PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
Wall Street Journal
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One of the most vexing problems in home computing is finding a way for parents to govern their children's use of computers and the Internet. The goal is to keep their kids safe from the creepier content and people on the Internet, and from spending too much time on the computer.
Of course, in many families, these problems are solved with good parenting skills, and establishing trust and limits. But even strong parents could use some technological help.
For years, add-on programs have attempted to give parents some control over what children can do on the computer. Some of these have been OK, but many have had weaknesses that were exploited by kids, who are typically technically savvier than adults.
Many parents, however, don't realize that the latest versions of the two main computer-operating systems, Microsoft's Windows Vista and Apple's Mac OS X Tiger, have parental controls built right in.
On both platforms, you can control even which programs a child can run. This is key, because it prevents kids from running alternative Web browsers or other programs that may not be susceptible to parental controls. Both also allow you to specify which Web sites a child can visit, another crucial feature.

These built-in controls are free of charge and fairly easy to use. Even better, because they are designed by the same companies that built the operating system and aren't bolted on afterward, they can impose limits in ways that kids may find harder to evade.

I have been testing these built-in parental controls. While they aren't perfect, I can recommend them as powerful tools to help parents get a handle on their children's computing and online activities.

On both Windows and Mac, the trick is to make sure the computer used by a child has multiple accounts, or logins. One, for a parent, should be set up as an "administrator" account, the type that grants its user powers to change various settings, including the power to establish parental controls on other accounts. This administrator account should be protected by a password -- and this password should never be shared with the child. If the child knows it, he or she can log in as the administrator and weaken or remove the controls.

In addition, you should set up a standard, or more limited, account for each child who uses the machine. People logged in via these accounts can't change many settings on the computer and can't override the controls.
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