Managing parental controls with eero Plus content filters

While the internet is an invaluable source of education, entertainment and communication, parents must ensure a secure online environment for their children. Multiple online threats, including inappropriate content, online predators and excessive screen time, make monitoring home network traffic more critical.

Fortunately, eero’s parental control settings offer solutions to manage internet access with features such as:

• Content filters (via eero Secure and eero Plus) to block access to inappropriate websites.
• Family profile management for personalized restrictions per profile.
• Time management to monitor and track screen time.
• Real-time threat blocking.
• Ad-blocking capabilities to block unnecessary ads.

Read more: Is eero Plus worth it?

Global CyberSecurity Forum published a report in 2022 that found that  72% of children globally have experienced some type of cyber threat. As internet access grows, implementing parental controls is essential to minimize children’s exposure to harmful content while fostering healthy internet habits.

eero’s parental control features let parents filter content, set screen time limits and monitor online activities. Some of the parental control features include:

Through the eero mobile app, parents can create and manage individual user profiles to apply age-appropriate personalized settings and restrictions.

For example, young children’s profiles can have content filters to block explicit content and limit screen time. In contrast, teenagers’ profiles can have limited access to social media while enabling SafeSearch for filtered search results.

Parents can then monitor their children’s real-time activity via the Activity tab. This dashboard reports daily and weekly time spent online, the apps and sites visited and blocked attempts when a child tries to access restricted content.

Content filtering lets parents block specific websites automatically by applying pre-set filters for age-appropriate restrictions (pre-K, pre-teen or teen) or manually filtering content based on various categories. These categories include:

• Adult content
• Illegal or criminal activities
• Violent content
• Social media
• Streaming services
• Chat and messaging
• Games
• Streaming platforms
• Shopping

The content filtering feature also enables SafeSearch and YouTube Restricted Mode for all profile-associated devices, automatically filtering out explicit content in search results.

Parents can set screen time limits for their children’s profiles, ensuring they don’t overuse the screens when it’s time for homework, bedtime or family time.

They can also set scheduled pauses at designated times, whereby they manually pause WiFi access for specific devices, for example:

• Homework mode: Pauses internet access for two or three hours when it’s time to study.
• Dinner time pauses: Ensures kids are not distracted during meals.
• Bedtime mode: Prevents late-night internet scrolling or gaming sessions that can interfere with sleep.

Beyond parental controls, eero Secure and eero Plus provide additional security features that maximize the security of your home network. These extra features include:

Parents can allow or block individual sites on the network or specific profiles that content filters might otherwise miss based on their category. By entering the URLs of the websites, they have more control over which sites their children can or cannot access.

Additionally, parents can block or allow access to individual apps per profile. They can search for the app or select from a list of apps to block or allow.

eero Secure and eero Plus provide active real-time threat protection to secure your home WiFi by blocking access to known malicious sites and protecting users from phishing attacks, scams or malware. eero Plus provides Malwarebytes, an anti-malware feature that scans and removes malware, viruses, spyware and ransomware from connected devices in real-time.

Ad block lets parents block ads on connected devices, reducing the risk of children encountering and clicking on malicious ads that could pose security threats. The ad-blocking feature also improves the browsing experience by minimizing distracting ads and improving website load times.