My family and I use the Internet for a lot of different things. I’m a web designer so I’m either using or creating Internet products. We homeschool our kids and use the Internet for their online courses and we also use the Internet for our TV shows, movies, and games.
I’ve never really been worried about how much Internet my kids are consuming until lately. When they were younger they seemed to be more interested in playing outside than being on the Internet, but now that they are getting older things have changed. This might be shocking for some of you to hear, but we currently don’t have any filtering software on our computers. So far we haven’t had any issues that we know of, but now that our kids are becoming teenagers I’m starting to wonder if this is something that would be beneficial. We’ve had a lot of family councils about the dangers of the Internet and try our best to ensure that they only use the Internet in open spaces, never alone, but it doesn’t always happen. I like that my kids have their agency and I pray that they would come to me if they had a problem, but maybe I’m too naïve in thinking this. I’m curious to know what some of you are doing to keep your kids safe from inappropriate content online. If you have any advice I would love to hear it.
Google Wifi
While we don’t currently have a perfect solution for keeping our kids safe on the Internet, we have found the perfect solution for monitoring their Internet usage. This month we collaborated with Google to try out their new Google Wi-Fi device and I can honestly say that it has solved some major Internet issues for our family. Google Wi-Fi replaces your old router and is controlled by an app on your phone. The app allows you to know everything that is going on with your Wi-Fi. From my phone, I can see which of my kid’s devices are online, prioritize them depending on who needs the most bandwidth, or I can pause the Wi-Fi on a specific device if they shouldn’t be on it. I seriously love the “pausing” feature; I use it every day to manage my online time. You can also schedule when a device shouldn’t be on Wi-Fi like at dinner time or bedtime through the app. My kids hate the “pause” feature but I freakin love it. I can’t say enough about it. Sometimes we use the “pause” feature when Nikki and I are on a date and the kids aren’t answering the phone. We simply pause the Wi-Fi and then time how long it takes for one of the kids to call us about the Wi-Fi being down.
Google Wifi has also increased the range and speed of our Internet. It uses something called Network Assist to automatically adjust settings to give us the fastest possible Internet speed. Being a web designer, I’m always curious about what upload and download speed I’m getting and now I can do it straight from the app. Very cool stuff. And finally, I wanted to brag about how much more Wi-Fi range we get now. Depending on the size of your house you can buy multiple Wi-Fi points to eliminate dead zones. Our house is a little over 3500 square feet so we put three Wi-Fi points on each end of the house and one in the middle. Wi-Fi for days! We used to have sections of our house that were too far from the router so the signal was weaker, now I can get signal all the way out to our camping trailer 30 feet from our house. Sometimes I use this trailer as an escape pod to write a blog post or edit a video. I never really got reliable Internet when I was out there before but now it’s solid.
If you have kids using the Internet you should really think about getting a Google Wi-Fi. Even though Google sponsored this post, it still doesn’t change how I feel about Google Wi-Fi. I totally recommend it.
If you want to learn more about Google Wifi click here
Would love to try this out, looks awesome! That price tag is steep, but I’m sure it is worth it. Thanks for the detailed overview.
It can be a really good solution about the internet. My daughter already can not spend a day without the Internet (she is 6 years old). She doesn’t surf the net or sth like that but she wants to watch cartoons and videos on Youtube all the time.
Sounds great, will be checking this out further. My eldest (19) is probably past the age of needing to be monitored, but we now have a 5 year old at home. We previously got through the teenage years without parental controls. I always found they created more problems than they solved and often blocked sites she needed access to for school projects. However, in those days, we needed a dongle to access wifi, and the assumption was always that there was a problem with the dongle. Not strictly true! If she didn’t come for dinner when I called, I would unplug the router, then plug it in again… while it was resetting the interruption would be long enough for her to come and ask me to fix it. The answer was always “OK, I’ll take a look after dinner”…
I think the ease of the internet is a blessing and a curse. My little guy, 3 can navigate Youtube WAYYYYY to well for being 3. We try to limit screen time to only when we are driving but I am still a bit nervous as he gets older. I would like to think that when TVs first came out people had the same worry. What are your thoughts?
Cool, now I’m looking into Google wifi. We get anout 750k upload on our DSL out in the sticks. It hurts. Anyways, good to know. We don’t use filtering (so far). We do have accountability software in general so we can keep things in check. Also, the Microsoft Family account stuff is good so far. I see which computer gets used, what sites are visited, etc. I just whitelist only. There’s like only 13 sites my kids can access, and most are for homeschool stuff. Thanks for sharing.