Home Network Protection Parental Controls Not Working

[Willdabeast3190]

I am trying to set up the Home Network Protection (By MacAfee) parental controls on my Fios router.  To do this, you have to use the My Fios App.  I have Home Network Protection enabled in the app, I have the children's profiles created in the app and all the filters / times the way I need them, but it shows all the devices connected to the router as "Offline" (grey dot) and No Active Devices as Online (green dot).  When I check the status of these devices on the router's gateway, they all show connected and all the devices have internet access.  When I add the offline devices to the children's profile, the filters do not work, because the App see's them as offline.  How can this be fixed so the filters work?

 

[Cang_Household]

I need to say that the HNP management through myFios App is slightly unwieldy to use. Are you able to manage through myVerizon website or directly through the router GUI (probably locked if you enable HNP)?

[Willdabeast3190]

I certainly wish the router's parental controls automatically blocked certain content without having to add every word / phrase under the sun.

[Cang_Household]

There's free DNS filter service for category-based blocking. You can look into OpenDNS by Cisco if you are interested. You can either configure DNS filtering at the network level or go to each device to configure.

The down side of all DNS filtering is that anyone who memorizes the IP of the site can directly type in the IP to reach the site without ever conducting a DNS lookup. I hope your children don't see this. There's also free ways to block the Internet based on the time of the day, but there's also ways to circumvent. 

I would not rely on technical implementations to do parenting.

I am barely out of teenagers years, so I probably lack credibility in terms of parenting. 

[gs0b · Accepted solution]

I use(d) OpenDNS in my home.  I configured the router to use OpenDNS's servers, then set the content filters on the OpenDNS site.  Worked great when my kids where young.

It can be easily circumvented by configuring devices to use another DNS server or, as cang_household described, going directly to a site's IP address.  But doing that requires a level of networking skill and knowledge that takes time and effort to develop.  If any of my kids had figured out these (or other) workarounds, I would have been half proud and half mad.  By the time they got to late teen years, I figured it didn't matter much as they were approaching adulthood and were capable of making their own decisions about content.

But yea, technology should be considered an aid to parenting, not a replacement.