Who we are

Switched On Parents publishes parental control guides for UK parents. We tell you which settings to change, what each one actually stops, and what it does not.

How we are funded

We take no money from Apple, Google, Meta, TikTok, Snap, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Roblox, or any broadband or mobile provider. We never will. That is the whole point.

Most online safety advice in the UK is funded by the companies it reviews. Those organisations do good work, and their guides are often more thorough than ours. But a site part-funded by a platform cannot tell you plainly when that platform's controls are weak, and that is exactly what a parent needs to know.

Today this site costs about fifteen pounds a year to run and is paid for out of pocket. If that ever changes, this page changes with it, before the money arrives.

How the guides are made

• Every step is checked by hand on a real device running the version named at the top of the guide.
• Each guide carries the date it was last verified. If there is no date, it is a draft and says so.
• Every step tells you what the setting does not cover. A control that works only inside one app, or that warns without alerting you, gets said out loud.
• We re-check guides when the vendor ships a major update, because that is when instructions quietly stop being true.

What we do not do

• We do not collect anything about your child. No accounts, no profiles, no dashboards.
• We do not give you a safety score. A number implies a child is safe, and no set of settings can promise that.
• We do not use scare statistics. You already know there are risks.
• We do not pretend controls are enough. The most common route to harmful content for a UK child is another child's phone, and no setting touches that.

Tell us when we are wrong

Settings move, vendors rename things, and we will get some of it wrong. If you find a step that does not match what is on your screen, tell us. We will fix it and note what changed.