An Overview of AOL’s Parental Controls

In my opinion, AOL’s parental controls are the best in the business. The layered approach for creating web accounts (General, mature teen, young teen, and kids only) gives you flexibility to manage children’s access. The filters can be adjusted, but can be very strong. My kids’ AOL accounts do in fact block out “Whitehouse.com” but allow both “whitehouse.gov” and “whitehouse.net.”

The kids’ chats are supervised by an in-room adult, there is no IM available on the kids’ accounts, and they cannot mail attachments to each other. Permission is required to access most public sites, and the kids have to call me from across the room to put in my password to allow such exploration. Then, an email is sent to my account detailing the request.

I could not break through the controls using my children’s accounts. Word searches such as “Nudity” did return some hits, but they were mostly philosophical debates, no pictures or dirty words. It would take some pretty creative searching to find something obscene.

Also available are an Online Timer, which notifies the child when they sign on how much time the have left for the time period (flexible) and then cuts them off (after a warning) when their time is up. Then there is the “AOL Guardian” service, which emails me a summary of all the websites my children have visited.

AOL, while still one of the more pricey services, delivers well in this regard with a stringent-yet-flexible parental control package which does what it sets out to do.