How to Monitor and Filter Your Kids’ Internet Activity
Last edited: 2025-05-29 15:24:45
Living in this digital age can be difficult for parents. There is a high risk that the internet will bring up your children; therefore, monitoring their activity is important. In this guide, I will walk you through how you can monitor and block your kids’ internet activity using AdGuard DNS.
AdGuard DNS – How it Works
To achieve a monitoring system, we will be using AdGuard DNS, a service provided by AdGuard, which allows you to create your own custom DNS server. A DNS server is like a phone book for the internet, translating human-readable website names (like google.com) into numeric IP addresses that computers use to locate and connect to websites. Since we will be creating our own DNS server, we will be able to look at all the internet activity on this server. By manually configuring your kids’ devices to use your DNS server, you will be able to monitor all their activity, whether they are at home, school, or any other place. Sign up for the free trial on AdGuard DNS, and I will walk you through all the steps.
Creating an AdGuard DNS Server
First, we will be creating our own custom DNS server. So, in the dashboard’s left menu, go to the servers tab.
When you are on the Servers tab, click on “Create server”.
Then give your server a name, I will name mine “Tutorial”, and then hit “Save”.
Configuring AdGuard DNS Server for Parental Controls
Once you have created your DNS server, we will configure it for parental controls. By clicking on your new server in the server menu, you will be directed to its settings page. AdGuard has already provided us with good parental control capabilities, so let’s enable it:
Here we can enable YouTube restricted mode so that explicit videos containing nudity, swearing, violence, etc. YouTube restricted mode also disables YouTube comments.
We can also do things like scheduling. You schedule when the parental control should be turned off.
Parental Control on Video Games Using AdGuard DNS
AdGuard has also added a big list of popular services that you can block from:
As you can see, you can block things like “Blizzard Entertainment”, “League of Legends”, “Battle.net”, “Epic Games”, “FIFA”, etc. If you do not know, these are video games or video game launchers. So, you can also limit your kids’ gaming. You could, for example, set up this with scheduling so your children cannot do any online gaming in the middle of the night. One caveat here, since AdGuard DNS only targets internet activity, it cannot block offline games, for example, Mario Kart on the Nintendo Switch.
AdGuard DNS Custom Website Blocking List
Blocking specific websites (or whitelisting/unblocking them) is also possible. You can do this under “User rules” in your server’s settings menu.
By adding a new rule, you have a user-friendly way of adding websites to the block list, which looks like this:
But you can also open a text editor where you have more freedom in creating your block list, you can see that I have blocked youtube.com.
AdGuard has an intricate syntax for setting up your block list (you can find their documentation here). I have also written some examples and a strategy for setting up blocking lists in my tutorial on setting up AdGuard Home (free open-source DNS filtering for your router). Things you can do with AdGuard’s block list syntax are:
- Whitelisting
- Keyword matching
- Subdomain blocking
- Blocking for a specific user
And several other ways, so check out the two resources above. Since you have ultimate freedom here, you can, of course, block online video games this way also. You might not find the game your child plays in the service list we went through above, but if you figure out which domains are connected to the video game, you can block it here. I will show below, when we go through the “Query log”, how you figure out what domains to block.
Connecting Devices to the AdGuard DNS Server
The last step in our setup is adding devices to the DNS server. So, click on “Connect device” (found on the dashboard page) to add one of your kids’ devices.
Here you will be prompted about what kind of device you want to add. For example, if you choose to add a Mac, then AdGuard will provide you with different ways to connect the device:
You can use AdGuard’s app, which is easy for you to set up. However, if your kid has basic computer skills, the app could easily be uninstalled. To counter this, you could use apps that make uninstallation difficult, You can check out my guide on parental controls on Android or my article on whether you should do parental controls on your kid’s devices or just on your home network router. These two articles will give some strategies to prevent your child from bypassing the DNS server.
Another possibility for connecting your child’s device is to do it manually. This is a bit trickier than using the AdGuard app, but since it is also trickier to set up, it is also trickier to disable. So, if your kids know how to uninstall apps, this might be the preferred configuration for you. Connecting manually is different for each type of device (Max, Windows, Android, iOS, etc.), but fortunately, AdGuard has provided you with a step-by-step guide for each type of device.
Monitoring Your Kids’ Internet Activity in AdGuard DNS
Now you should have created a server and connected your children’s devices to it. So now we start to monitor their internet activity. By clicking on “Query log” in the dashboard menu, we can see the activity live.
In the Query log, we can have some filtering options. I, for example, have chosen to monitor the device “Android” (you should probably use a smarter naming convention, for example, “Sarah’s iPhone” or “Liam’s computer”). Now we can see all the recent internet activity on the “Android” device. Here you can see that I tried accessing YouTube, but since I blocked it earlier, I can’t enter the website. We can also see that I had the Spotify app open, that it made some requests, and that it is not blocked, so I can still listen to music.
We can also filter on types to see if someone has tried to access a blocked website/service by filtering by status, or if you have multiple servers, you can filter for a specific one.
The Query log is also great to figure out what to block, since you can see what domain was accessed at what time. Let’s say you want to block an online video game. Well, if you know at what time your child was playing this game, you can filter for the device the video game was played on and look for the domains (the “Request” column) associated with the video game. Then you can click on the three dots and choose to block it.
Statistics of Children’s Internet Activity in AdGuard DNS
In the “Statistics” tab, you can get a more general overview of your kids’ activity. Here, you can see by the hour if a device tried to access a blocked service.
You can also see other things, such as top domains, in other words, where on the internet your kid spends most time.
Warning Signs Children Bypassing Parental Control
Now you know how to monitor internet activity, but how can you figure out if your kid is bypassing your monitors and blocks? Well, one obvious tell is that if you look at your kid’s internet statistics and no requests have been made when you know your child has been using his or her device, then the DNS server has most likely been bypassed. So, in what ways could your kid have bypassed the DNS server, and what can you do to prohibit this?
Possible Bypasses Around Parental Control
As already mentioned above in the part on how to connect the devices, you had a couple of options in doing so. If you went with the AdGuard app option, then your kid could have uninstalled the app. If you went with the manual option, then your kid could have found the place where this configuration is set up. So we need to block them from removing the DNS server configurations. There are also other ways to bypass the AdGuard DNS server. I will be compiling a document with different bypasses and how to stop them behind a paywall (it could be your kid reading this for free, getting suggestions on how to bypass your blocks instead of you, so we don’t want to make it too easy for them to figure it out themselves) in the future. So, keep an eye out and revisit this guide if you need circumvention prevention.
Alternatives to AdGuard DNS
If you do not want to pay for AdGuard DNS or rely on that their servers are online for your blocks to work, you can instead use their free open-source program called “AdGuard Home”. It works similarly, but instead of AdGuard hosting your DNS server, you have it running on, for instance, a Raspberry Pi connected to your router. I have a guide on how you set it up using a Raspberry Pi here. However, it will only work on your home network router, so if your children use data roaming on their phones, you cannot monitor or filter their activity in AdGuard Home.
If you do not care so about monitoring your kids’ activity and just want a basic filter from porn there are free DNS servers that block common porn websites and forces google, bing, etc. to be in safe search mode. In a coming review, I will compare some of the popular free parental control DNS servers. You can also check out some of my other guides and reviews for other inspiration for ways to protect your children on the internet: