Restricting the iPhone? Sad, but sometimes, necessary

Why would you ever want to place restrictions on your iPhone or iPod Touch? Well, you may not want to, but if you’re a parent and have just bought the shiny new gadget for your child, you may have some concerns. Maybe they’re not being totally responsible with that camera, or they’re downloading explicit music from iTunes. Or maybe it’s the end of the month and you’ve just gotten your credit card bill – with hundreds of dollars of iTunes charges. If any of these are the case, you’ll definitely want to limit your youngsters use of it. Here’s how to do it.

First, find the “Settings” icon on the Home screen of the iPhone or iPod Touch. Once inside the settings menu, you need to find the “General” tab and gently tap it. Once this is done, you’ll be asked for a four-digit password. Enter it, and make sure you choose something that is easy to remember. If you forget, there is no way to get it back and you’ll have to do a full restore on your iPhone or iPod Touch to get it back to the way it was. And while you want to protect whoever is using the device, you certainly don’t want to wipe it clean of all the wonderful things they’ve spent months putting on it!

Once you’ve set the password, you’ll then be given a long list of things you want to restrict on the iPhone. Go through each of them individually and choose “On” if you want a restriction on that item or “Off” if you’re okay with the way it is. Once you’ve done this, the iPhone or iPod Touch will no longer offer this as a feature. For instance, if you were to block the YouTube application, when you go back to the Home screen, you will no longer see this icon, making it inaccessible to the user of the iPod.

No, placing restrictions on such a fun little device as your iPhone or iPod Touch is never a fun thing to do. Aren’t we always trying to get more out of our iPod instead of less? Sadly though, sometimes these restrictions are necessary.