Art of Manliness: The Best Internet Filter for Kids

 

The Best Internet Filter for Kids


Like most modern kids, our children get some screen time each day to watch YouTube videos or play Minecraft or Zelda.

And like most modern parents, Kate and I want to make sure our kids don’t come across anything they shouldn’t — like porn — while they’re on their screens. There are some gnarly things on the net that you really don’t want your eight-year-old to see.

While we’ve laid down some ground rules for screen time that allow us to check in on what our kids are consuming — e.g., you can only watch screens in communal places in the home — it’s impossible to keep an eye on them all the time.

So I’ve tried various internet filters to fill that gap. And by trying various internet filters, I mean I’ve tried pretty much every iteration on the market in order to find the best one.

What I found in all my testing is that the cost of most internet filters is about the same. Look to spend $10-$20 a month for filtering multiple devices.

The most significant difference between filters is in their ease of use. Some of them are just a massive pain in the butt to install and manage, and even when you get them installed, they don’t work correctly.

For example, I gave NetNanny a try, but man, it took me the better part of a day to install the software on my kids’ iPads. And then, after I got it installed, my kids couldn’t connect to the internet because the VPN service NetNanny uses for the filtering was wonky. So I uninstalled it.

I then tried out a service called MobiCip. I had high hopes for it. The price is one of the cheapest on the internet filtering market — $5 a month for 10 devices — and installation was much easier than with NetNanny. It was only after installation that the problems started popping up. Web browsing slowed to a crawl thanks to my kids’ internet browsing going through a VPN. Filtering was a tad too aggressive as well. A few times a week, my son would come to me with his iPad, complaining he couldn’t check ESPN for football scores because MobiCip blocked ESPN for whatever reason that day. And sometimes, browsing on any page wouldn’t work at all.

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