Parental Control recommendation? NetNanny or other?

Hi there,

First, I'll say nothing replaces the conversations you should have with your kids, sharing information and building trust. But I'm appalled at the laissez faire attitude of the post I've seen, that suggest you just shouldn't even bother to try to filter their content. Your kid can hit a typo while tapping in "pokemon" and end in some pretty crazy porn, pretty quick. In an age where more extreme porn equals more clicks (and more profit), you're simply negligent if you don't even try. The best $100 we ever spent was to purchase Circle, a device that filters content at the router level. It's amazing! You can assign different devices to different levels of filtering. Most of our household is set to teenager level, but my husband's and mine are totally unfiltered. You can set it up to turn off the wifi between certain hours, or simply pause it if your kids won't get off their devices. I can turn it off when I leave the house and know my kids aren't on their devices. It's not perfect, but it's a huge help. Most of the other stuff out there is pretty useless. We also set up parental restrictions on their individual devices. Good luck!

I purchased the device "Circle by Disney" for my home wifi, mostly to try to prevent my son from accessing inappropriate content.  Through Circle I was able to see what websites he was on, I can set time limits on each device, pause the device or internet, and set a bed time on the internet or device.  A lot of people said that I shouldn't do this and that kids will find a way around it.  And yes, even though he found a way to get around it by using a hotspot on his phone, I was able to talk with him about the fact that I could could see every website he was visiting, could tell when he was using the hotspot (which consumes huge amounts of data so he would run out early in the month for his cellular usage) and if I could do that probably someone else could too (so what he was doing should not be considered "private").  I explained that it was just like junk food or cigarettes, I don't want them in my house, so that was just part of the rules of being a family member in our household.  I have not yet started using the time limits or bedtimes on the Circle, but if I found I needed to as a way to control the amount of internet access, I would do it.  I think as a parent you have to use every tool you can.  If you can also use NetNanny, that might be a good tool too.  I have never used it and somehow you have to restrict all access so they are only browsing using NetNanny, which was not something I felt I could easily install and implement across devices, so using Circle with it's remote and somewhat "cloaked" installation was a better choice for me.  Wish I had been able to install this device years ago when the kids first got computers and smart phones.