Amazon Fire Kids Edition Parental Controls Guide

Amazon’s Fire Kids Edition tablets are tablets designed for kids and marketed to parents. They come with a protective case, extensive warranty, and FreeTime, a massive collection of kid-friendly content.

Whenever you give a digital device to your child, you want to ensure that you set up parental controls, and that it’s adequately secure and private. Let’s walk through steps to do so with your Amazon Fire Kids Edition tablet.

Best Parental Controls for Amazon Fire
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For some settings, I don’t have a recommendation related to security or privacy, so I don’t describe them in this guide. For those, feel free to keep the default, or choose based on your preferences.

Note: Amazon Fire tablets used to be called Kindle Fire tablets.

Create Child Profile in Amazon Household

You need to create a profile for your child, which will determine their level of access, and allow you to monitor their activity.

Go to Amazon Household and click Add a Teen (meant for ages 13-17) or Add a Child (meant for ages 12 and under). You’ll be asked for the child’s name, gender, and birth date. You also choose an icon to represent your child.

I recommend that you use a codename for your child, to keep their name private from Amazon and from anyone who may get access to your Amazon account or devices. For the same reason, I recommend that instead of entering your child’s actual birth date, you enter a date that’s close to it.

Amazon Fire Kids Edition Parental Controls Create a Child

Utilizing Amazon Fire Kids Edition Parental Controls

On the Amazon Fire Kids Edition tablet, open your profile (if you’re setting up a new tablet, it will be the default profile; the only one on the tablet).

Tap the Settings app, then My Account, then Register. Sign in with your Amazon account.

On the Fire options page, I recommend unchecking Save Wi-Fi Password to Amazon. You can decide whether to check Auto-Save Photos and Videos (I didn’t).

On the Fire Kids Edition screen, tap Set up your child’s account. On the Set Lock Screen PIN screen, set a PIN or password for your profile, to prevent your child from accessing it. If you’ll be storing any important data on the tablet, or making important data available from the tablet, I highly recommend setting a password rather than a PIN, because a strong password is more secure than a 4-digit PIN.

Tap the Settings app, then Apps & Notifications. Set On the Lock Screen to Hide sensitive notification content.

Go back to Settings, then tap Alexa. I recommend toggling to off, unless you want your child to use Alexa (Amazon’s voice assistant).

Go back to Settings, then tap Security & Privacy. Tap Location-Based Services, then App-level permissions. Toggle to off any apps that don’t truly need your location. You can toggle all to off and still remotely find, lock, and erase the tablet.

Go back to Security & Privacy, then tap Device Usage Data. I recommend toggling to off.

Go back to Security & Privacy, then tap Collect App Usage Data. I generally like to share data that helps make software and services better, as long as my (or my child’s) data is anonymized. You may choose to toggle to off if you’d rather not send data (even anonymized data) to Amazon.

Go back to Security & Privacy, then tap Advertising ID, then Interest-based Ads. I recommend toggling to off.

Go back to Settings, then tap Device Options, then Backup & Restore. I recommend toggling to on.

Amazon Fire Settings

FreeTime Settings

FreeTime is Amazon’s massive collection of kid-friendly content, as well as parental controls that allow you to control access. Amazon has curated books, videos, and apps by age so that your child only has access to the content available to the age range you select. 

Amazon Fire Kids Edition tablet

On the Amazon Fire Kids Edition tablet, open your profile. If you’re in a different profile, you can switch between profiles by swiping down from the top of the screen and tapping the user icon (round head and shoulders). Or, on the lock screen, tap your profile.

Open the FreeTime app on the tablet. To the right of your child’s name, tap the gear icon to open the settings for their profile.

Amazon FreeTime child settings

Tap Set Daily Goals & Time Limits. Toggle to on. On the Weekdays and Weekends tabs, configure as you like. You can control the following:

  • Bedtime: Time frame during which FreeTime can be used.
  • Educational Goals: Amount of time you want your child to do educational activities each day. You can also block entertainment content until these goals are reached.
  • Total Screen Time: Amount of time child can spend on FreeTime each day.
  • Time by Activity Type: Amount of time child can spend in various FreeTime categories each day (apps, books, Audible, videos, Web).
Amazon FreeTime Daily Goals Time Limits

Go back to your child’s settings and tap Age Filters. Then, drag the markers to set what content you’d like your child to have access to. Amazon determines what content is appropriate for what ages, but you don’t need to be bound by their judgment. If you want your child to see less content, just set the upper age lower than your child’s actual age. If you want your child to see more content, set the upper age higher than your child’s actual age. You can always change this later.

Amazon Free Time Age Filters

Go back to your child’s settings and tap Add Content. Here you can give your child access to additional Amazon content, websites, and/or videos from the Web, if you want.

Go back to your child’s settings and tap Remove Content. Here you can make content unavailable, including content that’s part of FreeTime. There are two ways to remove FreeTime content:

  1. Search by title or keyword: This shows all content that matches what you type. You can block individual items, or all items found in the search with a single tap.
  2. Remove by hand: Show all items available to your child and tap to block. You can filter by books, videos, and apps. The amount of content is overwhelming, so I recommend using the search option instead.

Another option is to go back to Age Filters (described above) and set the upper age lower than your child’s actual age.

Amazon FreeTime Remove Content
Amazon FreeTime Remove Content Search
Amazon FreeTime Remove Content by hand

Go back to your child’s settings and toggle to off Enable In-App Purchasing, unless you want your kids to be able to make purchases inside apps.

Go back to your child’s settings and tap Enable Web Browser. If your child isn’t ready to use the Web, toggle to off. If your child is ready to use the Web, you can choose whether you want to Enable Pre-Approved Web Content.

Amazon Parent Dashboard

The Amazon Parent Dashboard includes some of the same settings as the FreeTime app, plus a couple of extras. It also lets you view your child’s activity.

Click the gear icon to the right of your child’s name to open their settings.

If you don’t want your child to be able to control your Amazon smart home (Alexa) devices, click Smart Home Access, then toggle Enable Smart Home to off.

If you have Apple Music, Pandora, or Spotify connected to your Amazon account, you can prevent your child from listening to explicit content by clicking Manage Music and toggling all the options to on.

Amazon Parent Dashboard

Using Amazon Fire Kids Edition Safely

You can install the FreeTime app on any Amazon tablet, or any Android or iOS device. But, the options may be more limited than they are on your kid’s Fire Kids Edition tablet. For example, I installed the iOS app and signed into my Amazon account, but I wasn’t able to remove FreeTime content through the iOS app; I had to use the FreeTime app on the Fire Kids Edition tablet to do that.

The security of your Amazon Fire Kids Edition tablet largely depends on the security of your Amazon account. Be sure to learn from my Amazon Account Security and Privacy Guide.

If your Fire tablet doesn’t need to communicate with other devices on your home network, connect it to your guest network instead. That will ensure that traffic to and from the tablet goes directly through your router to the Internet, and doesn’t reach other devices on your network. That way, if your child does anything dangerous with the tablet, it won’t affect other devices on your network. Likewise, if someone else in your family does something dangerous with another device, it won’t affect the Fire tablet. You may need to enable the guest network feature in your router, and not all routers have it.

Amazon FreeTime automatically renews and charges you. If you don’t want this to happen, go to your subscription and toggle Auto-renew to off.

Downloading FreeTime Content for Offline Use

This section isn’t related to security or privacy, but it may help with your family’s use of Amazon FreeTime.

FreeTime content streams to your device; it isn’t pre-loaded onto the tablet. So if you plan to use it offline, without Wi-Fi, you need to add content to the device ahead of time, when you’re still on Wi-Fi. To do this, long-press (tap and hold) the item (book, app, or video), and a menu will appear. Tap Download. You’ll see a progress bar while it downloads, and see a checkmark appear on the item, indicating that it’s been downloaded. It can then be used when offline.

Any time your child opens a book or app for the first time, it will be automatically downloaded to the device, and will then be available offline. This isn’t true for videos; those you must manually download using the steps I just described.

You can confirm that the content you want is available offline by enabling Airplane Mode, and seeing if you can access the content you want to. 

If you download a lot of content, you can make it easy for your kids to find their favorites by long-pressing an item, then tapping Add to Favorites.

You can delete a downloaded item by long-pressing the item, then tapping Remove from Device.

20 thoughts on “Amazon Fire Kids Edition Parental Controls Guide”

  1. Can i lock my child on a educational website or app to prevent her from deliberately trying to access other apps she trys to go to during her learning time?
    She trys to go to disney or other apps during her remote learning time and not complete her schoolwork.
    If so how do i do it?

    Reply
    • Jodi, if you’re using Amazon FreeTime, your child should only be able to access what you’ve made available through FreeTime. This post explains how to restrict the FreeTime content your child has access to, as well as how to control access to websites and non-FreeTime apps. If you’re not using FreeTime, then you can use the parental controls build into Amazon Fire, or use third-party parental control software that works with Amazon Fire. You can find the built-in parental controls by signing into your own profile on the tablet, then going to Settings > Parental Controls. Mobicip is one third-party solution that works with Amazon Fire tablets; here’s a list of other parental control software that may work with Amazon Fire tablets.

      Reply
  2. Ok so I got a fire 8 tablet and set up my child’s freetime with the zoom app only I restricted the entire fire so no web browser or download of other apps or content. It took maybe 35 seconds to get from the zoom app to unrestricted google on freetime (through zooms privacy policy to a link to zooms website scroll down to YouTube logo and TADAH YouTube) is there any way to be able to restrict that from happening

    Reply
    • Josh, is it opening the Silk browser, or a different browser? Or is the browser embedded in an app? I just tested by clicking a link from inside an app (not Zoom), and the Silk browser briefly flashes on the screen, but then closes with a “Feature is Blocked” message. On this tablet, Enable Web Browser is toggled off in the child’s settings. Is that how you disabled the browser?

      Reply
  3. Hi there! I’m having a ton of trouble with my kids Fire 10. We just got it a few hours ago and for some reason it won’t show shared content other than games. Hulu, YouTube, and Disney+ are all downloaded and say they are “shared”, however it doesn’t show up on my kids profile. Any help would be great!

    Reply
    • I had this issue and it turned out in the screen time limits settings I had it set to “block non educational content until goals met” so shared apps/web links were not appearing. I unticked that box and then the shared apps+ appeared. Does that help?

      Reply
  4. I’ve had Fire Tablets for two or three years now but quite honestly I’m really disappointed with it. Every time I try to give them access to something they need to use, it doesn’t appear on their dashboard. For example, today I allowed them access to Ed Place and Doodle Maths websites, but although allowed successfully, neither site appears.

    Not very impressed and sick of having to jump through hoops in order to personalise anything. Think going back to android and using Google’s own family filtering programme will be the way to go.

    Reply
  5. I wanted the Zoom app to show for my 6 year old account
    The app does not seem to have any age restriction
    Zoom is showing on parents account, but not when we switch to child’s account

    So we tried another app – Chess – and once it was downloaded/installed in parents account, it also became available in 6-year-old’s account

    Why is Zoom app not behaving the way Chess app immediately appeared?

    Reply
  6. Hi. Is there app that i can use and have on my phone and can control my child amazon tablet through it ? I had one fir ” regular ” tablet and i loved it, i could set time limit and bedtime. I didn’t have to take his tablet to switch off and on if i wanted, at some point he didn’t even knew i was in control and that’s why I liked it.

    Reply
  7. Is there a way to leave a shared app always shown in the “just for you” line? I wanted to have the kids fb messenger app and sometime’s it is visible and sometimes it’s not. I don’t know what amazon characterizes it as “videos, games, web” to figure out if it’s one of the parental settings i need to change.

    Reply
  8. We have 3 Kid’s Fire 8 tablets and one of them won’t download anything. The download circle just keeps spinning. I restarted his tablet, tried to remove items for space, our year subscription for Free-time was just added a couple days ago, I even completely deleted his profile from my amazon account and created a new one. Still nothing. The other 2 tablets are still downloading things just fine. Can someone help me?

    Reply
    • Do you have an external memory card in the affected Fire? If it isn’t working correctly the fire could behave this way. Safely eject the card if you have one, then see if the fire works as expected.

      Also do a software update for the OS, it may help and a bad memory card may prevent auto updates.

      Reply
  9. I have a question about screenshots. My kids are using kid profiles for their home schooling. ClassDoJo app, teacher shares a link to something, say a BBC bitesize quiz or some such. They finish the quiz and I remind them to take a screenshot to prove they did it. Unfortunately, the screenshots are not appearing in the photo roll for us to upload.

    I’ve set the kid profiles to auto sync images up to amazon cloud, and it does that for their photos they take, but not the screenshots.
    If I go onto the device in a grown up profile and take a screenshot, that syncs fine.
    I loaded ES File Explorer app onto one of them and shared to the kid profile, and I can browse and see the screenshot folder, so I can see they exist, I just can’t work out how to include them in the sync to cloud.

    Any ideas?

    Reply
  10. I am interested in this for my senior mother because of the warranty. She is in a nursing home and could very possibly drop this. What I want to know is can I remove controls so we can download other books that may be beyond the age range this is designed for? I want something very easy for her to use but she loves to read so I want to make sure I can get the books she wants. Thank you!!

    Reply
  11. So I notice in my Child’s profile there is no Task Switcher (square box). So when my child closes a app, is it actually closed? Or merely running in the background? And if so, how do I close apps in child mode? I can’t find a answer to this question anywhere.

    Reply
  12. I can’t figure out how to allow my child to make phone calls on her account on the Amazon Fire. I added all the contacts to her profile and still the call app only shows my name.

    Reply
  13. I just purchase a kids fire 7 and I am not finding a way to delete any content. There’s an option to add but not remove. Do you know if the remove option is still available since changing from free time to kids+?

    Reply
  14. Is there a way to set a max level for the volume? We own multiple Kindle Fires, 2 are just the regular adult version and the rest are the Kids version. The Kids versions are insanely loud. We have a special needs child who has no impulse control. No matter how hard we all try, he can not resist turning the volume up to full volume and sticking it to his ear. We need a way to restrict the high volume levels for him. 3rd party apps don’t work because he just goes and deletes the app.

    Side question: Is there a parental control that makes downloading and deleting apps impossible without a password? That’s another struggle we encounter with all of our children.

    Reply
  15. Is there a way to turn off the pulldown menu bar so my daughter doesn’t keep pulling it down by accident and getting on settings and things that she doesn’t need to do

    Reply

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