Manage Your Child's Contact List With Windows Live Family Safety

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.

Where to Find the Settings Section

First, you need to have Windows Life Family Safety installed and configured. To learn how to do this, check our previous guide on Enhancing Parental Controls with Windows Live Family Safety. When you are done, login to familysafety.live.com. Here you will see the list of all your family members. Click on the Edit Settings link found under the account name on which you want to configure.

From the Edit Settings window you can setup web filtering, get activity reports and also manage the contacts of your children, plus approve or deny requests made by them.

Managing the List of People your Child Gets in Touch With

Based on your child's Windows Live ID, you can manage his/her contacts on all these platforms: Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Spaces. In the Edit Settings window, click on the contact management link.

NOTE: If you are trying to edit settings for an account setup as parent, Contact Management settings cannot be modified. You can modify such settings only for accounts which are not setup as parent.
Next, click on the 'Add your child Windows Live ID' link.

You have to sign in with your child's ID or, if your child doesn't have one, you can create a Windows Live account for him/her.

After you have added your child's ID, from Contact Management panel you can choose whether your child can use or not 'Windows Live Messenger', 'Windows Live Hotmail' and 'Spaces on Windows Live'. To let your child use any of these services, just check the box near their name.

In the Contact Management window, you can see your child's contacts list. You can add contacts to your children contacts list by writing their first name, last name and e-mail address and you can remove persons, by selecting the box from the Remove column of the contact that you want to delete.

If you trust that your child will not add inappropriate contacts, you can choose to allow your child to directly manage his/her contacts. Check the appropriate box and click on Save. This means that he/she will also be able to add or remove contacts without requesting for your approval first.

If you decide to allow your child to manage his/her own contacts, click on 'Get latest contact list updates' to see who your child has added or removed. You can still manage your child's contacts even if you allow him/her to do that also.

How to Manage Requests from your Children

If you have blocked certain web sites or contacts, your child can make a request for you to allow them. To review them, go to the Edit Settings window of the contact for which you want to manage the requests. On the left-hand side panel, click on the Requests link.

In the Manage requests window, you can see a table that has on the first tab your child's website requests and you can choose whether to approve or deny them.

In the second tab, you have the list of contacts that your child wants to add. Choose whether you allow or deny the adding of each of these contacts.

Conclusion

This tutorial completes our series on Parental Controls and how to enhance them using Windows Live Family Safety. In this article I've shown the last of the features added by Windows Live Family Safety: managing the people your child gets in touch with over the internet and how to approve or deny requests. I hope you've found this series to be interesting and useful. If you have any questions on this topic or on parental controls in general don't hesitate to leave a comment. And, don't forget to read the other articles in the series, which are listed below.

Posted in: User Accounts and Family Safety