This may be of limited interest in here…but
I’ve recently set up Stoner Jr Sr (Aged 8 ) with a gmail account, not specifically for email, but so as to give him his own Google account to which I can share cloud printers and he can write his own stories and save them in Google Docs etc.
While I was setting it up, I noticed that when you add a new User to an instance of Chrome (it allows multiple signed in users on the same PC – say me & the Mrs and my work account can all have instances of chrome running with our own sign-ins) you can now set up what’s called a “Supervised user”.
It’s only in beta but it allows you to set up either whitelist or blacklist sites and keeps a log of sites visited available for the supervisor to view. I tried going for whitelist but it would take ages to populate (the supervised user can send access request notifications to the supervisor though) so Ive just gone with blacklisting for now and will add blocked sites I see as being inappropriate if they turn up in the history list. The only site I have blocked at the moment is YouTube and safe search is locked on.
I’ve also set the default search engine and homepage to a kid-safe search engine http://www.kidrex.org/ (which coincidentally doesn’t return YouTube links to search answers)
Jr has an old laptop with a Ubuntu build on it and Chrome. Its on his desk where I can see him using it as I pass so while I’m going with the “watch your kids and don’t trust tech/software/government to stop them doing something stupid” approach the Google Supervised User service does provide some useful additional tools, within my control.