How do I set up parental controls?

Lock down feed management with Kid Mode for safer, unsupervised browsing.

While LightWatch isn’t an app intended for kids, my kids definitely want to use it. Kid Mode prevents changes to feed subscriptions and disables analytics so you can trust that your rules are followed.

What to know before setting up

LightWatch pulls content directly from RSS feeds that you add to it. It is your responsibility as a parent to ensure your child only has access to feeds with appropriate content. Kid Mode is a feature intended to control what is added to the app, but it is up to you to moderate what that content is.

RSS feeds are like a newspaper rather than than a social network. They publish content linearly in whatever their given theme is. An RSS feed doesn’t use an algorithm to suggest “related content”, so it’s stable in terms the content you approve being what they continue to see.

LightWatch generally does not provide any content itself. That’s up to you. The one exception to this is the discovery feeds presented when adding a new feed. These are curated lists of feeds to help users find interesting new sources of content. While these are generally benign, they include topics such as art, design, and photography which can occasionally contain content which is not appropriate for children.

Exposure risks

  • Unapproved feeds — Without Kid Mode, a child can add any feed they want.
  • Content changes over time — A feed that posts appropriate content today might not tomorrow. There’s no way to predict this, but you can be smart about choosing feeds from reliable sources.
  • Discovery feeds — The Add feed screen includes curated discovery feeds. These are generally safe, but the content is unpredictable. With Kid Mode enabled, the Add feed screen isn’t accessible, so this isn’t a concern.
  • Screen Time bypass — Feeds aren’t subject to Screen Time’s blocked sites rules, so a child could use LightWatch to view content from sites you’ve blocked in Safari. Ask me how I learned about this with my own kids.

How a child might circumvent restrictions

  • Learning your password — If they know the Kid Mode password, they can disable it.
  • Deleting and reinstalling the app — This resets the local app state. On first launch after reinstalling, the app will prompt to reset the parental controls password. A child who knows to do this can bypass Kid Mode entirely.

What Kid Mode does

When Kid Mode is enabled, it isn’t possible to add, remove, or modify feed settings. You can configure the app with approved feeds and trust that they’ll remain that way.

Be sure to add feed sources you trust to consistently post appropriate content. The app doesn’t provide moderation tools, but you can do some basic filtering using feed filters to exclude posts by keyword or URL pattern.

Additionally, with Kid Mode enabled, all analytics are disabled. My tracking policy is already very privacy oriented, but just to be safe, analytics are completely turned off.

Enabling Kid Mode

  1. From the Home tab, tap the More menu in the top right.
  2. Tap Settings, then tap Parental Controls.
  3. Set a password and confirm it.
  4. Tap Enable Kid Mode.

Once enabled, it stays active until you enter the password to disable it. The password is required every time you want to turn Kid Mode off, so make sure it’s something you’ll remember.

Resetting your password

If you forget your Kid Mode password, you can reset it by deleting and reinstalling the app. Your feed subscriptions and data are preserved in iCloud, so nothing is lost.

On first launch after reinstalling, the app will show a prompt asking if you’d like to reset the parental controls password. Tap Reset Password to disable Kid Mode and set a new password.

Strategies for control

Kid Mode prevents changes within the app, but it doesn’t prevent a child from deleting and reinstalling the app to bypass it. If you need stricter control, you can use Screen Time restrictions on the device to prevent app deletion. With app deletion disabled and Kid Mode enabled, the feeds you’ve configured can’t be changed without your password.

For a trust-but-verify approach, you can leave app deletion enabled but make note of the install date, which is shown on the Parental Controls page under Device Info. As long as that date hasn’t changed, the parental controls haven’t been tampered with by deleting the app.