One solution for controlling your child's access to the Internet at home assumes that you already have a wireless network, perhaps provided by your Internet service provider's equipment.

In this scenario, you would purchase and install a third-party wireless router, creating a second wireless network for your home. You then remove your children's ability to connect their devices to your main home wireless network and instead connect them to this new, second network. In this way, you can absolutely control your children's Internet access by physically disconnecting the second router from your Internet provider's equipment.

In addition to the ability to pull the plug on the second network, a 3rd party router can be configured with much more fine-grained controls. For example, you can configure the router to use OpenDNS for filtering, so that any device connected to that router is filtered. Most routers also give you the ability to configure time restrictions for all Internet access or even tailor restrictions to specific devices, allowing different rules to apply to different devices.

The documentation for any wireless router you purchase will detail how to configure the various settings yourself, and all major vendors have websites with support resources. They want to make this process as easy as possible!