Kindle store books, Amazon Instant Videos are not refundable.īefore we get started, you need to know which Kindle your child is going to be using, since the parental control options and procedures are different on different models. I would set up the Kindle with the guidance you want before the first unsupervised use. I’m going to run through the possibilities here. Is that kind of specific content guidance (called “whitelisting”) possible with a Kindle? Yes, but not with all Kindles at this time. The parent approves the sites ahead of time, and then the child has the freedom to go to sites within that group without constant supervision. With a parental control system, it can be possible to limit which websites the child can access. I have run into situations where parents will not allow kids to click on websites at all…the parent has to do it, if they are going to go there. Let’s say that an adult does not want a child to get to websites that have content not intended for children. Parental controls can actually give a child more freedom.
#Free time unlimeted on older kindle fire free#
While we can certainly debate how much free access to content a child should have, I think it’s worth knowing what your options are to help you actualize that decision. “Parental controls” (and I’m going to use that term for simplicity’s sake, even though it may not be a parent-child situation) are a tool you can use (just like that lock). Well, that seems a bit to me like saying you shouldn’t put a lock on the cabinet that has your household deadly chemicals, because you should simply be there to prevent your kid from getting into them. When this issue comes up within the Amazon Kindle community, there are always posters who chide the adult for even asking about it, saying that it should be the parent/legal guardian who watches over what the child does, not some “parental control” tool. For example, parents/legal guardians might not want a child spending a thousand dollars on apps, or having access to certain content that the adult considers to be inappropriate. While that can be a really wonderful, life-expanding experience, adults may want to guide what that child does. This year, many children may start using a new Kindle.