> give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools

The problem is that it's bloody hard to actually do this. I'm in a war with my 7yo about youtube; the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can watch.

Well, after many successful months of DNS block, he discovered proxies. After blocking enough of those to dissuade him, he discovered Firefox DNS-over-HTTPS, making it basically impossible to block him without blocking every Cloudflare IP or something. Would love to be wrong about that, but it seems like even just blocking a site is basically impossible without putting nanny-ware right on his machine; and that's only a bootable Linux USB stick away from being removed unless I lock down the BIOS and all that, and at that point it's not his computer and the rules of engagement have been voided.

For now I'm just using "policy" to stop him, but IMO the tools that parents have are weak unless you just want your kid to be an iPad user and never learn how a computer works at all.

As a parent of young children, this is your entire problem:

> the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can watch.

You're treating this as a technical problem, not a parental rules problem. Your own rules say he's allowed to watch!

You have to set the expectations and enforce it as a parent.

The obvious solution would be TLS interception and protocol whitelisting. Same as corporate IT. Stick the kids' devices on a separate vLAN if you don't want to catch all the other devices in the crossfire.

Still, there's an awful lot of excellent educational content on YouTube. It seems unfortunate to block access to that. Have you considered self hosting an alternative frontend for it?

Sounds like a smart kid, is part of you secretly proud of him for his tenacity?

Is it impractical to keep an eye on what he's doing on his computer, i.e. physically checking in on him from time to time?

How about holding him responsible for his own behavior, to develop respect for the rules you impose? Is it just hopeless, and if so how come? Is it impossible for him to understand why you don't want him watching certain content or why he should care about being worthy of your trust?

I'm not judging here, I'm genuinely curious.

I remember when I was a kid that age there were rules and some were technically enforced. But if you found a way around the technical enforcement you were in huge trouble. The equivalent here would he been, if you used a proxy to watch what you weren't meant to, then you lose all screen time indefinitely. Sneaking around parents' rules was absolutely not on.

Putting controls on the machine you want to restrict is pretty normal. While I agree with your first sentence that it's hard for parents to get proper monitoring tools, the rest of this sounds like a self-imposed problem. If you don't want to mess with the actual machine then run a proxy it has to use.