The list gets longer every month and the afternoons do not get any better.
What is actually happening
A blocklist is a list of things you have already been annoyed by. That is not a criticism of your list, it is the definition of the thing: it can only contain sites that have already been seen, named and typed in. Everything else on the internet is permitted, by default, until it has come to your attention personally.
Look at the arithmetic from both sides. You have to name every distraction in advance. Your child has to find one you did not. Those are not comparable jobs, and the second one takes about eleven seconds.
The supply is the part parents underestimate. Browser game portals in particular are built to be replaced: a domain appears, gets popular, gets blocked in schools, and reopens on a new one with the same games. Any given site has mirrors on hostnames you have never seen, and there is no upper limit on how many there can be. This is not a conspiracy against you. It is what happens when a whole category of site is optimised for being reachable from a school laptop.
Then there is the silence. Your blocker tells you when it stops something. Nothing anywhere tells you about the site it let through, because from the tool's point of view nothing happened — a page was requested, it was not on the list, it loaded. So the failures are invisible and the successes are visible, and your impression of how well the list is working is built entirely out of the half you can see.
Try this. Take the last three sites you added and ask yourself how you found out about each one. If the answer is "I walked past" or "I looked at the history", then your list is not a filter. It is a record of what you have happened to catch.
The three places this goes wrong
1. You are naming individual sites when the problem is a category. Fifteen entries for fifteen game portals is fifteen entries that do not cover the sixteenth. The thing you actually mean is "not games this afternoon", which no list of names can express.
2. The rule is on all day, so it has to be lenient. A permanent block has to survive homework, a lesson, a Saturday and a school holiday, so it ends up covering only the two or three sites nobody can argue about. Everything genuinely borderline stays off the list, because banning it forever is too big a decision to make on a Tuesday.
3. Nothing about the list ever expires. Sites you blocked two years ago are still there. Sites that renamed themselves are still there under the old name, doing nothing. The list grows, its accuracy falls, and neither of those facts is visible from looking at it.
How to make it hold
Invert it. Instead of naming what is shut, name what is open, and only for a while.
In Parentech a program is a name, a length or a daily window, and the two or three sites it allows. While it is running, those sites open and nothing else does — including the site that first appeared this morning, because it was never on the list and it never had to be. A schedule starts and ends on the clock, on the days you choose, with nobody at the computer to start it, and your kid gets a one-minute notice on whatever page is open so it is not a surprise. Afterwards, everything comes back on its own.
Keep the never-open list too, and keep it short. It is the right tool for the handful of sites the answer is always no to. It is the wrong tool for "not during homework", which is a window.
The difference is that a new site appearing in the world changes an allowlist not at all. It was never named, so it was never allowed.
The part that needs you not to be there
Windows do their work at a specific time of day, and it is almost never a time you are free. Four to six, or half three to half five, is exactly the stretch when somebody is home and it is not you.
A schedule runs itself, which is most of the answer. The rest of the answer is what happens when the plan meets a real week. The maths site turns out to need a second address before the homework can start. There is a lesson today that was not there yesterday. It is somebody's birthday and the rule should be off. Every one of those is a thirty-second change that has to happen while you are somewhere else, or it does not happen at all.
That is your phone: sign in at parentech.app, edit what the window allows, start or end a session, open one site for an hour, and it reaches the computer within half a minute.
Straight about the money. All of it works free on one computer, set at that computer with your PIN. The family plan adds your phone, the other computers, and a different set of rules on each. One laptop and you usually in the room, and the free version is the whole product.
What this still does not reach
- A phone or a tablet. Parentech guards Chrome on the computer it is installed on.
- A desktop app already installed. Shutting the website does not close a program that is already on the machine.
- A second browser. The answer there is a standard account on the computer without administrator rights, not a longer list.
Questions parents ask
Do I have to throw the blocklist away?
No. Keep it for the sites the answer is always no to, where it does its job well. Add windows for the times when the real rule is about the hour rather than about the site.
What if the window blocks something they genuinely need?
Add it to the program's list, from the computer or from your phone, and it opens straight away. That is a much smaller decision than deciding whether to ban something forever.
How is a scheduled window different from a class session?
Same thing with a clock attached. A session is started by hand and runs for a length; a schedule is the same program starting itself at the time you set, on the days you pick.
If this is happening to you, one of these usually is too
It worked last month, now it does not · Blocking at the router misses the page · Account controls do not reach inside the browser
The window itself: Set a schedule. Free on one computer — what it costs to change it from wherever you are.