iPod Parental Controls on iTunes and iPodTouch.

Here is a question for parents with teenagers about how to use the parental controls properly on iTunes with an iPodTouch.


In our case we have a young teenager and want to restrict him to PG13 movies, music that doesn't have explicit lyrics and 14+ applications. But I made a mistake when initially setting up his account in using his own e-mail account and password.

So we do plan on fixing that, and using an e-mail account that we control.

Anyway, here are a set of questions.

#1) What is the best way to have the parents controls on what the kids can download on iTunes, but provide with them perhaps via a gift card the ability to select among that content what they want.

#2) I'm not very happy with the US rating system, where a PG-13 movie can have a an extreme amount of violence in it (i.e. Dark Knight) and yet a movie like "Witness" starring Harrison Ford gets an R rating. Does anyone know of other countries that have better rating systems. Is it possible to have iTunes use the rating systems of different countries. (Maybe part of this question is outside the macrumors domain)

#3) Are there any good sources of information for parents about using iTunes/iPod?

hotwater10 said:

How do I find parental controls?

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In iTunes they are under then menu item:

iTunes -> Preferences... -> On the Parental Controls tab.

You will see, the ability to disable certain features, or restrict the content based on a rating system. i.e PG-13 for movies, TV-14 for TV, "explicit" for songs according to the US rating system.


See the previous post for the iPod touch settings. That only turns off certain features though.


Only switching to the Mac recently, I'm a bit behind the curve.

I've also recently seen that iTunes has an "allowance" account for kids. This might be something we would want to try with your teenager.

TraceyS/FL said:

It looked like 3.0 was going to expand the parental controls greatly too. I haven't been able to find much about it though, but the screen shots looked good!

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We enabled the parental controls on your young teenage son's iPod Touch. It does restrict "explicit" lyrics on the iPod, but it would be good to see it also enforce movie, TV and (especially) application ratings.

His iTunes account is on his windows machine, and we enable that also. However, the password lock ties into the OS admin account which I've never bothered with on a Windows machine. So, for that we are going on the "understanding" that he will not disable those settings.

I'd like to see a different parental controls password scheme for the Windows version of iTunes. Better parental controls on the iPod Touch would also be appreciated. I'd like to hear more about what they have in 3.0.

Ivan P said:

Australia has a somewhat reliable rating system (at least when it comes to movies

The Dark Knight is rated M here, which means it's recommended for people over 15 and, if you're under 15, it is advised that a parent watches it with ...

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Thanks I look into the Australian rating system when I've got some time. My problem with the US system is "PG-13 rated" movies are way too violent.