Protecting your kids on the internet: Pandemic edition
Update 2020.10.12: Bark Home added!
Update 2023.07.12: Circle Home has come a long way since I wrote this — we use it now and it’s great.
The internet is a horrible place. And now that our terrestrial world is a virus-ridden hellscape, all human communication, entertainment, and education has moved to the digital world. We hold our children’s hands, walk them up to the gates of the internet, and say “go learn stuff!”
If we were airlifting our children into a jungle survival mission, where they had to survive for three days amidst wolves, snakes, and non-potable water, we would equip them with at least the slightest defenses. A multi-purpose tool or some matches, perhaps. Similarly, I intended to protect my kiddos as I provided them with secondhand computers for their journey into the internet.
So how would I defend my kids from the worst version of humanity, the internet? How would I spend the next two months? Read on!
Round 1: Google Wifi
Early on in our internetting days, we determined that the base model Comcast wifi router isn’t suitable for our family. We are avid users of lead-based paints for our interiors, our cutlery, and our toothbrush holders, and this seems to block standard wifi signals.
Happily, there are mesh network routers readily available. We opted for Google’s Wifi (this was before they confused the market with their competing Nest Wifi). The Amazon package arrived, and I raced to plug that baby in (well, “plug those triplets in”, since you must deploy three little pillboxes around your grounds). Instantly, we were drenched in juicy wifi, wherever we might be sitting. Streaming Gilmore Girls from the far corner of the garage, one-click-shopping on the back patio, and having a “parent timeout” in the attic were all now viable options.
This was great for the parents, because we like Internet. Meanwhile, the kids only had boring old books, toys, and kid-safe Kindles with worse performance than Gameboys.
Then Covid hit, and I had to upgrade my kids’ computing power. It was chilling to realize that now they could look up anything they wanted. But worse: they could append the word “butt” to any search, and that would yield a whole different dimension of results that they weren’t expecting.
Happily, Google had an answer there. You can create Family groups, which allow you to do a few things:
- Enable Google SafeSearch
- Pause internet access for groups as you see fit
Success! Now my family is fully protected! Right?
Nope.
Round 1 score - Technology companies: 0, Vanderzee family: 0
A couple problems arose:
- Google Wifi’s group management is terrible. Want to add a new device to a group? Nope! You have to delete the group and then recreate it from scratch.
- Want to block some sites that are “safe” from SafeSearch’s point of view, but not from yours? Sorry. Google knows best. Don’t disagree with Google.
- Want to block categories of sites (game sites? social media?) during school time? No luck there, boss. The world is binary. On or off.
Round 2: Circle
Like any good citizen, when I want a clear, concise answer to a question, I turn to the Internet. And, like any good citizen, I am fully aware I am not going to get that answer.
But the slightest bit of Googling for “parental controls internet” led me to Circle. This is a company that focuses on exactly this goal — providing controls and support for parents facing the same challenges I am. A brief tour of their website, and I was sold! Look at how great this app looks!
I downloaded the app and signed up for an annual subscription. I created my Users (the kids), and configured them just so: bedtimes, filters, etc.
Twenty minutes later, I realized that this didn’t do exactly what I needed. The Circle app will enforce the controls I specified, but only on devices I install the app on (phones/tablets). To protect computers, I had to go a different direction: I needed something to protect my home network.
Luckily, Circle has a product for that! The Circle Home Plus is a little softball that plugs right into your wifi router, and will apply all your parental constraints to any device on your network.
Perfect! Now I can handle anything the Internet has in store for us. And when you buy it, it comes with an annual or lifetime subscription built right into the price of the device.
Oops — I had already paid for a membership an hour ago. Luckily I could cancel it, and then order the Circle Home Plus with Lifetime Subscription to be delivered tomorrow.
Setup was a breeze, and things just worked. You can see what sites your kids visit, you can block things, you can shut down internet when it is time to do some jumping jacks. Great! Now I don’t need to worry about my kids on the internet, right?
Nope.
Round 2 score — Technology companies: 0, Vanderzee family: 0
Pretty quickly, problems arose. Circle allows for two modes:
- Internet on: Your kids can use the internet.
- Internet off: Your kids can’t use the internet.
That makes a lot of sense, and in “internet on” mode, you can apply safesearch, and block individual sites, etc. So the kids are pretty protected from the yucky stuff on the internet.
But in our pandemic world, we need three modes: On, Off, and School.
That third mode is critical: The kids need to be able to use the internet, but we need to be able to prevent certain types of internet usage — games, social networking, etc.
It turns out that when your kids are in their class Zooms, and the parents aren’t nearby (the school doesn’t really want parents hovering, and also we have three kids so we’re in zone defense mode, and also we have parent things to do like work), kids are smart enough to open up a new Chrome tab and type in “poki.com”. In other words, they are about 8 button clicks away from doing something fun, versus learning to how to unbundle during subtraction.
Happily, I was aware this was happening, since in the Circle app I could see what the kids were doing. And yes, I’d like to win their hearts and minds by convincing them that school is good for them, and better than playing online games. But pragmatically, I needed to be able to put my kids’ internet into School Mode, wherein they could access all the school resources they need, but couldn’t jump over to games or social media.
Circle has no such thing. The closest you can get to this (which I learned after a few hours of customer support) is put them into “Internet Off” mode, but manually allow specific sites during that mode. I tried it for the first few, but A) this was wayyyy too cumbersome, B) I don’t know all the specific sites that they will need for school, and C) this is not the right solution.
Aside: when internet is filtered, and then you allow a specific domain, it allows that specific site to load. But these days, any webpage reaches out to dozens of other domains before it can fully load. If you allow the primary site, but all the other ones are blocked, the webpage is unusable.
What is particularly sad is that Circle has a great “site category” system. They know if a website is for games, or social media, or education, or yucky stuff. So all they really need to do is create a “School” mode, and then allow you to allow and disallow by category. But that is not possible — you only can manually enable specific sites during “Off” mode.
And that’s a nonstarter.
Round 3: Gryphon
Back to the internet I went. A good fatherly.com article (hey, that content is perfect for a father like me!) indicated Gryphon Network’s Mesh WiFi Security Router & Parental Control System was a great parental control thing.
The website shows that indeed they have a “Homework mode”, which looked like it will do exactly what I needed! Yahtzee!
I returned the Circle device, and ordered the Gryphon one. It is a mesh network too — great, but I didn’t want to give up my Google Wifi (which is great other than the parental stuff). Happily, I could plug the Gryphon router into the Google router, and thus have 2 different wifi networks: parents on Google, kids on Gryphon. So, I don’t need to move all our devices over to the new one.
Away I went, setting up the kids’ accounts. It works pretty great — you indicate your child’s level (elementary, middle school, etc). You can specify the schedule for Bedtime and Homework time. You can configure SafeSearch and Ad Blocker. You can review your kids’ internet activity, and block sites.
Great, all good now, right?
Nope.
Round 3 score — Technology companies: 0, Vanderzee family: 0
Some problems quickly arose:
- You can’t see a list of the sites you’ve blocked, in case you want to unblock them. You have to manually type in the site domain name, and only then will it tell you that site’s status.
- You have to configure each child independently. Not a huge problem, just more work. And because you can’t see the current site blocking status (point 1 above), it’s hard to remember “did I block toosexyforkids.com for Sally and Steve, or just Steve, or have I not blocked it at all yet?”.
- Gryphon doesn’t have any notion of a website’s category. So, you can’t do things like “block all game sites”. You have to do everything site-by-site. That means every day, I need to review all the dozens of sites my kids went to, determine if they are games or not, and then block them.
In subsequent days, things got a little rocky. Something about how the device was working, or how I configured it, or how the school sites were structured caused loading failures. And, if the kids miss even a few minutes of class, they will be condemned to a lifetime of manual labor and dunce caps. I ran through all sorts of troubleshooting to try to identify the causes, but often I would need to disable all controls to get things to work.
I opened some support tickets with Gryphon, with a 3-week Amazon return window in which to sort through these. Fingers crossed!
Round 4: Bark Home
My impatience got the better of me four days later. I picked up the search and came across Bark Home. I had heard of Bark previously, but it seemed to mainly focus on watching for bad things in your kids’ social networking. Our kiddos are a little below the age when that is a concern (but getting there fast!).
But then I saw Bark Home on Amazon. Some interesting notes about this:
- The company doesn’t have any website content about Bark Home, other than a blog post. Maybe this is a new product?
- Not a ton of ratings yet on Amazon. Yep, seems like a new product.
- There is only a bit of support content available on Bark’s website. Gotta be a new product!
I love being on the cutting edge of technology, so I ordered the Bark Home and installed it the next day, in place of the Gryphon device. Bark works with your existing wifi, and upon plugging it in, immediately applies a minimum level of parental controls to everything on your network. “Babe, the internet is down,” my wife noted from the other room — not sure exactly what sites she was looking at!
Setup was great! The configuration tools — which are both via a web browser and a mobile app — make setting up your kids’ profiles easy. It allows for four (Four!) modes for each child: Default, School, Bedtime, and Free Time, and each can have its own configuration for what is allowed and what isnt.
Bark has site categories (Games, Social Media, etc), and allows category-level and site-level configuration, with exceptions in both ways (“disallow a site that would otherwise be allowed”, and “allow a site that was blocked by other rules”).
You can view all the exceptions that are in place for each child and each mode — which is great. That means that there are a lot of settings — three kids times four modes means there are twelve different scenarios I need to worry about, but luckily the defaults seem to be well designed — for example, School disallows games and social media.
Some of the site categorizations didn’t work right out of the box — Zoom was disallowed, and Google Docs were categorized as social media. So, like all of the previous solutions, I had to closely monitor the first day or two to get all the right exceptions in place. But generally, the onboarding of this technology into our home network was about 80% easier than the previous ones.
Some open issues I have reached out to customer support regarding:
- There doesn’t seem to be a way to dynamically change the mode a child is in. Say, for example, school ends early one day. If I want to change them to Default mode, I have to go edit the whole schedule, and later remember to change it back.
- There doesn’t seem to be a way to see all of the sites a child has visited. You can see what is blocked, but sometimes you may want to see what wasn’t blocked, in case the site categorization is incorrect.
But all in all, Bark Home almost perfectly meets our needs!
Round 4 score — Technology companies: 1, Vanderzee family: 1
Readers, you were probably hoping for an answer here: how do I protect my kids from the internet, and support pandemic schooling? So far, it seems Bark Home is closest to what we need. Our desired feature list is:
- School mode: Allow a subset of the internet to work, and block everything else.
- Site categorization: Don’t make us have to specify everything site-by-site.
- Ensure sites load fully: When loading an allowed site, if that site depends on other domains, don’t block them.
- Ability to dynamically change a child’s current mode, while not affecting the overall schedule.
- Be able to configure multiple users easily: but probably still allow user-specific customization.
Bark Home has the strongest showing amidst these criteria. So that is great news. It was a journey to get here, but two months into the home school year I can finally stop the kids from playing games during school. Phew!