Is Kindle Freetime only for young kids?

[mom31257]

Ds has started talking about buying some kind of tablet with the birthday money he will get this spring; however, we don't want him to have internet access, youtube access, etc. Will a Kindle Fire be a good option? I would love for him to have access to educational apps, books, and even fun video games. Can the Freetime feature be tailored to any age?

[jentancalann]

Ds has started talking about buying some kind of tablet with the birthday money he will get this spring; however, we don't want him to have internet access, youtube access, etc. Will a Kindle Fire be a good option? I would love for him to have access to educational apps, books, and even fun video games. Can the Freetime feature be tailored to any age?

For some reason, I can't post from my Surface without quoting. Sorry. Anyway, I don't know for sure, but Freetime has a variety of books under my 8 yo's name. From I Can Read It type books to Strawberry Girl. You can add anything there from the cloud- apps, books, etc. There is a place to update you child's profile with their age, but I'm not sure if that changes the pre loaded content. Example of books- Stone Soup, Medieval Tales That Kids Can Read and Tell, Uranus by Seymore Simon, New Neighbors for Nora, Exploring Roots, What is Touch?, Mr. Popper's Penguins. Video examples- The Electric Co, Arthur, She Ra, Word Girl, Reading Rainbow, Mr. Rogers, Bob the Builder, Caillou, Fat Albert App examples include audio books like Black Beauty and Anne of Green Gables, but also include puzzle apps, Arthur and Penguins of Madagascar games, Aesops Fables and Nursery Rhyme books/audio. So, you can certainly add age appropriate content to the mixture of what is preloaded. Hope that helps some.

[Butter]

Do you mean the Free Time you pay for or just use of the Free Time app? What you pay for is really onlt for about 8ish or so. The app itself can be customized however you want. You can put watever videos, books, and apps you want them to see when they are locked in FreeTime. It makes it so they can't do certain things at all, so some people with older kids use other parental controls apps.

[mom2boys030507]

My 10yo and almost 6yo both have Fires. I have the parent controls set so they are unable to access the internet, email or youtube. They are also unable to purchase anything without a password that they don't have. We had Free Time activated for a few months of our almost 6yo, I found it to be really hard to use. He is an advanced reader and the books were to easy. We frequently check out e-books from the library, but with Free Time running my son wasn't able to read any of those books. IMO the parental controls are good on the Kindle and work.

[mom31257]

Thank you all! I am glad to know there are parental controls work well. I was thinking that the Freetime was their only parental controls.

[Woodland_Mom]

The free time is probably ideal for kuds under the age of 10. Lots of fun/interesting/educational content comes as part of the "free time" package. Customers get a free trial period (I think) and then pay $2.99 per month for the service. The book and video selection that is available changes every month to keep it interesting for kids. You can limit the screen time for apps and videos and even set the book/reading time to unlimited. It's definitely worth a look. Kids with free time cannot access the web, the app store, or e-mail.

 

We purchased Kindle Fires for our boys last summer when they were 12 and 10. We have found that the parental vpcintrols work quite well. We have locked Internet access, the app store, etc, but the can access e-mail. Sometimes they ask if they can look at a particular website, so I just type in the code to give them time to look something up on the Internet.

 

Once my boys got their Kindle Fires, they hardly ever touched their Nintendo DS games.