HomeAssistant Kids/Family tracking Hub

[Mattie (Mattias)]

Hi everyone,

I’m wondering what you are doing to calm your nerves when your kids finally get their first mobile phone! I’m one of those who think most kids today get their tech waay to early. Too much bad things are out on the internet, especielly amongst schoolkids, social networks, bad content on YT, TikTok, well the list goes on.

But you know… finally you have to give in when they start to feel left out in the school, when veryone else is having their “fun” and not our kids. Yes, I’m a bit overprotective father you might say. but also the kids wont need keys for the house and dont risk loosing them if they have something unlocking when they get home so also good things come with the phones. So with this background I started to integrate my daughters first mobile into home assistant and since she got an android I also added her to Family Link controlling her time, apps and so on. That works very nicely! Now as a nerd I’m of course wondering what you have done about this yourselves? Am I the only one having this approach? Have you any other cool features that would be nice to have?

I feel like this whole “Family-thing” has the potential of getting a way bigger part of HA

I’ve not done much but it gives me the control I need for now with some logging from her cell and a custom:multiple-logbook-card, below just gives me the apps that I want to keep a close eye on with other colors. Youtube, her games and so on. Then the family link-app gives me the summary of each app nicely in a dashboard

I have various cards with info like notifications and could easily get warning for when ringvolume has been turned off when she leaves home for example

Also an earlier project of mine was to make a “point system” for the kids so that they can do their chores and get points so that they can unlock other features in real life, for example use a point to get 1hour internet with the unifi controller integration

I did discuss this in this thread: Google Family link - #14 by Mattie

The chores page looks like this at the moment

Well, I dont know if I wasted my time but hopefully someone has been thinking the same as me and maybe has other cool ideas. If not I’ve at least shared my thaughts and possibilities about it

Take care, all papanerds out there!

Other great posts:

Created a "Chore Tracker" with points system in Home Assistant

The way i’ve handled that is by creating a 2nd toggle for each and having the automation only give points if the 2nd toggle is off. the automation then turns the 2nd toggle on when giving points. the 2nd toggles only get turned off by automation nightly. I created a python script to create my toggles, automations, and scripts, and only built the front-end by hand.

[Mattie (Mattias)]

Another issue is that other apps such as Google family link do not seem to handle call blocking, search history in browser, YouTube and so on very good, or at all… It would be nice to see some kind of integration where the companion app could handle and deny more things the kids do on their phone. A parental control setting within the app maybe

For example deny calling certain numbers, today the kids just add the numbers to emergency list so that they can call those when the device is locked down.