Every parent of a remote-schooled kid has watched the same thing happen. The lesson starts on Google Meet. Ten minutes in, there is a second tab. By the time you walk past, the lesson is a small window in the corner and YouTube has the rest of the screen.
The obvious fix is to block YouTube. It does not work, and it is worth understanding why before you spend a weekend on it.
A blocklist is out of date the moment you write it
Blocking youtube.com takes about four seconds. Then it is TikTok, then a browser game hosted on a domain you have never heard of, then a Discord web client, then whatever a classmate shares in the chat.
You are playing a game you cannot win, because you have to name every distraction in advance and your child only has to find one you missed.
Invert it. During the class, name the two or three sites the class actually needs and block everything else. A whitelist does not go stale. A new site appearing in the world changes nothing, because it was never on the list.
Most blockers break the sign-in you need
Here is the trap almost every parent hits next, and it is subtle enough that it looks like the extension is simply broken.
Blocking a domain usually blocks its subdomains too. That sounds right until you notice that signing in to a Google account walks the browser through hosts that have nothing to do with the site you wanted. Blocking youtube.com can stop you signing in to Gmail, because Google's multi-account sign-in passes through accounts.youtube.com on the way.
So the child cannot join the class with their school account, the parent assumes the software is broken, and the whole thing gets uninstalled.
Any blocker worth using has to make an exception for sign-in endpoints while still blocking the content. If yours does not, you will find out at 9am on a school morning.
Blocking is only half of it
A block tells you nothing. It stops one page load and leaves you exactly as informed as you were before — which is to say, guessing.
The question you actually want answered at the end of a lesson is not "was YouTube blocked" but "did the lesson happen". Those are different questions:
- How much of the 45 minutes was spent on the class?
- How long was nobody at the screen at all?
- How many times did attention leave?
That last one matters more than parents expect. Four minutes away as a single bathroom break is a fine lesson. Four minutes as eight thirty-second flickers is a child who never settled once. A stopwatch cannot tell those apart, and neither can a blocklist.
What to look for
If you are choosing a tool for this, the short checklist:
- Allowlist, not blocklist — you name what is permitted for the session.
- Session-scoped — it turns itself off when the lesson ends, so nobody has to remember.
- Sign-in still works — test by signing out of Google entirely and back in with the block active.
- Catches tabs that are already open — a blocker that only intercepts new navigations leaves the YouTube tab from before the lesson untouched.
- PIN protected — otherwise it is a suggestion, not a boundary.
- Tells you what happened — a report you can look at afterwards, not just a wall.
What we built
OnTask is our answer to exactly this. You name the class, set how long it runs, and list the sites it needs. Everything else stops opening until the session ends, tabs already parked on something else get pulled in, and afterwards you get a report of time on task, time away and every site turned away.
It is free while it is in beta, it runs entirely on your device, and it sends nothing anywhere.