Monitor kids' PC activity

When you turn on Family Safety for a child's user account, monitoring starts automatically. If you're signing in to Windows with a Microsoft account, you'll receive an activity report in email from Family Safety, summarizing how much time the child spent on the PC, the websites they visited, the games and apps they used, and the terms they've looked up in search engines like Bing, Google, or Yahoo! Search.

The email summary gives you a lot of info about your child's PC activities at a glance. But you can always delve into more details—and change permissions and other settings based on the activity info—by choosing a link in the email report to view the report online. You can also open the report from the Family Safety website. Here's how:

The top half of the Summary tab shows info about the websites your child has visited recently, and any web searches they've recently performed. The bar chart of Most popular websites indicates the top five sites they've been to and how many pages within each site they've looked at, but doesn't show how long they might have spent on each site. To see a complete list of every website your child's visited in the last week, tap or click View all above the chart. All of the web addresses and search terms shown on the summary page are also links that you can tap or click.

For a complete list of your child's Internet activities, you can also tap or click the Web activity tab. This page shows all of the sites your child visited or tried to view, including sites that Family Safety considers "suspicious" or potentially inappropriate. The Action taken column indicates whether Family Safety allowed the site, or blocked some or all of its content. The Category column shows the website categories as determined by Microsoft, but you can dispute a site rating if you disagree. Use the buttons in the Change Setting column to allow or block your child's future visits to a particular site.

For a breakdown of your child's overall PC use, tap or click the PC activity tab. The Sessions section indicates when and for how long your child used the PC during the week. The Apps and the Games sections list each app or game, respectively, that your child used, how many times, and for how long. The Action column also indicates whether your child was blocked from using a particular app.

File downloads from the Internet and Windows Store downloads are listed separately in their respective sections. If your child downloaded a game from the Windows Store, and then played it for 45 minutes, that game will appear in both the Windows Store downloads and the Games sections of this page.