My current router does not allow URL filter for individual devices. Many parents would like to limit the amount of time kids consume social media and streaming nowadays, but they cannot restrict the internet access because most schools has adopted online learning and they will need internet to access online school materials. What action is recommended? Can ASUS parental control feature do this? Thanks
Firewalla gold or gold plus.
Get a real router, there are cheap computers that can easily run pfsense or opnsense.
Most easy options are also relatively easy to get around.Get a Firewalla router. Makes powerful parental controls trivial to implement.
I second this—powerful and easy to use. Since my kids tend to get addicted to electronic devices, they have a specific hour on Tech Tuesday (school computer homework) that the Firewalla Gold unblocks the internet (at least the stuff that they should access) for 1 hour to get done. If they get done quick enough, they are allowed the remainder for games or research on something that they are learning. If they earn a segment of computer times, I’ll manually unblock their computer for 30 min. Sometimes I’m at work and my wife asks me to unblock, which can be done from my phone.
This is the most user friendly option I know of. Even the basic models will suffice for OP’s purposes.
Look at https://gryphonconnect.com/ routers. They have impressive parental controls and are super easy to setup and admin from your phone. They have several models depending on your house size and performance requirements. I use the Guardian and it’s plenty fast for everything we do. It’s on sale for $50 now I see. The other suggestions on here require a much higher level of technical understanding and effort.
I have an Eero system at home. Easy to setup and has an option for parental controls (for a fee). Also provides good coverage throughout the house.
I’ve been working on setting up laptops for my kids and Microsoft has done a ton on this. Create them Microsoft accounts and log tbem into their windows machine with said account. You can then manage that device from your Microsoft account. Block apps, setting screen time, web filtering using Edge, your kids can request access to apps and you can approve it from an app, and you get reports every week of their device usage if you want. Overall I’m honestly surprised how much control it gave me.
At the end of the day having multiple layers is the best approach. Setting up both a DNS filter like pihole and using managed accounts should stop most unwanted usage of devices.
Set screen time on their devices, no need to block Wi-Fi. If you want to block their school provided notebook from unrestricted WAN access: Unifi. You should put their school provided devices on their own network (VLAN & SSID) anyway.
Leave the children alone.
I use Unifi Dream Machine Pro traffic restrictions. Works flawlessly.
I set up Nextdns for my parents to use for my younger siblings and it’s worked great. Others suggest pi hole but I’d say Nextdns free is enough for a kid or get the plan and use it yourself too for ad blocking out of the house. PiHole is too much work and maintenance for this task. You have to maintain blocklists, etc. And if you don’t have one, a raspberry pi is more expensive than many years of nextdns. Nextdns works outside the house easily for kids devices without the need for vpn setups which will be annoying to set up on children’s devices. Also has a whole feature set for easy parental controls. My two cents.
I use TP-Link decos. I can set time limits as well as parental filters. I can even block specific URLs like Facebook and TikTok. It’s not that expensive.
Get a pfsense firewall. Setup dhcp and reserve ip based on their mac address. Then google pfsense parental filtering and control
NextDNS is also an option, would be similar to pihole recommendation but just in the cloud. Has a parental control section.
Any good router should have parental controls and timers
Also make a free NextDNS and setup filters and then use that as your DNS provider on all devices
You also setup the devices so the kids cannot change the DNS
By doing this you can keep them from ever loading a bad site
Also use the parental controls inside you kids favorite app like robolux or whatever
Good luck ;)