5 Best Free Parental Control Software

If you are a parent of teenage kids, then you must be really worried about your kids visiting adult or offensive websites online. Internet has become a very dangerous place for children, with thousands of porn & adult websites coming up each day. Completely denying web access to your child is not a solution.

That is why you need a good Parental Control software to monitor and control your kid’s activities online. Most of the Parental Control programs are expensive and finding good free ones is not easy. Choosing a Parental Control software has to be done carefully, or else you might end up doing more harm than good as some of them contain spyware and share logs of all your activities including key strokes.

After reviewing many free applications, we list 5 Best Free Parental Control Software.

1. K9 Web Protection

K9 Web Protection offers parental control for your kid’s internet browsing. With this free Parental Control software, you can apply highly custom filters for website browsing on your computer and view a complete log of all internet activity. With K9’s web filtering technology, you can easily monitor and control browsing activities of your kids, keeping them safe from offensive or inappropriate websites.

K9 requires free registration with an activation code to download and install the software to your PC. Setting up parental controls with K9 needs internet connection as all administration is done through it’s browser-based control panel. K9’s web protection lets you choose from one of’ it’s 50 different web categories to easily block unwanted websites. You can also block websites based on URL keywords. K9 supports wild card characters to specify a wide range of such keywords.

With K9, you can set time restrictions for internet access on your PC. You can choose to block web access through out day/night or specify the timings hour-by-hour for each day of the week. Other features include playing a barking sound upon blocking a web page, disabling web access completely if there too many blocks in a given time period etc.

As a parent, you will definitely find this parental control application worth trying, despite it’s not so user-friendly installation. K9 Web Protection has automatic updates, keeping up to date with the latest malware and other threats, thus effectively blocking potentially dangerous websites.

Download K9 Web Protection

Works with Windows Vista, Windows 95, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Mac OS X

2. Windows Live Family Safety

Windows Live Family Safety is a free internet parental control software developed by Microsoft. This program lets you monitor and control your child’s online activities by blocking offensive websites, filtering websites by content, and giving you detailed reports. With Windows Live Family Safety’s support for multi-user accounts, you can monitor and control each child separately.

Filtering of websites can be done on an individual basis thus giving you more flexibility. Windows Live Family Safety lets you extend your parental control to email and chatting, albeit only to Microsoft services like Hotmail, MSN Messenger and Live Spaces. You can allow or block certain contacts from your kid’s contact list. Windows Live Family Safety settings are managed online, so you can keep a watch on your kids even when you are away from your computer.

Download Windows Live Family Safety

Works with Windows XP (SP2), Windows Vista, Windows 7 (32, 64 bit)

3. Chat Controller

Does your kid spend a lot of time on instant messengers, chatting with his friends? Then you may need Chat Controller, a free parental control application that enables you to restrict your child’s access to instant messengers on your PC. Chat Controller works with most of the popular IM clients including AIM, Gaim, Google Talk, ICQ, Miranda IM, MSN Messenger, Skype, Trillian, Windows Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger.

With Chat Controller, you can scan your computer to view all the messengers installed and set rules to control the usage of these IM clients. This free Chat blocking application supports multi-user accounts. So you can set different rules to different users of your PC. Chat Controller allows you to block selected messengers for selected days of the week for a specified time range.

Chat Controller has an option to synchronize computer’s clock with the atomic clock. Your kid cannot trick this free parental control program by simply changing the time of the system.  Download Chat Controller

Works with Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista 32, 64 bit; Requires .NET Framework 2.0

4. KidLogger

This open source and free parental control software is designed to log all computer activities when yo
u leave your kids alone with the PC. KidLogger logs all keystrokes including instant messenger chats, typed website URLs, emails etc. Other features include support for multiple user accounts, monitoring and logging of online activities as well as all programs running on PC, screen capture of computer screen every 15 minutes, log reports via emails etc. KidLogger can monitor all PC events like standby, hibernation, logoff, login etc.

This passive computer monitoring program which does not have any options to block websites is good for parents who want to keep a watch on their kids without being too obtrusive.

Download KidLogger

5. AOL Parental Controls

AOL Parental Controls is a free internet parental control program provided by AOL. For downloading and installing this software, you need an AOL email account. Like most parental control software AOL Parental Controls features controls for web browsing, email & IM, uploading/downloading etc. It also lets you set time limits for your child’s online activities and gives detailed reports. You can manage AOL Parental Controls Web Suite via it’s settings and options online on the AOL Parental Controls web site.

Up to 6 child accounts are allowed for each user. You can quickly block inappropriate websites for your child by choosing one of the 3 available age categories – Kids (12 & under), Young Teen (13-15), or Mature Teen (16-17). Or you can customize web access by allowing/blocking specific websites.

Adding time limits to your child’s internet activity is easy. You can set a limit on the number of hours and allow access only on specified days of the week. Though AOL Parental Controls is a bit sluggish in operation, it is definitely worth a try for all those parents who are worried about their children’s unsafe online browsing and are unable to afford expensive parental control software.

Download AOL Parental Controls