Why Do I Want To Do This?
With more and more families cutting the cord, switching to streaming-only media sources, and otherwise looking to bring digital content into their living rooms it becomes increasingly important for parents to be able to easily restrict their children from racking up charges via instant purchases and accessing age-inappropriate content.
That said, the protection features are well implemented on both devices and Fire TV Stick users can follow along with the PIN and parental control section. Let’s take a look at how to set up both the PIN system, parental controls, and FreeTime.
Setting a Purchase and Parental Controls PIN
Here you can create and reset your PIN as well as toggle purchase restrictions on and off. We highly recommend you enable the “PIN on Purchase” feature. We use this feature even on our streaming units and devices that aren’t used by children just to avoid accidentally buying media. Oddly, even though this setting is available in the main dashboard you need to manually set it on your Fire TV and TV Stick units too.
Let’s take a look at making that change as well as locking down other portions of the Fire TV and TV Stick.
Locking Down Your Device
With your PIN in hand it’s time to enable the parental controls and actually lock down the device.
Note: The following steps are applicable to both the Fire TV and the Fire TV Stick. We tested the process on both, but we’ve used the screenshots from the Fire TV unit for this tutorial. If you’re following along with the Fire TV Stick please ignore any references in the menu items to the FreeTime system as it is not available on the Fire TV Stick.
The first stop is the settings menu. In the left-hand navigation list on your Fire device scroll down to the “Settings” entry and then navigate right across the menu system until you reach “FreeTime & Parental Controls”.
When you first select the entry the parental controls are off and the list is sparsely populated. Toggle the entry for “Parental Controls” to “ON” and you’ll see a whole host of extra settings.
Let’s take a look at each of the parental control options and highlight what they do.
PIN Protect Purchases
Block Content Types
In light of our criticism above you might be thinking we’re about to back pedal and apologize because clearly the “Block Content Types” menu will cover content maturity ratings. Alas, no. The content type menu is for broad types of content.
You can lock down the Games & Apps category as well as the Photos and the Music categories such that the user cannot access any games, applications, photos, or music from the main Fire TV menu without the PIN.
It’s interesting to note that you can lock down the Fire TV system to the point that it can do absolutely nothing except go into the FreeTime system (or do nothing at all if the system in question is the Fire TV Stick). When you PIN lock every available option any user without the security PIN will be unable to watch videos, buy content, look at photos, play games, open apps, or access the settings menu to change any of the security settings.
Creating a Walled Garden with FreeTime
The parental controls we just highlighted are really best suited for locking down a Fire TV device for older kids who might go crazy making in-app purchases or buying an entire season of television shows without realizing the amount of money they’re spending.
Turning FreeTime On
Enough about the FreeTime system in general as you can always read our review for a more detailed look at it; let’s focus on how to enable it on your Fire TV. To do so navigate to Settings -> “FreeTime & Parental Controls”. Select “FreeTime Settings”.
As we did in the previous section of the tutorial, let’s go through each option and then we’ll take a look at FreeTime in action.
Manage Child Profiles
Here you can create your first profile or add additional profiles for your children. The process is simple: input a name, input an age, and select an avatar for the child. FreeTime does the rest and automatically generates curated content for the child based on their age.
In addition to creating new profiles and editing existing ones you can also set time limits on individual FreeTime profiles. These time limits include both total screen time and time of day and they can be further adjusted based on whether it’s a weekday or the weekend.
Manage/Unsubscribe from FreeTime Unlimited
You don’t have to subscribe to FreeTime Unlimited to use the FreeTime function, but without the subscription portion of the FreeTime system the only content that will appear in your child’s FreeTime profile will be content you manually curate and approve (apps you select, video you purchase and share with the FreeTime profile, and so on).
Add Content to Child Profile
Within this sub-menu you can approve purchased content for inclusion in the secured FreeTime area. If you’ve totally locked down your Fire TV unit but you want your child to access a small number of applications and episodes of their favorite TV show, you can selectively include them here.
FreeTime in Action
With the FreeTime profile active it’s time to take a look. Press the home button on your remote to return to the main menu. Navigate to the FreeTime menu via the left hand navigation column and then select your recently created profile.
If you’re using regular FreeTime without the Unlimited component you’ll see a smaller selection than what we have here.
If you’re using FreeTime unlimited you’ll see a wide variety of television shows and movies as well as, and this is one of our favorite features for small children, the highly curated “Characters” section. Here you’ll find content grouped by both actual character (like Dr. Seuss, Dora the Explorer, and so on) as well as general keyword topics (like “Horses”, “ABCs”, or “Cars & Trucks”) which makes it very easy to tune into content that’s geared toward what your little one is really into.
Regardless of what content you have in the FreeTime system the important detail is this: kids can’t exit the FreeTime system unless a parent authorizes it with the security PIN, so once they’re in the land of Dr. Seuss and friends there’s no risk of them hopping back into mom and dad’s media center.
Between the the PIN security and the outright walled-garden provided by FreeTime, the parental control system on the Fire TV is a solid example of what parental control on streaming media devices should look like.
