And yet the evenings keep telling you a different story, and you cannot find the seam.
What is actually happening
Look for a pause button. Almost every blocker has one, usually written as a kindness — "pause for 15 minutes", "snooze", a switch on the toolbar icon. It exists because the adult who installed it wants to get past their own rule occasionally, and it works exactly as well for anybody else using that computer.
The important property is not that the pause exists. It is that it leaves no trace. The tool does not write down that it was paused, does not tell you afterwards, and comes back on looking untouched. So the state you observe, every single time you look, is the state it returns to.
That produces a very specific kind of madness. You test it and it works. You conclude the tool is fine. You then have to explain the evidence some other way, and the explanations available to you are all wrong: they are on it more than you thought, they are using a phone, the site got past the filter somehow. None of those is true, and you will spend a fortnight on them before you check the one thing that would show you.
The second half is timing. A rule does not need to be off for long to be useless. Two hours between school and you getting home, four days a week, is eight hours a week with nothing running, and it is the eight hours you were most worried about. It goes back on before you are through the door, because the return is the part they are careful about.
Here is the check, and it takes a minute. Open the tool and find out whether it can be switched off or paused at all, and whether anything asks for a code when you do it. Then look for any kind of record — a log, a history, a timestamp of the last change. If the switch is free and the record does not exist, you now know both that it can happen and that you would never see it.
The three places this goes wrong
1. The off switch is not behind anything. A pause you can reach in one click from the toolbar is not a feature your child needs to defeat. It is a feature they use. Whatever you run has to demand something they do not have before it changes state.
2. The tool has no memory. Even a locked blocker that quietly forgets what it did leaves you guessing. You want a rule that is either on or asks for a PIN to stop being on, so there is no third state you cannot see.
3. Every fix requires you to be at that desk. This is the one that turns a small problem into a permanent one. If putting the rule back means physically going to the computer, then the rule is off for exactly as long as you are away, and the failure repeats every single day at the same time.
How to make it hold
In Parentech there is no pause. There is a list, and there is your six-digit PIN. Turning a rule off, taking a site off the list, opening a blocked site or ending a class early all ask for the PIN, and the dashboard locks itself the moment it is closed, so an unlocked window from earlier is not lying around as a shortcut.
When a site genuinely should open for a while, that is a deliberate act rather than a switch: enter the PIN on the blocked page, choose fifteen minutes or an hour, and it shuts again by itself. Nobody has to remember to put it back, which matters, because nobody ever does.
Then close the last door underneath it. Give your child a standard account on the computer without administrator rights, so the extensions page is not an alternative to the pause button.
The part that needs you not to be there
Read the problem back to yourself: the rule is off when you are out. That sentence has your absence in it. It is not a detail of the failure, it is the definition of it.
Which means no setting made at that computer, by you, while standing there, can be the whole answer. The moment you leave, you are back to trusting the thing that already failed. What you need is the ability to act during the window you are missing.
That is your phone. Sign in at parentech.app, and from wherever you happen to be: lock the dashboard, close a site, open one for an hour because there is a reason today, check that the rules are the rules you think they are. Changes reach the computer within half a minute. Half three on a Tuesday stops being a blind spot and starts being a time you can reach.
Being straight about the money: everything above works free on one computer, changed at that computer with your PIN. What the family plan adds is reach — your phone, the second and third computer, and a different set of rules on each. If this page's problem is that you are not in the room, that is the part you are buying. If you are always in the room, use the free one.
What this still does not reach
- A phone or a tablet. Parentech guards Chrome on the computer it is installed on and nothing else on that desk.
- A child with administrator rights. They can remove the extension, and no extension can stop that. Do the account step.
- A second computer that was never set up. Rules are enforced where they are installed.
Questions parents ask
Is there a way to see that they turned it off?
There is no off switch to use, which is a better answer than a log. Every change needs the PIN, so the question becomes whether the PIN held, not whether a switch was flipped.
They will just ask me to unblock it every day.
Some will, for a couple of weeks. That is a conversation with an end to it, unlike the current arrangement, which is a rule that quietly stops existing every afternoon. You can also open a site for an hour from your phone without going home.
What if I am the one who needs it off for a bit?
Enter your PIN on the blocked page and choose fifteen minutes or an hour. It locks itself again afterwards, so a Saturday exception does not silently become the new rule.
If this is happening to you, one of these usually is too
They keep unblocking the site · They deleted the extension · The rules stop at the second laptop
More on how blocking works: Block websites. Free on one computer — what it costs once you need to reach it from somewhere else.