I’ve built Tellybox to specifically control what and how long my kids can watch anything.
It has a visual indicator (sun going down) that tells them how long they have remaining and that works quite well to remove any discussions (well… screaming and shouting)
https://github.com/sandermvanvliet/tellybox
As others have said in adjacent threads, kids are hard, every situation is different.
I dont have kids (but may in the future) and one thing I'd like to do before then is get a NAS /plex server and build a kid friendly UI on top of it to keep them off of youtube/netflix/fire tv and greatly limit the content available to them to high quality vetted stuff. Acquiring the content for the server may be its own project in and of itself I admit. I also want to do this for myself too, but I especially want it should I have kids. I'm excited by some of the recent examples of hacking smart TVs too, which seems complimentary.
You don't even have to do it before you have children. You can wait until they are six or so and have the autonomy to pick what they want to watch (under your guidance). For children younger than that, you pick what they watch and when they watch it. Every time.
Do start hoarding the better shows and series you know.
I just threw infuse logged in as "kids" to Jellyfin which has curated kids stuff - and it's all tied to a custom home assistant timer profile that turns jellyfin access off at a particular time; there's a "door lock" in HomeKit that can be used to extent TV time past the normal cutoff if a parent decides, but since it's a door lock "hey Siri" can lock it, but not unlock it.
This is awesome, great work! I'll be back in a few years ;)
Clearly it's actually your LLM that built it, but still interesting!
Yes obviously it did. I have kids and a day job that takes up my time ;-)