Can anyone give me some help or advice about setting up new tablets for Kids?

[Paul G B]

Can anyone give me some help or advice about setting up new tablets for Kids?

My niece and nephew are getting low end android tablets for Christmas, the Tesco Hudl. They are 7 and 9 and the tablets will be personal. We will go in and turn on parental controls, but what I'm more interested in is the initial set up. Do they need (can they have) a Gmail account?

We have no intention of connecting credit cards to the accounts and will fill them up with Play prepay cards as required, but how will that work without a Gmail user name?

Mum and Dad both have Gmail accounts, could we set the girl up under mum and the boy under dad as a secondary user. We wouldn't want them to have access to the parents emails, I'm sure my brother gets sent stuff which is inappropriate for kids. We really want something that can build for the future. What I mean is, say they get birthday money and start buying music through Google, when they get old enough to cut the kiddy links it would not be nice to find all the music tied to the parents account.

Any help or web links would be appreciated. I have done some searching but I'm getting lots of results more focused on Parental control and we will worry about that next.

Thanks

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! To keep things simple, I suggest just using your own account to set up the kids' tablets and to install apps, then set up a kid-safe launcher on the tablets that locks them out from sensitive functions. That's what I do with the tablet my 4 yr old uses. I like this kid-safe launcher: Kids Place. It requires a PIN to be entered to exit back to the stock Android launcher/homescreen, and there are options to prevent in-app purchases. Since you control what apps show up in the launcher, you can prevent the kids from accessing email or any other app you choose.

When they're old enough to use the tablets freely on their own, then you can consider removing your Google account and adding their Google account (if they're old enough and responsible enough).

 

[someguy01234]

Create a second account which will have less privileges than the first, if I remember it should will let you enable and disable apps. You can use AppLock to further prevent apps access.

When connecting to WiFi on the tablet, manually set the DNS server for it and use OpenDNS FamilyShield, either 208.67.222.123 or 208.67.220.123.