How to Block Porn Sites on Internet-Connected Devices

Children are exposed to several dangerous risks on the internet. One of them is pornography. The harmful effects of watching pornography at a young age cannot be ignored. Porn is such an addiction that completely deteriorates one’s life.

There is a flood of pornographic material on the internet. Images of child abuse and videos of adult porn are available everywhere online. You can never know when your child comes across a pornographic image or video on their screens and are left feeling overwhelmed and shocked. Such scenarios leave no options for parents but to find out how to block porn sites on their child’s device.

Prevent Child Abuse America blog shared a piece of expert advice and made us understand the effects of pornography on children. Many parents get worried when they think there is only little they can do to keep their children safe from inappropriate content on the internet. This is because they cannot watch over them or protect them on the internet and social media all the time.

However, they can help them identify the online dangers they are exposed to online and teach them how to be safe from them. Moreover, parents can also adopt several ways to shield their children from sexually-explicit, pornographic as well as otherwise inappropriate content on the internet.

In this post, we are going to discuss eight important tools and techniques that parents can use to eliminate or significantly reduce the risks of their children stumbling upon pornographic content on the internet.

How to Block Porn Sites on Internet-Connected Devices

Porn is everywhere on the internet. This means it can come across as the greatest challenge for parents in keeping their children away from its tentacles. It is impossible to think that your child is completely safe on the internet.

To make sure your children maintain a safe distance from porn and to prevent them from coming across inappropriate content online, here are different tools and tactics to teach you how to block porn sites on your child’s internet-connected device.

Enable Safe Search Mode

The first step you can use to block porn sites is to enable the Safe Search mode on your child’s internet-connected device. To set the search engine to “safe search” mode on Google Chrome browser, you need to head to https://www.google.com/familysafety/. Those who use the Bing browser can head to https://www.bing.com/preferences.aspx.

If you are using another search engine, you need to open the safety settings on that browser and look for this feature. In case your child is using video-streaming platforms like YouTube and Daily Motion, you need to make sure that you have turned on the “safe” mode on these platforms as well.

Use Family Safety Tools

We, as parents, can also make use of family safety tools provided by our computer or other device’s operating system. The good news is that both Mac and Windows operating systems are providing family safety tools.

The family safety tools are present in the Mac and Windows operating systems by default. So, it is recommended to make use of them to block porn sites on your child’s device.

Use Parental Control Apps

While using family safety tools provided by your respective operating system is always a good idea, there is no harm in putting up an additional layer of protection when it comes to safeguarding your children from online pornography.

The extra later of protection we are talking about is parental control software. Parental control apps like SecureTeen and NetNanny can be used to block porn sites on your child’s digital device. In fact, SecureTeen is regarded as the best porn blocker as it helps filter and block all the porn sites on your child’s device.

All you need to do is download and install the app on your child’s phone and start controlling and managing what they see on the internet. Deploying parental controls isn’t something that is only applicable to youth. Many adults also prefer to filter our porn material and other inappropriate content such as hate and violence by using parental controls like SecureTeen.  

Install Parental Controls on All Devices

Now that you have realized how parental controls and porn blocker apps like SecureTeen help in keeping your children away from porn, it is important to know that these apps need to be deployed on every device your child is using to access the internet.

All internet-connected devices such as smartphones, tablets, personal computers, laptops, and gaming consoles should have installed parental control apps on them. Some parental control apps offer coverage for all types of digital devices whereas some are only limited to smartphones and computers.

However, SecureTeen is one parental control solution that works on all the digital devices and makes your monitoring much more feasible and manageable.

Monitor Web Browsing History

It is strongly recommended to regularly keep tabs on your child’s web browsing history. Children these days are clever enough to get around parental control apps. They use such phrases such as childbirth, breastfeeding, etc. to get around porn filters enabled on their devices.

Some children may even use slang terms that even filters are not able to identify them. For instance, the slang term “walking the dog” which basically means sex can be used by children to look up for porn videos on the internet.

Set Privacy Settings on Social Media

Make sure you have enabled strict privacy settings on your child’s social media accounts. Restrict their social media profiles to only known friends and keep them as secure as possible. A great deal of pornographic content gets posted and shared on private albums stored on different social media sites.

Monitor Phone Activity

Be sure to monitor your child’s smartphone activity every once in a while. Your younger children may not be involved in sexting but older ones might have begun participating in this type of behavior. Sexting has become common among teens and the only way to find out whether or not your child is involved in such behavior is to monitor their cellphone activity.

You should scan all the photos and videos stored on your child’s device to ensure they have not kept any pornographic material on their device. SecureTeen parental control app can help you monitor your child’s complete phone activity.

Review the Installed Apps

You must review all the installed applications on your child’s device to ensure they have not installed any inappropriate apps. Open the Settings on their device and go through the list of all the installed apps on their device. In case you find out one, you can delete it immediately.

On the other hand, besides blocking porn sites, SecureTeen can be used to filter and block inappropriate apps as well.

Before concluding this article, we would like to remind parents that they are the most reliable tool themselves when it comes to keeping their children safe online.

No parental control solution or family safety tool alone is enough to protect your child from coming across pornography on the internet. You need to communicate with your children and initiate the discussion of sex with them.

Make them differentiate between sex and porn and at the same time, explain to them the dangerous effects of pornography on their tender minds. Carolyn C. Ross M.D., M.P.H explained the effects of early exposure to sexual content in a blog featured on Psychology Today.

Make your children comfortable enough so that they can come to you right away as soon as they find something unsettling on the internet.