Parental control with Home Assistant: your options in 2026
DNS filtering, routers, Family Link or Nintendo integrations, a family platform: a tour of the ways to manage screens with Home Assistant, with their strengths and limits.
Managing the screens at home without handing everything to an online service is a question that keeps coming up among Home Assistant users. There is no single right answer, but several families of solutions that can be combined. Here is the tour, without bias.
1. Filter at the network level (DNS)
The simplest place to start. A filtering DNS server blocks unwanted domains (ads, tracking, malicious sites, adult content) for every device on the network.
- AdGuard Home is available as a Home Assistant add-on and shows up on the dashboard: you can switch filtering, or parental control, on and off from an automation.
- Pro: nothing to install on the devices.
- Limits: it can be bypassed if a device uses another DNS or a VPN, and it does not measure time spent. It cannot tell who is using the device either.
2. Use the router
Many routers have their own parental controls (time ranges, cutting access per device). Some Home Assistant integrations expose them as switches, for instance for FRITZ!Box, UniFi networks or GL.iNet routers.
- Pro: cut internet access to a device from an automation (“no console after 9 pm”).
- Limits: all or nothing. The device still works offline, and you cannot pick one app over another.
3. Drive the vendors' own tools
Platforms have their own parental controls, and the community connects them to Home Assistant:
- a community integration for Google Family Link (locking, schedules, time bonuses);
- an integration for Nintendo Switch parental controls.
- Pro: fine-grained, app-level control.
- Limits: each platform has its own rules, and the account stays with the vendor. Managing one shared time budget across phone, console and PC quickly gets complicated.
4. Build your own
With a few sensors and automations, you can measure a PC's screen time, get notified when a limit is reached, or lock a session. On the French-speaking HACF forum, for example, a member shared a combination of a DNS allowlist in AdGuard and screen-time limits on a Linux PC.
- Pro: a solution tailored to your home.
- Limits: time to invest, and a setup you maintain yourself.
5. A family platform, with parental control as one module
This is the path taken by Vision, a Soprez project: a family platform that lives inside Home Assistant. It turns the TV into the home screen and music player of the house, puts widgets on phones, and offers modules you switch on or off. Parental control is one of them: the same per-person rules on Windows PCs, Android phones and Android TVs (time ranges, categories, time requests approved by an adult). All with no account and no cloud. Vision is being polished; the roadmap shows where it stands.
Which approach should you pick?
| Need | Simplest option |
|---|---|
| Block dangerous sites for the whole house | DNS filtering |
| Cut internet at a set time | Router |
| Manage a single type of device | Vendor tool |
| Same rules on PC, phone and TV, locally | Family platform with a parental-control module |
In most homes, DNS filtering is a useful base, whatever comes next.
One last piece of advice, which no tool replaces: explain the rules and let them evolve with age. Parental control supports the conversation; it does not replace it.