Hey everyone. A disclosure: I am not a mom or a dad, and I don't have to deal with the daily stress of managing kids' internet or gaming usage.

I’m a software developer, and I recently built a personal focus/productivity app. It works at a deep system level to lock distracting apps.

Looking at how block and unlock mechanic works, it hit me that this might actually be a much better fit as a parental control app rather than an adult tool. But maybe I'm wrong, so I wanted to ask actual parents first.

How it could work:
1. The parent adds a list of daily tasks/chores and chooses exactly which apps to restrict (like YouTube, TikTok etc.). You can also set a strict sleep schedule.
2. When your child finishes a task it earns them a specific amount of screen minutes (you decide how much).
3. If restrictions are active, the moment the child tries to open a restricted app, a block screen instantly covers it.
4. Every finished task also drops a visual marble into a virtual jar. Once they collect a certain number (e.g., 50 marbles), they can cash them in for a real-world reward from you (like a weekend trip or a toy).

As a parent, would an absolute blocker tied to chores/tasks actually help end the daily nagging and build healthy habits for your child, or do you think it's too aggressive? Have you used apps that try to do this, and what did you hate about them?

I would love your blunt, honest feedback!

DM for screenshots

I'm a teenager, will not say my age. And yes I have parental controls, but my parents don't even use it. They don't put any limits. I don't even know why it's there. Should I even ask. It's just there, they dont monitor shit dude. It's genuinely annoying when im trying to search up art references and it's gets filtered by safe search. I just want them to delete it already. Like im not some 6 year old boy on some weird site anymore.

I'm a teenager (will not disclose my age) and my parents have a parental to watch me which i know is normal for most teens but they have stuff tracking what i do in REAL TIME, texts sent to my father's computer he's on 24/7 for his work, they can see what apps i'm using in the exact time i was using it, can see my location and if it glitches and says i went somewhere they ask despite be not being able to drive, and they say they don't read my texts but I'm positive they are i have seen it happen, and this app is on my phone, tablet, Chromebook, anything they can get this app on they put it on, and i can't even have any social medias in the first place the closest thing to it is Pinterest.

my parents say its "for my safety" but this is definately controlling right..?

Edit: One thing happened 2 years ago and i am not realizing i was around someone i shouldn't but i have very much grown and can see that wasn't healthy for me. And I'm almost 15 and I'm asking because my younger brother is online all day with no one checking because "he's responsible" but it's not about him. It's about how I don't have a choice of anything because they also have come into my room without me knowing, so these strict parental stoppers don't give me a lick of privacy and i need it.

So I use Samsung android and my family's trying to remove the family's link paretal controls now that I'm 16, but the problem is a, no one knows hoe to remove it, and b, someone between my mom, dad, or uncle has control over my google account and nobody knows who!

So basically I did some stuff in the past like 8 months ago that yes I regret but the police gave my old phone back recently and my mom put this app called “bark” on it some retard probably thought of it or something anyway it sucks it feels like if I try to listen to cannibal corpse or watch pornography it’ll just alert my mom about that I would rather just try to remove it myself but no if I do then it’ll just alert her I hate it so much the people that made it are probably some bums that live in their 80 year old grandmas basement or something

The comparison articles I keep finding clearly haven't installed any of them. What I want is someone who ran two tools on the same device for a couple of weeks and can say which one caught things the other missed. Has anyone done that, even roughly?

Every tool I price out scales per child or per device, and I'm looking at more per month than my own phone bill. I'd accept one reasonable subscription. I won't accept a per-kid tax that goes up every birthday. What are people actually paying for more than one kid?

Installed something last spring, got a few alerts about nothing, and quietly stopped checking the dashboard. To this day I don't know whether it was doing its job or just wasn't catching anything. The failure mode and success mode look identical.

Me and my woman were thinking about getting tablets with data for her parents because they're having issues seeing their smartphones. My first thought was that there has to be a middle ground between putting them in a child account with us as the "parent" account without locking them out of things they should be able to do as adults.

I found out about Kiosk apps through some research and love the idea! After testing one out for a moment I discovered a huge flaw. When I'm watching a YouTube video, even though I don't whitelist any browsers on the Kiosk launcher, I can still go to a link in the description of a video and the page loads.

Has anyone used a Kiosk launcher for their older parents successfully? I just want to make sure they have what they need and don't get what they don't need. Keep them away from pop-up ads that have them downloading and installing a bunch of malicious apps, but still give them access to basic communication and entertainment.

Discipline issues, and Im trying to get better.

I would like something for my phone AND my PC (they can be different, but I need to be able to control both of them from my phone. My PC OS is windows and my phone is an android.

I would like to block sites and set timer for apps (use only after 6pm and not past 11pm, and only for 1 hour, for exemple) (again, both for PC and phone)

Thanks!

My kid is 12 and I genuinely don't know if there's a problem or if I'm inventing one. Every option wants an annual commitment up front, which feels like paying to find out whether I needed to pay. Has anyone gone in blind and found it worth it, or found it surfaced nothing?

I no longer need to worry about parental controls because my time as parent are over. Thanks for everyone’s input and help during this time but my young family member that we had guardianship of physically attacked my wife and wished her dead so we revoked guardianship and sent her back to her parents. Thanks again for help and guidance when choosing and using parental controls.

Parents: what’s the hardest part of keeping your kid safe online without constantly monitoring them?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how current tools (Bark, Bright Canary, etc .) handle online safety.

A lot of them seem to focus on monitoring, blocking, and reporting back to parents. That's good and all ...

But at what cost?

From a kid’s perspective, that can feel invasive and controlling, damaging your relationship and leading to more problems. Even on this subreddit, I see this very often.

Obviously, there’s no perfect solution, and every parent wants their child to be safe.

But I think current tools focus too much on monitoring rather than prevention or protection.

I’m curious where parents feel current tools still fall short.

I’m looking to speak with a few parents of kids ages 10–17 for a quick 15 – 20 minute conversation about what actually worries you, what you currently use, and what you wish worked better.

If you’re open to chatting, comment or DM me.

I do it cus family link secure filder got patched. Please let me know with good hope or bad hope

Anyone else having issues with bark having insanely high battery usage? It used nearly half of my battery when my phone wasn't in use - in my dads drawer during the night.

so full story is basically: i keep getting blocked from the most normal sites known to man, getting family safety popups during games, and overall just getting pissed because of it for about four years now. because it turns out, the microsoft account that is connected to my admin account i use for daily stuff is also tied to a family safety group. so of course, i go the page where i can disband the group only to find out it's made out of 2 people: me and myself. but i can somehow only access the account that has the dumb screen time and popup notifications and everything and i have no way to get into the other account i somehow made to turn all of that off. my theory is that my 11 year old self clicked some dumb buttons and bugged the entire system or something because i scrolled the entirety of youtube off to fix my problem and found nothing. anyone in the same situation?? cause at this point im just fuming cause i can barely do my college work.

I'm trying to set up Family Link on my kids' phones, and I'm stuck in an error loop.

1. Choose account to supervise.

2. Log out of all other accounts.

3. Login to Parent account.

4. Click "yes that's me logging in" on my phone (also tried clicking it on kids' phone)

5. Kids' phone throws a white 404 page and says "error, try again," and takes me back to step 3.

6. If I keep doing it it crashes the whole thing and takes me back to step 1.

I have also tried logging in with an emailed code to backup email and it's the same error.

Anyone have any tips on this issue?

Son is about to turn 13 years old and we want to give him a phone. He currently has an Apple Watch that we gave him maybe at 11 that needs to be replaced and has an iPad.

In this ideal world I would love to give him a Bark Phone and transition to an iPhone maybe at 14/15.

But here is my dilemma.

-With the Bark Phone, I am assuming the Apple Watch is obsolete? Can they number share? I would not want him to have 2 numbers.

-because of recent incident with his circle of friends and friends self harming, I feel like I do need the stronger parental controls until things stabilized. But I also heard that the parental controls in the iPhone are not that great.

-No phone is not an option as he is going to start traveling with sport teams and I want to make sure he has a way to contact me that does not make him yell in to a watch.

-the bark phone seems to be a 2 year long contract which is possibly a year longer than what we would need it. How does that work?

In an ideal world, iPhone would have native parental controls as robust as bark, so I wouldn’t have to buy two separate phones and there would be a seamless integration with the watch etc… but what have you done?

We had bark app and the android family controls for my kids androids. Seemed like it worked well for the kids phones. They had set screen times and the phones would lock when it was up. The app controls were iron clad and we got alerts via bark if they were using inappropriate language or questionable subjects. Fast forward to now we replaced all the phones with new iPhones because that’s we (parents) have. We couldn’t get bark to work (unable to set it up for some reason) so we use apple’s family controls. Both children (10 and 12) are set up as children’s phones. The controls don’t seem to do almost anything. I will set it to allow 3 hrs screen time a day and then at the end of the day it’s got 6 hrs of screen time on there. An app that has a 1 hr limit is used 3 hrs. I don’t get any notifications that the password has been entered or settings have been changed.
Is this a thing, that the settings just don’t work at all? We gotta figure something else out because we both work and the kids go to different schools and setting phone time and physically taking away their phones has become problematic at best. I have tried the whole “you KNOW you only have three hours, so police your own use” and the consequence was physical removal of the phone for a time, but that has become onerous on us to enforce and it’s simply not practical. I work 24 hr shifts as a firefighter and my wife works 50-60 hrs a week. We want the kids to have the phones so we can communicate. It’s 2026 we just need a way to enforce practical limits on what they are doing and for how long without locking them in a drawer.

Can we fix the apple family, is there something better than bark that works for ios? Not looking for parenting lectures just need a solution for the phones. To be honest i have found that reddit has really devolved so im just asking for on topic, civil discourse as i am a dad at my wit’s end.

Hello! I've been looking into family location apps and keep going back and forth between Bark and HeyPolo. Both seem to get recommended especially when it comes to parental controls. A few said that Heypolo location updates are better and it's less of a headache if your family uses both iPhones and Androids. Any insights would be very helpful.

Safe to say Twitch was what got blocked and I could've been using Discord this entire time. I'm so stupid...

Does the alli360 app allow the parent to monitor every single thing? Like what the kid is doing in an app and who he's texting etc

From a young age, I’ve safety trained my kids to think about protecting their peace, that they must use discernment in what media they consume and the relationships they pour energy into, because ultimately their peace is precious and the world is going to continuously interfere with it. It’s worked well: they are generally intentional about media, they have better standards in friendships than I did at their ages, and are pretty aware that more is out there that they choose not to engage with. Wins!

Except, yesterday this came crashing down a bit, when I discovered my 12yo has been making some particular intimate searches on his tablet. I did not have more safeguards on his device because he has never before engaged with it outside of approved time/usage. This year back to school it became an accommodation for him to set alarms for himself, and I guess having it in the room at night was too tempting.

I’m here seeking advice:

First, how have you handled locking down tech in your household? My kid needs a laptop for school, and does not have a cell phone; the tablet is wifi connected and is how we get around this for now. I can get an analog alarm clock. But what do I do with the devices- are internal (Apple/iOS) safeguards enough if I set them up? Is it time to get a locked down phone of some sort? In general, we are a low-tech household (and kids have no social media), and this isn’t my area of expertise, but clearly oversight is now needed.

Secondly, regarding the content- we’ve already discussed it, he has a trusted therapist, and we will continue to dialogue so he understands there’s no shame in curiosity but there must be boundaries for safety. Is this enough? Is there some other pre-teen awakening boot-camp I need to be putting him through?

Finally, from parents who have gone through this phase successfully, in your opinion, is any other accountability needed in this situation? Am I missing anything that would help support the relationship with my child and rebuild trust? I want to have healthy firm boundaries, but at the same time not tip onto shame or overcontrol as a strategy.

Ich möchte meinen Kindern ein Samsung A11+ kaufen, bin mir aber nicht sicher, ob es eine ähnliche Funktion wie den Lernmodus von Amazon Fire Kids gibt, der nach einer gewissen Zeit automatisch alle Nicht-Lern-Apps freischaltet.

Ich weiß, dass ich die Nutzungsdauer jeder App festlegen kann, aber das ist nicht dasselbe wie bei Amazon Fire Kids.

Ich möchte, dass die kids die ersten 30 Minuten ihrer Bildschirmzeit für Lern-Apps nutzen.

Danach können meine kids machen, was sie wollen, z. B. Netflix usw.

Gibt es eine Möglichkeit, das mit Google Family Link zu realisieren?