ESRB: Adding Parental Controls to Your Gaming Systems

If you have multiple gaming devices in your home, setting parental controls on each one can be intimidating. Non-profit ESRB points you in the right direction.

A friend of mine recently begged me to come over and help her with her 13-year-old son’s technology.  He’s an eighth-grader and has an hour at home alone each day after school. 

He’s a good kid but doesn’t always choose the best group of boys to hang around.  Lately, he’s been getting into some trouble and his parents took away his phone.

My friend is one of the funnest people you’ll ever meet and she has a great relationship with her son, she always has.  Unfortunately, peer influence is becoming a stronger draw right now.

When I went over to their house, I found that her son has access to a Windows PC (just for him), a Chromebook, Xbox 360, his phone, and an iPad.  That’s a lot of access. 

My friend, who is not very tech-savvy, was at a loss of where to begin.

Quite frankly, I was a bit overwhelmed as well.  You may have a similar scenario.  Each tech platform (Windows, iOS, Xbox, Microsoft, Android) has its own separate way of adding parental controls on their technology.

Where does one start?

ESRB Parental Controls

As a fan and Ambassador for the non-profit Entertainment Software Rating Board, ESRB, we always mention the ESRB rating of any video games we review. 

It is essential for parents to know possible subjects of video games that may be too mature for your child.

ESRB realizes that it’s difficult for parents to keep tabs on all things gaming – from PCs to gaming consoles to handheld gaming consoles.  Kids can even download games without parent knowledge.

As a trusted partner to parents, ESRB recently released a Parental Controls section of their website which gives parents a step-by-step guide on how to set parental controls on different gaming devices.

I used this guide to help my friend.  ESRB’s Parental Controls guides for each of the above platforms includes online links to make it easy to navigate exactly to the place on the gaming platform’s website to set parental controls.

ESRB’s Parental Controls narrows it down for you as to what you’d like to control as well. 

Blocking by Age is definitely the most preferred, but most families don’t even know if their gamer is actually communicating with other gamers online.  

ESRB shows parents how to restrict communication as a top-level parental control.  Then they’ll tell you how to do it for each platform your child has access to.

ESRB Parental Controls is the simplest and easiest method of creating or adjusting parental controls of anything I’ve ever seen on the web. 

They’ve taken disparate and confusing information from a myriad of websites and brought it together in one place.

Ideally, a parent can set up restrictions before their child begins using them. I didn’t get them all in place before my daughter starting using various technology items in our house. 

When I tried to set them after the fact, I receive a lot of flack from her.  To be honest, it was painful.  

ESRB Family Discussion Guide

As a result of my own delay in locking down our technology, I encourage you to look into parental controls now.  Talk about the importance of why parental controls are necessary. 

The ESRB created the Family Discussion Guide to discuss gaming and apps and why controls, ratings, and understanding of information collection are important.

It includes some great discussion points to have with your children and the guide assists you in setting things up for a safer tech environment for your child.

As your child grows, s/he should be aware of what the different ESRB ratings mean.

Children of all ages should understand the ESRB ratings just like the ratings of movies. 

ESRB goes to great lengths to give parents as much description as possible of questionable content, dependent upon your comfort level BEFORE you buy a game for your child or teen.

As you can see from this graphic, taken from the ESRB website, they rate a game’s content from violence to sexuality to nudity to substances to blood and gore.  They get detailed so you know the facts and are not blind-sighted after the fact.

Keep up to date on the latest gaming happenings by visiting the ESRB Blog.

Don’t delay.  Use the ESRB Parental Control instructions this weekend to ensure you are creating a safe environment for your child.  As your children mature, you can adjust the controls. 

Fortunately, thanks for ESRB, you just need to keep track of their Parental Controls website instead of 6-8 different websites to adjust parental gaming controls as needed.

Remember, it’s always easier to set tighter controls first and let go slowly than it is to have no controls and try to enforce them later.    Don’t delay!