Raising Tech: Navigating the Online Identity (Premium)

There is an interesting dynamic between parenting and the Internet; I have written a couple of times about enabling my daughter to explore the bounties of technology while also trying to not let it overwhelm her entire existence. But as she grows older, schooling becomes more pervasive, and the fact that we are locked inside for the next few weeks at best, it’s time to revisit the topic of enabling online activity but in a way that is controlled.

I am not forging any new ground here, many others have gone down this path but for me, but this is my first time working intimately with Microsoft’s and Apple’s parental control features. And let me tell you, it’s a pain in the butt.

The good news is that I likely have a couple of years before my kid is old enough to be on a PC to where she could get into trouble but let's start with the Microsoft side of life first.

After finishing my basement (post coming soon, finally), we set up an area that has a Surface Studio for her to use as she loves to color and there is not a better device available for this task. Which ran into the first problem, creating a child account.

With my daughter dancing around and having the patience of, well, a child, I was trying to set up her account on the device and there is no way to do this without having an email address for her.

When you attempt to create the account, it asks for an email address which she didn’t have at the time (she’s six) and if you select to skip that input, you are then asked for a phone number for the account. What child on this planet is going to have a phone number but not an email address? And if you enter your own phone number that is associated with another MSA, you get denied.

If you want to have a child account on your Windows 10 PC without sending all your data to the cloud, you are out of luck and this, quite frankly, sucks. Again, this is a first walkthrough for me, so maybe I missed something but I feel that I am slightly more educated on Windows than the average parent and if I can’t figure it out, good luck to others trying to accomplish this task.

The only option I could find was to create a local account, not linked to anything, and I was finally able to let her use 3D paint to have about 20 minutes of entertainment while I finally created her an MSA to properly setup an identity for her to login to the PC.

I understand why Microsoft forces this mechanism and candidly, when she had to start schooling from home because of COVID-19 and was using a laptop, the ability to login to her account instantly on that device is convenient. But, completely locking out child options for those who don’t want an MSA is a letdown and I do wish there were other options.

Once you are comfortable with letting Microsoft peer deeply into your child’s digital life, the family portal does provide a robust set of controls to fully monitor what your child is doing on the device. The controls for limiting appli...