Windows 8’s Family Safety gives you an amazing amount of control over your children’s user accounts. It allows you to monitor their activities, restrict their usage times and prevent them from viewing and using things that aren’t meant for them. This tool is easy to use, but it also has enough going on that it might intimidate some users. We’ve compiled a list with the best features of Family Safety, to show you how it works and why it’s worth the trouble of using it.

Windows 8’s Family Safety allows you to police your children’s user accounts to ensure their safety and innocence while they use the computer. Microsoft provides a helpful web interface for this service that allows you to change your settings, monitor requests from your child to change permissions for pages and apps and monitor reports of your child’s usage. While this is a great feature that is sure to help a lot of users, it isn’t for everyone. If you don’t like the web interface, or would just rather manage your Family Safety reports locally, you have the option to disable the website for your user accounts. Keep in mind that this will disable the ability for your children to send requests from their account(s).

We’ve covered in past tutorials what it takes to set up Family Safety in Windows 8. We’ve also shown you how to use the Family Safety website to check your child’s usage reports from any web connected device anywhere. If you should find, based on your child’s habits or usage, that you want to increase or decrease the permission level on their account, you don’t even have to go home to do it. You can use the same website to change any of your Family Safety settings. Here’s how:

If you’ve been following along with our Family Safety series you’ll know what it takes to get this fantastic feature enabled and configured for your child’s account. Once you’ve enabled web filters, game filters and time limits, you’ll know that you child can’t get into much trouble. Even still, you may still find yourself wondering what they do with their time on the computer. Thanks to the Family Safety website, you don’t have to wonder any more. You can visit the page any time to view usage reports for your child’s account. You can see what pages they’ve visited, what games they’ve played and plenty of other information to ensure they’re computing responsibly.

If your child uses Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Spaces, with Windows Live Family Safety you can manage the list of people he/she gets in contact with via these services. For example, you can see the entire list of contacts and add or remove people from it. Your child can also make requests for adding new contacts or accessing websites which are currently blocked. You will receive these requests and you will be able to allow or deny them. While this sounds a bit controlling, these features can help you to make sure that your child is not in contact with unwanted strangers over the Internet. If you want to know more about this subject, click on read more.

We continue our previous article on Enhancing Parental Controls with Windows Live Family Safety with a tutorial on how to setup web filtering. Web filtering means setting up what kind of pages you allow your children to visit. With Windows Live Family Safety you are able to select between pre-defined sets of settings but you may also add your custom exceptions. In this tutorial I will show everything you can do on the web filtering side.

Windows 7 allows you to integrate parental control functions from other software companies (called service providers) with its own. While many security solutions providers offer parental control applications, one of the best solutions comes from Microsoft and it is called Windows Live Family Safety. This application can be installed on top of your Windows 7 installation and allows you to filter web sites, access activity reports which tell you what your children are doing on their computers, administrate the contacts with whom they communicate, allows children to ask permissions to access different web sites that you have already blocked, etc. In this article I will show you where to download Windows Live Family Safety from, how to enable it and manage the user accounts which you want to monitor.