Amazon now lets you adjust parental controls for its Fire tablets from anywhere

Amazon is improving its parental control dashboard to allowparents to adjust FreeTime settings like screen time limits,bedtime curfews, whitelisted apps, and more from any web browser.Previously, those controls could only be changed from the actualkids』 edition Fire tablet. Now they can be accessed and updatedfrom any smartphone or PC that a parent has access to. They canalso enable or disable the web browser remotely.

The Parent Dashboard lets parents remotely keep an eye on thecontent — apps, games, videos, ebooks, etc. — their children areusing on the company』s kid-oriented tablets. It provides daily,weekly, and monthly activity reports, which help parents feelreassured about what their kids are seeing and how they』re spendingscreen time without having to peer over their shoulderconstantly.

Since last year, Amazon has also displayed 「discussion cards」that are meant to help parents strike up a conversation about thecontent their kids are interested in. Hopefully, if you』re aparent, you already have some sense of what your kids are into andare capable of talking about those things without cheat cards, butit』s hard to keep up with this stuff sometimes, so it』s nice thatthe option is there if you need it.

The Parent Dashboard is available exclusively to parents who owna Fire 7 Kids Edition or Fire 8 Kids Edition that』s currentlyenrolled in the company』s FreeTime service, which provides accessto 15,000 curated apps, games, videos, and educational content fromthe likes of PBS, Disney, and Nickelodeon. A year of FreeTimeUnlimited is included with each tablet purchase; after that, it』s$2.99 per month. The ability to control settings remotely issomething that parents must opt into. 「All previous FreeTimesettings will be reset, but parents will be able to readjust andmanage their parental controls right away」 after switching on thefeature, Amazon says.