There are no easy answers, that's for d#ng sure.  We thought we had a tight reign on our daughter.  At times, that only "pushed her" to "push back".

Doesn't matter what you do with HER device on YOUR network.  She has friends who have different ideas of "parenting".

There are girls at her school that has been raised differently.

There are boys at her school that will give her a "free phone" for over the weekend.

Hades, my daughter would walk around with a DEAD PHONE and EARBUDS claiming that was the only way that others at school didn't "make fun of her".

et cetera...

Welcome to "parenting" in the digital age.

On 12/9/2024 at 4:02 PM, Nikolas said:

I’m looking for a good program to manage and monitor my kid’s device use.

Nikolas, how about "Cloudflare Family DNS" or "Family Filter"?

It's available in any chrome under "secure" DNS,

 

Oh, and you also can set up your router with that DNS, and protect it with a pass.

On 12/16/2024 at 1:48 PM, w2k4eva said:

YouTube just doesn't work this way, in fact it is exactly backwards from what you want. I have never had a google account of any kind, including YouTube, and have never been blocked from watching any video I wanted to see. And trying to put restrictions on her account (if it is even possible) isn't likely to work for very long - at age 11, she is old enough to figure out that she can just go view them without logging in.

You might be better off having a conversation with her about why some content is not suitable and convincing her to avoid it on her own. Especially since a channel blacklist is about as useless as an AV that tries to work by listing known malware - there will always be a new item that is not on the list yet.

You might still be able to set screen time limits, or per-app time limits, with whatever parental controls are in Windows or Android, though. Just not channel-specific blocks.

I talk to her about this all the time, and she understands that some content isn’t appropriate to watch. (I say “isn’t appropriate” because, at this age, anything forbidden just becomes more tempting.) But she can’t always filter everything herself. Some videos seem super exciting to her, and she sometimes forgets what we’ve talked about.

I’m not always there to keep track either. So, while she’s old enough to find these videos or install YouTube, she’s still a bit too young to fully realize which ones she shouldn’t watch.

13 hours ago, D.Draker said:

Nikolas, how about "Cloudflare Family DNS" or "Family Filter"?

Thanks for the advice! I’ll try it out.

On 12/17/2024 at 8:19 AM, Nikolas said:

Thanks for the advice! I’ll try it out.

You're very welcome! Let us know the result, what finally worked for you. Thanks.