When it comes to parental controls, there are a lot of options to choose from. But which ones are the best for your family? User activity reports can help you determine which parental controls are most effective for your specific situation. This information can help you make informed decisions about how to use these controls and ensure that your children have the best possible experience. There are a few different types of user activity reports that can be helpful when it comes to parental controls:

  1. Parental Controls Report: This report is designed to track the activities of parents and children on various devices in the home. This report can include things like how many hours each child spends online, what games they’re playing, and what type of activities they’re involved in. This information can be helpful in understanding why one or more parental controls are being used and whether or not they’re working properly.
  2. Child Activity Report: This report is designed to track the activities of children aged 12 or younger on various devices in the home. This report can include things like how many hours each child spends online, what games they’re playing, and what type of activities they’re involved in. This information can be helpful in understanding why one or more parental controls are being used and whether or not they’re working properly.
  3. Parental Controls Report & Child Activity Report: These reports work together and combine data from both parents and children to create a comprehensive view of all aspects of their lives at home. They provide an overall picture of how well each parent is controlling their child’s environment as well as their own personal activity levels within the home. These reports can be very useful when it comes time for a change in parenting control settings or when there’s an issue with one particular control being ineffective for one family but effective for another family member.

To access this report again go to Control Panel and click on “Set up Parental Controls for any user”.

Now click on the the user account you want to administer.

Ok, now we want to choose View Activity reports under their profile, it may take a few moments for the report to generate.

This report will cover several items, some of which may surprise you or not.  Either way this is a great tool for determining which functionality to add or disable.  The first thing to look at in the report is located in the upper left hand corner.  This will include detailed information about their Web Browsing, Email, Instant Messaging, etc.  As you can see it is laid out in a simple expandable tree format.

Under each sub-category the list can be quite comprehensive.  For instance looking at Websites visited on this list produced well over 1,000 results and this was just after a few hours of browsing.  But as you can see there are several topics you can view to gain a more clear picture of what they are using the PC for.

Here is a complete expanded tree view of every thing you can look at and get a report on.  As you can imagine this report is very handy when they try to deny they were at a certain site or running a certain application but you have the evidence!

  

So far we have covered ways to monitor and protect children with the PC and while online using Windows Vista.  In coming features in this series we will look at what we can use to get similar results in XP as well as other precautions to take using 3rd party applications and services.