Limit Screentime with Koalasafe - Part 2 The Downside

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and this is the second and last video about my experience using the KoalaSafe router to limit screentime and filter content for my kids. If you haven't already, you should watch Part I where I discuss how Koalasafe works and why it's fantastic. In this second part, I'm going to talk about some of the drawbacks and enumerate some of the infinitely creative workarounds my son has employed. 

I've been using KoalaSafe for just about a year now to help enforce rules that were theoretically already in place.  Obviously, the rules weren't being enforced well since after installing it, I practically had a family insurrection on my hands.  My kids were furious.  And the level of conflict and stress in the house rose exponentially for 2-3 weeks. My husband was traveling a ton at that time or else he might have just chosen to sleep at the office. It was brutal. 

Just to recap from Part I, I keep homework mode on all the time, which allows general browser use, iMessaging, and Facetime. My kids get 30 minutes of free screen time during the school week if their chores are finished and no more than 10 minutes per hour to respond to Snapchats if requested. Other than that, they have to earn screentime by doing productive things like reading, walking the dog or practicing tennis serves.  Weekends are a little more unstructured, but you get the idea. 

Before KoalaSafe, my kids relied heavily on my inevitable loss of focus or my leaving the house to use as much screentime as possible.  After KoalaSafe, no dice. The rules were the rules. Cue -- the insurrection. Probably the biggest issue for them was the difference in the /amount of screentime/ allowed before and after KoalaSafe, but there were other issues. 

For one thing, they were worried about /friends/ coming over. My son was in middle school and making lots of new friends whom he was keen on NOT alienating by limiting their screentime when they were at our house.  This sounded reasonable to me, so I tried to figure out how to make this happen. There was NO WAY i was going to give their friends the password to the adult wifi since obviously a good friend would leak that info immediately back to my kids.  Fortunately, KoalaSafe has a profile created called Everyone Else. When someone new, that Koala doesn't recognize,  logs onto the Koala wifi, it dumps them by default into the Everyone Else profile. I just set that profile up with primary mode always on and with very few restrictions. They have access to all social media, video streaming, gaming, etc. The only restrictions I kept were the adult content filtering. And remember, if you've seen my video on OpenDNS, you have to use KoalaSafe DNS servers, which don't filter by default, so make sure you keep the settings on to filter unsavory content. 

So that solved one issue, but then we had problems getting the /filters/ right. KoalaSafe was blocking websites they needed for school work. Or blocking gaming apps that I permitted. In some cases I needed to change the basic settings from High to Medium and then needed to play with the categories.  I also had to remember to apply these changes to both kids filters. 

The other thing I realized was that sometimes games were permitted in homework mode that I didn't want to be permitted. I had to figure out how to block those.  I needed to sleuth a little to figure out the URLs that the games were using to put them on the blocked list. 

Sometimes our KoalaSafe router would just /stop working./ Or stop letting the kids connect to the Internet. Usually I could restart the router and that would fix things, but sometimes it took more doing or more time and that caused a lot of frustration on the part of my kids. I was able to work around those by temporarily logging them into the main wifi and then forcing their devices to forget the network when KoalaSafe came back online. 

The other irritation is that the /signal strength/ of the Koalasafe wifi is not as strong as our original wifi. I tried to hook it up to a network extender and managed to get it working for a time, but KEEPING it working took more networking know-how than I possessed, so we make heavy use of headphones since we are all in the same area. I don't mind this drawback, frankly.  Our house is not enormous, but we do have 3 levels and I'm fine with the signal not being as good in the dark corners of our house. 

Okay -- we got through 3 weeks of hell working out the kinks and getting used to actual rule enforcement. And that is when the hacking and workarounds began. 

My son, who is a sweet and hilarious boy, has the mind of a miniature criminal. He will lie right to my face with zero qualms -- particularly about Koalasafe, which he views as a violation of his teenage rights. I keep a little perspective here and try not to get too outraged at his antics. After all, literally all of his friends have what we call Free Screentime every minute of the day without asking permission.  He's not trying to access bad sites or spend money -- he just wants to watch more of The Office than I want him to.

So, let me just take you through the litany of workarounds that he has attempted in order to thwart the system. 

• Sometimes I leave my iPad or iPhone out and the screen is still open.  Whoo hooo!  It's like leaving the door wide open and putting out the welcome mat. He has turned on Parent Mode indefinitely (that is access with no filter and no restrictions). He has changed his schedule to have Primary mode internet access at all times during the day. He has changed his Homework mode filter to allow Netflix, YouTube and Snapchat. And these have all happened on different occasions and multiple times.  It usually doesn't take long before I catch him -- maybe a day or 2 -- but it requires hyper vigilance. 
• He has somehow managed to figure out the password to the original wifi. SUCH a pain in the butt since I then need to change the password and then reconnect ALL of the like 19 devices attached to it. I blame my husband and his lax security. 
• He had his phone replaced due to a defect and it took me a couple of days to realize that he had full Internet access until I put his new phone into the right profile.
• He downloaded some VPN workaround apps that work for the wifi network at school, but not for the KoalaSafe wifi. 
• He logged off of KoalaSafe and used cellular access only to stream video. YIKES. He got charged $70 that month for the cellular data overage, but that was not sustainable, so I limited his data use through our internet provider to only 1.5GB per month.  I have a video about that coming soon. 
• Then he was routinely logging onto my cell phone's hotspot while I was sleeping or not aware. And running up MY cellular data use. It took me a while and at least one month's crazy data bill to figure out what he was doing. This is still problematic since Apple has this annoying thing where any device that shares an Apple ID can log into a hotspot without a password.  Basically, he gets major punishment if he does this since I can't prevent it from happening. 

Just this morning I'm trying to figure out how he managed to watch Netflix for an hour last night without asking for access.  It's exhausting, but keeps me on my toes for sure.  And I know, based on his personality, that it is better to have limits -- at least right now until he develops better self control and work habits. 

So, there it is. I felt compelled to tell you that implementing KoalaSafe was not all sunshine and rainbows. We had a tough adjustment period and keeping on top of the myriad ways to game the system has been challenging to say the least. All that to say, I still love KoalaSafe as a method of enforcing screentime rules, limiting arguments and making Internet access a reward rather than a given.   I would do it all again -- but I'm glad I don't have to!

Leave questions, experiences and thoughts in the comments section. And thanks for watching!