4. Monitor.
The porn-free family plan is in place, and your family is now benefiting from some protection. But you can’t just set the plan in place and simply leave it to run its course. A solid porn-free family plan requires monitoring and maintenance.
- Covenant Eyes Reports. Covenant Eyes will send you regular reports. Do not expect these reports to be as helpful as you want them to be. You will need to take some time—two or three minutes—to look carefully over the report looking for anything that seems amiss. Follow-up with any of your children whose report shows a red flag.
- OpenDNS Reports. OpenDNS also collects reports, including pages and searches it has blocked. While you won’t know who’s responsible for these blocks, you would do well to keep an eye on them, look for patterns and so on.
- Adjust. As your children grow, you may need to adjust their privileges. You may also find that as they grow older they face greater temptations which will require fewer privileges. Be willing to adjust accordingly.
- Maintain. Covenant Eyes updates their software on a regular basis. As they do this, you will want to install the new updates.
Conclusion
And that’s the Porn-Free Family Plan. It takes a couple of hours of hard work to set up, but it’s time well invested.
Even then, this plan is not fool-proof. There will be ways around it for those committed to finding those ways. Covenant Eyes occasionally blocks something harmless. OpenDNS sometimes fails to filter something that obviously ought to be filtered.
Yet this porn-free family plan will suffice in most circumstances. Now you’re well on your way to training and protecting your children.
