Screen Time
& Parental Controls
Many parents have understandable concerns about the amount of time their children spend looking at screens. Recent research and advice from paediatric specialists, however, has recognised the differences between good screen time and bad screen time. Playing Fortnite or Roblox for half an hour and doing Reading Eggs for half an hour are completely different and they should be treated differently.
So as well as screen time, screen purpose should also be considered. If it is active, creative and/or educational, then it should be treated differently.
For further reading on screen time:
Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health Screen Time Guidance
American Psychological Association (APA) Digital Guidelines
APA What do we really know about kids and screens?
Common Sense Media - How much screen time is OK?
Parental Controls by Device Manufacturers
Microsoft devices
Amazon Fire tablets
Parental Controls by Internet Service Providers
MEO Net Segura
MEO's Net Segura system is a security solution that protects your cell phone against viruses when browsing the internet on the MEO mobile network. It also allows online parental control.
The features available on the Management Portal are:
Add numbers: Allows you to add other MEO numbers that become under your management and assign the adult or child profile.
Threat Protection: Activate or deactivate threat protection.
Parental/content control: Block websites belonging to a certain pre-defined content category (e.g. adults, violence, shopping, etc.).
Manage list of allowed sites: Adding/removing sites that you consider safe despite being included in one of the blocked categories and you do not want them to be blocked by the service. Example: You have blocked the “Games” category for your child, however, there is a gaming site that you consider safe, so you can add it to this list so that your child can access this specific site.
Security notification and parental control/content: Receive alerts by email whenever one of the numbers entered on the portal is protected from a website with malware or attempts to access a page belonging to a blocked category.
Reports: View service activity indicators over various time periods, both for protection against threats and for blocks made at the level of parental control/content.
What can you do with MEO Net Segura?
NOS HomePass
If you subscribe to NOS' Wifi Total plan, they also provide free access to an app for parents called Plume HomePass.
This allows the user to restrict access to the Internet and content from specific profiles or devices. Plume has identified the most common content filter categories that you can use to customise your network. When configuring content filtering for a profile or device, you can activate one of the following options:
No Limits – You can access all online content.
Appropriate for children – Content not suitable for children will be blocked.
Appropriate for teens – All content is permitted, except content classified as sensitive for teens.
No adult content – Sensitive content only suitable for adults will be blocked.
Vodafone My Family
Vodafone's My Family service does not seem to be available in Portugal at this time, although they appeared to launch it back in 2018. It is possible that some of the My Family functionality is available in the My Vodafone app, but they don't refer to this specifically on their website.
We will update this page with more information when we find out more.
When should I get my child a phone?
It can be very difficult for parents to know when the time is right to give their child a phone. While all the social media platforms do have very clear age guidelines (as outlined on our Social Media page), the fact is that many of our parents do help their children access these platforms at an early age. It is also quite easy for children to lie about their age when setting up their accounts (as long as they have an email address they can use). Once a few students have set up accounts in this way, it can then become very difficult for the other students to resist the temptation - peer pressure is a very powerful force.
So while we do advise parents to wait until their children are old enough for these platforms (which is generally from the age of 13 upwards), we know that there will always be some who need a phone for some other reason - if this is for in-family communication, we would advise against Whatsapp and point you towards Google Family Link and Google Chat, or some other more suitable tools (as outlined on our Social Media page). There are others who might choose not to heed our advice or who are completely ignorant about what their own children are doing online. We would emphasise, perhaps, that this last point is the worst possible scenario.
When your child is learning to ride a bike, you wouldn't just give them a bike, point them at the road and leave them to it - instead you would start with a bike with training wheels and walk alongside them, then progress onto riding alongside them etc. In the same way, we would always recommend treating their first steps in communication online as a shared experience, using the process as an opportunity to talk through any issues or concerns that arise (as well as the positive aspects and opportunities of course - it's not all bad!). Using a screen-time system (like those provided by Apple and Google, for example, which are linked to at the top of this page) could be the equivalent of training wheels in the above example too.
It is worth remembering, of course, that these devices and platforms are going to be a part of our children's lives whether we like it or not. Many of them will end up in careers where these tools are either intrinsically linked to their jobs or they might even be the ones designing the next generation of these digital tools. So from our perspective as educators, we have a responsibility to prepare them for the world they will inhabit, and this includes covering all the eSafety topics that touch on this form of online communication.
These are some of the areas that we cover as part of the school's Digital Citizenship curriculum:
Keeping personal information private (name, address, school etc)
Being careful with users we don't know ("stranger danger")
Communicating politely and using block/report tools when others don't
Accidental exposure to inappropriate content
Cyberbullying and how to be an "upstander", not a bystander
Your digital footprint and how hard it is to delete content you have uploaded
There are some excellent online resources for parents that we think are worth a look:
Common Sense Media (especially the Parent Tips and FAQs menu near the top of the page)
