Many parents have likely given up on trying to use parental controls to limit the content that their children see online. Seriously, there are so many possible avenues your children can use to get to the Internet, you probably think that It’s nearly impossible to protect them from the huge amount of crap that is out there available for them to access.

Stop them on their computer and they’ll just use their game console, lock that down and they’ll use the browser on their iPod Touch.

Kids almost take it personally when you try to put up a parental control road block. They think of it as a personal challenge. They want to prove that they are smarter and more technically inclined than their dumb old Luddite parents.   

So, what’s a parent to do to protect their children in this day and age of uber-tech-savvy kids who can run circles around their parents in the digital realm?

Face the Facts. Some bad stuff will always get through

While we would love to keep every curse word and lewd image away from our kids eyes and ears, you have to face the fact that no parental control, no matter how sophisticated, is going to keep all of the bad stuff at bay 100% all of the time. It’s just not going to happen and you need to accept this.

Once you’ve accepted this fact, then you will realize that its all about limiting inappropriate content as much as possible, and educating your kids on what not to do while they're on the Internet.

Cast Your Net Wide – Parental Controls Start at The Router

Since your child may use 3 to 5 different devices to access the Internet, you'll want to use a parental control technology that can protect at the network level rather than at the device level. Otherwise you will drive yourself mad trying to configure parental controls on each possible device that your child may use to access the Internet.

Check out our article: Parental Controls Start at the Router for details on how to implement parental controls that will help limit content no matter what devices your child uses to access the Internet with.

Pick a "Kid-safe" DNS Provider

Domain Name Servers (DNS) provide the glue that link together IP addresses and domain names. These servers do all the heavy lifting in the background when you visit a website on the Internet. They make it so you don’t have to remember a bazillion IP addresses and can instead traverse the Internet by using a domain name, such as About.com, rather than typing in a long string of numbers.

A lot of people don’t realize that they don’t have to use the DNS provider that their ISP automatically assigns to them. You can set your DNS provider to something else such as a public DNS or open DNS service.

Many freely-accessible public DNS providers will not only provide lookup services but also offer content filtering so that adult websites and other offensive material is pre-filtered by the DNS server. This doesn’t mean that a smart kid couldn’t just learn the adult site's IP address and type it directly in to a browser window, but it makes it much more of a pain in the butt for them to get to the site since it won’t perform the address lookup for them.

Check out: How to Improve Web Browsing Security and Speed by Using Alternative DNS Servers for more detailed information.

Turn Off The Internet At Bedtime

Many wireless Internet routers feature the ability to implement time-based access restrictions. You can turn this feature on and effectively sever your Internet connection between say midnight and 6am or whatever time you think your children have no business being on the Internet.

If you want the rules to only apply to the kids, you can create a Guest Network for them with the time-based restrictions while you use the regular wireless network (without restrictions). 

Using time-based restrictions also has the added bonus of preventing hackers from attacking your network during the restriction time frame, since you will be effectively isolated during those hours.