The Internet offers several websites and services to read, listen to, or watch. Without supervision and proper filters, your kids may get exposed to adult sites inadvertently. You can adjust parental controls on popular video streaming sites to safeguard your kids from mature content. But it’s crucial to create a safer and more comfortable browsing experience for the younger members of your family.
There are two ways to block adult sites at home – device-level and network-level. The device-level method works fine when you share your Windows PC or Mac with kids. Meanwhile, you can employ a network-level block to cover all devices, even those of the guests.
Blocking Adult Sites With Qustodio on Windows and Mac
You can always create a separate child account on your devices and manage the time spent, screen time, and even digital purchase permissions. You can use an extension or a different user profile for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Mozilla Firefox. However, kids are smart enough to find a workaround, and you wouldn’t want to risk forgetting to switch, either.
Qustodio is a highly-rated parental control software that works on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Chromebook, and Kindle. The free version provides web filtering by blocking adult websites, screen time monitoring with limits, and even activity reports. After signing up, you can get these features free for three days. After that, the paid plan costs $55 for up to five devices or $100 for unlimited devices annually.
Before you start, we recommend signing up for a free parent account on the Qustodio website. Here’s how to get started:
1. Install the Qustodio software on your computer.
2. While installing Qustodio on your child’s device, check the box next to Hide Qustodio on this device. The software will then run quietly in the background and not appear in the system tray or start menu.
3. Enter the Child’s basic details like age and gender to proceed and finish the installation. Next, head to the Qustodio Family page to set browsing and other activity rules on your child’s device.
Visit the Qustodio Family Site
4. On your Qustodio Family page, click on your child’s account icon and choose Rules from the left sidebar.
5. Click on Web Filtering to access the categories of websites you want to allow or block for your child’s account.
6. By default, Qustodio blocks potentially dangerous website categories like pornography, mature content, proxies, gambling, etc. Click the three horizontal dots icon next to the category name and choose whether to block it or alert you when your kid tries to access it.
You can even block access to YouTube in the browser if your child is addicted or tends to spend a lot of hours on it.
Under Rules, the Games and Apps section can notify you whenever the child uses an app or game for the first time. Later, you can allow or block a particular app or game.
While Qustodio runs quietly in the background, it logs your child’s activity on the device on which it is installed. Later, you can either block a potential website or streaming service entirely.
Block Adult Sites at Network-Level for Windows and Mac
A practical and hassle-free solution is to use a third-party DNS service with built-in filters and a content-blocking mechanism. That way, you can block adult websites at the router level. Merely changing the DNS server other than the one assigned by your ISP can provide better speeds and a safer browsing experience. The NextDNS can block adult websites and also bar other categories like Online Gaming, Piracy, Dating, and Gambling.
Firstly, visit the NextDNS official site and create a free account. Note that the free account can offer up to 300k queries per month. After that, the service will work, but stop blocking specific queries. A paid NextDNS account will cost you $20 annually and that’s a fair price to pay for blocking adult websites, security threads, trackers, and also use it as a firewall for home network.
Note: You’ll need to know your router’s IP address to open its admin interface in a web browser. It’s quite similar to changing the DNS servers on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer.
After that, follow these steps:
1. On the Setup tab of NextDNS page, you’ll find the Linked IP addresses of the DNS servers.
2. Open your router’s admin interface in another browser tab. Head to the WAN or Internet Settings page to look for Domain Name Server Addresses.
3. Select the option to add DNS addresses manually and type the DNS server IP addresses listed on the NextDNS Setup page.
45.90.28.148
45.90.30.1484. Hit the Apply button to implement changes to your router.
5. Head to the NextDNS Setup tab and click on Parental Controls tab. From there, enable the toggles for these three options – Enable SafeSearch, Enforce YouTube Restricted Mode, and Block Bypass Methods. With these enabled, you child won’t accidentally stumble into suspicious links, can watch YouTube for kids, and can’t use VPNs or Tor to get around the DNS.
6. On the Parental Control tab, click on Add Category button. Then, add Porn and all other categories you want to block on your network.
After that, you can open another web browser tab to check whether your router correctly uses the new IP addresses for DNS. You may also try opening specific sites (if you know any) from the blocked category to see if they open. Your browser will throw an error if it can’t open the site. That means NextDNS is working fine.
Comprehensive Blocking Is the Best Way
Typically, the default parental controls of Windows and Mac are decent, but they might work against smarter kids. Hence, it’s a good idea to try Qustodio or other parental control software to enable safer browsing. For complete peace of mind, you can always use a combination of parental control software and custom DNS service to cover all kinds of devices.
