In today’s post in our Technology for Kids series, we are talking about limiting your kids access to the internet thru router settings.
Did you know that your router may just have parental controls built in where can set your internet to turn off at a certain time? What if you could turn off internet access to your kids’ devices at 10:00 pm every night? How great would that be! While in an ideal world, we would be able to setup a timer that enables a kill switch on all screens on certain devices – turning off the internet will at least get your kids off the internet at a certain time. Let’s look at how to do this by setting up your router to limit internet usage.
What you will be doing is essentially setting up another WIFI connection or SSID (service set identifier – basically the WIFI spot name that you connect to) that has limitations on when it can be accessed. SO, this will take some configuration on your part. For us, we have all of our smart devices on our main WIFI point and since the kids know that password – we need to switch that password (which means changing the WIFI on all 1,000 devices.)
Also through the router settings, you can block the ability to access certain sites. This varies by router, but if you don’t want your kids using Google – you can potentially setup your router to not allow Google to be accessed when using a specific SSID.
Accessing your router settings may sound like a no-no, too techy for me thing – but really it’s not too painful. The hardest part for me was trying to figure out what our username and password was. Then I buckled down and asked my husband, who knew it by heart.
Netgear Parental Controls on Router
Netgear is marketing parental controls on their WIFI routers (hello SMART!). Learn more about what their parental controls:
Netgear isn’t the only company offering router monitoring!
Routers Instructions for Parental Controls
Since each router has a different way to setup configuration for WIFI spots, I’ve listed a few of the most popular routers here with a link to the directions on how to do update the time settings and setup a new WIFI spot.
Let’s look at instructions to learn how to setup router parental controls:
If your router does allow you multiple SSIDs, you can buy another router and chain them. I’m no help at that part, my tech husband wanted me to make sure to throw that in so you knew.
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