Inside: Unsure about which parental control software to use? Read this Qustodio review to find out if it’s the right one for how your family uses the internet.
This blogpost is a review of the Qustodio app and how it can help to protect your child from exposure to porn.
And because I am a parent and not very technology-savvy (I still don’t know how to change channels on our tv), this review will be very practical (and not technical!).
Remember, I’m not a cybersafety expert (and I don’t pretend to be).
If you’d like to learn more about parental controls (and why you might need them), please read this blogpost, where I talk about parental control software.
Affiliate Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You may also find other affiliate links. You can read my full disclosure here.
What is Qustodio?
Qustodio is a program that you install onto your desktop computer, laptop, smartphones and tablets. You don’t need to buy any special equipment (like a router) to use it.
It works on Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, and Kindle.
How do you install Qustodio?
It’s pretty simple actually. (Yes, even I managed to install it!)
You just download an app to your phone, download a program to your computer or just log into the Qustodio Family Protection Portal through your internet browser.
You need to install it to your own computer or device. This way you can control the settings. Having it on your phone means you can quickly make changes.
You’ll also need to install it onto your child’s device/s.
And if you have any problems, just contact their customer support or visit their help page. I have found them very helpful!
TIP: The app on your phone is permanently logged in. Which means that if you don’t have your phone locked (or your kids know how to unlock your phone) it will be easy for them to go in and change the settings.
What does Qustodio do?
There’s a number of different things that Qustodio can do.
These are the things that I like about it!
Now, a word of caution. Depending on your parenting style (and each individual child), some features you will like and some you won’t. So just switch off the features you don’t want to use, like monitoring their calls and texts.
Blocks inappropriate content. So your child can’t access websites that you don’t think are suitable. You can block by category (eg porn, guns) or by site (eg redtube.com).
Balances screen time. So you can control when your child watches the internet and for how long. For example, my son can’t watch YouTube during the week but he can play Spotify before and after school.
Controls online games and apps. So you can control what they are playing on and for how long. For example, I have set a 24 hour ban on YouTube during the week and allowed 3 hours on weekends.
Monitors activity. So you can see what they are doing when online and decide if they need to have more balanced use. For example, my son spends waaay too much time on YouTube, so I now restrict his access. Which means he now spends more time building things on Minecraft (which requires creativity, problem-solving, self-direction instead of the mindlessness of just watching videos).
Monitors social media networks. So you can see how much time they are spending on social media, like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more.
Advanced Social Monitoring (that comes with the paid plan) where you can track what your child writes on Twitter, Yahoo Messenger, chats on Facebook and with whom, but it is not possible to read the actual conversation.
All other social networks or apps, such as Skype, Instagram, Kik, etc. can be monitored with Qustodio as any other application. However, Qustodio will not reveal what was said or exchanged between users on these apps or networks, only when the app was used and for how long. It is possible to completely block these apps or set a time limit for each.
So make sure you have a look at your child’s settings for each social media platform they have joined, so that you have it set up in the safest possible way. Leonie Smith, from The Cyber Safety Lady, has up-to-date manuals on how to set up social media in a child-safe way.
Monitors calls & SMS. So you can see who your child calls or texts, read messages they send and receive, and set a list of blocked contacts. (You have to set this up to happen.
Family Locator. So that you know where they are out with their device.
What does Qustodio look like inside?
I’ve made a video where I’ll take you inside the dashboard inside the Qustodio Family Protection Portal. (The video is at the top of this page)
I’ll show you the settings that I have made for my youngest child, and you’ll be able to see the different ways that you can use Qustodio.
I have a 13 year old son who is super curious and spends a lot of time on YouTube. And I also have a 16 year old daughter who is pretty mature and level headed but she does spend a lot of time playing Sims, watching Netflix and chatting to a small circle of friends via messenger.
I have also tested Qustodio, in regards to typing in search terms that usually bring up porn, as well as visited a porn site! And yes, it did block the sexually explicit stuff!
Will my child know that I’m using parental controls
That’s up to you.
You can set it up on their device and hide it so your child doesn’t know.
Or you can set it up with their full knowledge!
But, I’d like to suggest that your child knows that it is installed. Being open and honest with your child means that they feel safe to talk to you about their experiences online.
So let your child know that you have installed parental controls, and ask them to sit with you and have a look at what you can see about their online activity. My son was surprised at how much time he was spending on YouTube. He is now a lot more aware of the amount of time that he has, and is more careful about where he spends that time.
Plus it is a great way to start conversations about internet safety. Since we have installed Qustodio in our house, I have had a lot more discussions with my kids about internet safety.
So what do I really think of Qustodio?
This is the second time I’ve used Qustodio, and honestly, I don’t mind it. For the moment, the protection that it provides is enough for our family. It has more features than we need, so I’ve turned some of them off.
And it is pretty easy to install and then set up!
Just make sure you go in and test it. So that you know how it works and that it works properly. For example, I looked for porn on my 14 year old’s tablet, and found it. I then went and checked the settings and realised that I hadn’t actually blocked the category of porn. Once I changed the setting, porn was then blocked.
Transcription of video
Hi, I’m Cath Hakanson, and this is going to be a review of the Qustodio parental controls. Now, this is my second time for using Qustodio. I used it for… Probably uninstalled it maybe two years ago. So we used it for a couple of years and then we used something else and now we’re back to using Qustodio again. So what I’ve done is I’m going to show you through it and I was actually surprised at how easy it is. Look, I don’t know what you’re like, but I still go to grab our TV remote controls and I can’t work out how to get the streaming service on and hook everything up. So I am totally hopeless at tech and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to install. So I’m just going to shrink my head down and show you through it all. So this is the homepage, so you can use it on all devices. So Qustodio isn’t one of those ones where you have to plug something into the wall. It’s you download an app onto your device. I’ve already logged in. So for me, to create a child is really simple.
You just go in and call them whatever you want, give them whatever gender you want. Not sure why they want a gender, but anyway. Put their age in, give them a little image, and then you can go through and select devices. And if there’s no devices, that’s where you can then go in and connect a device as well. I found it really easy. So this morning, my son grabbed his iPad and we went in to connect a device. So if I go to my family and if I go to child two… So there’s nothing happening for them. Now, I’m still learning this as well. I have not played with it much at all. If we go to this one and then we can select. So Android, my tablet that I use as a phone. Ios, which could be your iPad or iPad. Windows, which is your computer. Mac, which is your Apple computer. Kindle and Chromebooks as well. So it’s also got the eBook readers as well, because kids can access porn on those as well, believe it or not. Even Spotify, apparently there’s tracks with sexual voices. I found it super simple. So basically, all you had to do was grab your device, it tells you to go and download it.
And then when you download it, it asks you to either create a profile or to actually log into your profile. And it was super so simple. It was like we managed to set up quite easily. So if we go over here to my devices, I’ve got child, who is a real child. I’ve just hidden his name. And then we’ve got here, we’ve got the iPod Touch, and then we’ve also got his MacBook as well. What else have we got? So if we go back to him. So if I click on, says he’s offline at the moment because he’s actually on his desk laptop computer. My son, he’s 14. Fourteen? Fourteen in a month. I get their age is mixed up all the time. So he has a computer that he does gaming on, but it’s set up in the house so that he’s against the wall and we’re all walking around. I haven’t installed it on that yet. And that’s just because the computer is in a public place. Our living area is this is my living space. And then the next room along is like a long lounge kitchen dining, and that’s where the computers and the devices are all kept.
So I may install something on, but I may not. The main reason I’ve gone back to Qustodio is because it’s really simple to use in regards to setting up restrictions and things like that. So this is the dashboard for him now. We set it up this morning. I think I got him to put… I haven’t set up anything yet. I’ve removed it all. The only problem that I did find with Qustodio was that when we first got it, my daughter was using it. Sometimes she had trouble accessing stuff at school, and that would be videos and stuff like on YouTube because at school, sometimes I get the kids to look at something on YouTube. So it’s something that you just got to play around with, working out the settings that work for you. Expect an ironing out period of about a week to just get things working. What I do also, I’m big into transparency, so I don’t believe in installing apps like this and not letting kids know because Sex Ed Rescue and me, we’re all about open, honest, and positive conversations. And if you want a respectful relationship with trust, you need to be upfront.
So what I do, and what I’ll do now is I’ll set this up, but then I’ll get my son to come have a look as well so that he actually knows what’s happening and what I see and stuff, because that’s all about transparency. But my main reason for coming back to this is the fact that I can restrict, I can give him a limit as to how much internet access he can have per day. So that if he’s got his ipod in his bedroom, that I know that he’s not messaging people or watching videos, whereas he should be sleeping. So if we go to timeline, as I said, I haven’t used this for a little while. So it’s got all the stuff that he was doing this morning. I did get him to… We did try to type in penis, but that might have been before we set up to just see what would happen. He’s got to be careful because his laptop is what he uses at school and they have their controls on as well. Now, this is where I like it. So you can go into the web filtering. So at the moment, it allows all this stuff and this stuff here that I can turn off as well.
So automatically, as I said, I haven’t set up anything. I’ve deleted the other profile and I created him as a new one so that we’re starting from scratch. I will probably, because my child is older, I will put drugs and alcohol in for alert me just because he goes to school. So I need to be able to allow him to look at stuff. Weapons. I live in Australia, so that’s not that big a problem. You also need to know your own child as well. Not sure what are these ways you can get around stuff. I’m just going to leave it at this for now. And we’ll just, as I say, watch this place, watch this space. And you just have to sit and work your way through everything. And then you can actually put websites in that you specifically don’t want them to go to. So you can put that in there as well if you need to. Now, we’ve got categories. Okay, let’s go back to timeline. It’s a little tedious sometimes working out how to settle this up. Rules is where I was supposed to go. Daily time limits, so I can set it so that maybe he has 12 hours on a school day.
Not that he’ll need that, but just have it set up as that. And you can go through and keep doing that. Hang on, while I’m setting this up, you probably don’t want to watch me doing this because I can’t see the pause button. Sorry. Don’t you hate those videos where someone’s trying to do something and then they bore you by showing you? So you can make this a lot less, of course, as well. And I’ll show you how the block works, too. If you suddenly hear a child screaming, you’ll know why. We’ve got the block, yes. What you can do is block a whole day or you can allow it and then you work out how long you want it to go for. There’s a lot of different options. What I love about these things is that they’re constantly developing. They’re always making new changes. Now we’ve just got… Let’s see if it will let me go back. Yes, it will. We’ve got daily time limits, location. If you want to put tracking on, you can. What else have we got? Panic button, if you want to set that up as well. My kids don’t get phones until they’re older.
That’s just me. If they’re at school, they can message me because they’ve got internet access at school, so they’ll usually email me and tell me if they’re going to be late or something. If we lived somewhere different and the bus route… Even if they don’t have money for the bus or they lose their bus pass, it’s still only a 20 minute walk home. So if we lived somewhere else, they probably would have phones. Okay. And then we go to what are the games and apps rules. This is what I like. I like the fact that you can either block them from accessing certain stuff or you can Like so for Spotify, I could set a limit so that he only has maybe two hours a day or something. So you can work out what you want to have working and you can turn on little things as well. So you will get stuff happening in your inbox. But it’s just what happens. Their customer support is also quite good. You can’t ring them, but they answer. Just remember though, I’m in Australia, they’re Spanish, I think, but they have actually bought out one of the big internet parental control companies in Australia.
So they’re constantly expanding. Okay, that was the one we just looked at. So yeah, you can work out whether there’s certain games and apps that you don’t want them accessing and you want to limit to as well. This is the one that I like, the restricted time. So it means that I know that my son’s not lying in bed at night on a device from eight o’clock onwards at night, and I can set it up so that they don’t have internet access in the morning, which is just something that you can do depending on how you want to do it as well. So you can have those time restrictions in for when you don’t want them to access stuff. I don’t set this up, but you can set this up as well so that you can monitor what they’re doing and it tells you what to do and how to set it up. So yeah, it says it’s only for Mac computers. Gets really tricky with a lot of this stuff because Apple will then make changes and Apple has privacy rules and so they have to constantly keep changing what they’re doing to make sure that they’re compliant as well.
Okay, what else did I want to show you? So you’ve got that option as well. And then then YouTube as well, so that you can allow or you can get set it up so that there’s tracking around how YouTube works as well. So that is basically Qustodio. So you’ve got the timeline that just gives you an idea of how long they’re on stuff and what they’re up to and what they’re doing and things like that, which is taking a bit slow, sorry. So it’s got all the stuff here tells me, as I said, he’s on a different device at the moment, so we’re not seeing anything here. And then we can go into the rules as well, which are all those things that I’ve just set up. And then you’ve got that overall dashboard page as well, which tells you all the different things that are happening as well that you can track. As I said, I need to go in and set this up properly, but I just wanted to show you just how it all works and what it all looks like, because when my kids were younger, I didn’t think too much about parental controls, but as I’ve been working more and more with parents and as my own kids have grown up, and I’ve got a course on the on porn, and I’ve written a lot of content, and I help parents with navigating porn and their children, and parental controls are necessary.
What it is is it’s just about slowing down the first exposure and it’s slowing down their access as well. Some kids just don’t have that impulse control to not go back and look at it. So installing parental controls can be helpful because if you want to help them break that habit of coming home from school angry or tired and then they just go and watch porn. If you want to break that habit, having parental controls can help as well. It can also let you know there’s something going on that you should know about as well. I was chatting to my son this morning about porn. He’s like, Mum, I’m not interested. I said, Yeah, but one day you might be. So we talked quickly about why we were setting these up again. For me, this is personal about what’s happening in my family at the moment. To me, the parental controls are more about making sure that there’s not too much time being spent on YouTube per day because, yeah, school holidays were over at the moment. They’re bored, they’re on devices more than they should, especially when I’m sitting here doing work and kids are in the other room.
And it’s about just making sure that they’re using the internet in a safe way. So just sitting there watching YouTube all day or just sitting there and doing gaming all day is not a good thing. But there’s a lot of good stuff about the internet as well. That’s why it’s important that I think having these things can just give us more control over what our kids are doing. It also makes life easier. This morning we were setting up and my son saw the old profile and he said, 10 hours. He said, I’m not going to start checking what I’m doing on the internet. I’m not going to start typing stuff in. That’s going to go into my 10 hours. And it’s like, mate, I’m going to delete this profile. But he was automatically he remembered from when we had this a couple of years ago, and he was like, oh, hang on, I’m on a budget. It’s like I’ve only got a bar of chocolate to last me the whole school holidays. How am I going to ration it out so I don’t run out? So he was automatically thinking, Well, how can I use this time wisely?
So that’s some of the benefits of it. Parenting is a hard one. Navigating porn and internet and device use is challenging as parents. But I think there are tools out there that can help to make it a lot easier for us as well. Anyway, I hope what I have said is somewhat helpful. And look, this is a person who can’t even put Netflix on the TV because I look at the four remote controls and it’s like, Why do we need four? So I am totally geeky with this stuff. I’ve just switched over to a new phone and I got my husband to do it for me because I started to do it and it was just too overwhelming. So if I can set up Qustodio on an iPad and a Mac and an Android, you can definitely do it as well. Okay, any questions? Just ask me. Okay, cheers.