How to Kick Your Kids Off the Wi-Fi

Were you one of those kids who secretly stayed up late, watching TV or reading comic books under your covers after bedtime? Kids today are no different—except they have the internet. If you need to give your children a forced break from the web, or just need them to stop hogging all your bandwidth during the day, a few router settings can help make that happen.

Change the Password

For a quick nuclear option, change the password to your Wi-Fi network, which will kick off every device in your house. This isn’t ideal if you have your own computers, phones, TVs, and smart home devices that you want to stay connected, but it’s fast and easy, so it’ll work in a pinch.

You would have to reconnect each device individually, using the new password. The good news is that you can always change it back later if you want.

First, you’ll need to log in to your router’s administrative options. If you’ve never done this before, check out our step-by-step guide here, but the jist goes like this: grab a computer, type your router’s IP address into the address bar of your browser, and press Enter. Log in with your credentials (if you don’t know them, the default password may be written on your router, or listed in this database(Opens in a new window)), and you’ll have access to all your router’s settings.

To change the router’s password, head to the wireless settings screen and change the password (sometimes also called the Pre-Shared Key). This setting’s exact location can vary from router to router, so you may need to hunt around a bit.

Once you find it, changing the password should be easy: just type in a new password, click Apply, and you’re off to the races. (Make sure you’re using a secure WPA2 password that’s hard to guess, and change it for both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.)

Note that your computer will probably disconnect from the network at this point, so you’ll have to enter the new password to reconnect (unless your PC is connected over Ethernet). Your kids will similarly lose connection, and have to find something more productive to do—that is, unless they have an Ethernet port of their own.

As a compromise, you could keep all your devices on the main network and put your kids on a Guest Network, then disable the guest network whenever you want to kick them off. It’s not the most convenient method, since you have to do this manually, but at least it won’t affect your own laptop, TV, or thermostat.

Block Specific Devices With MAC Filtering

If you’d rather not nuke your network entirely, you can block specific devices with a feature called MAC Address Filtering. (No, it has nothing to do with Apple’s Macintosh computers—MAC, in all caps, stands for media access control.) It isn’t a particularly effective security setting, since it’s easy to bypass, but it’ll work for our purposes.

Again, you’ll have to hunt around for this setting, but on my Asus router, it was under the Wireless MAC Filter tab in the Wireless section of the settings. Turn the MAC filter on, and you’ll likely be given a choice: you can either allow certain devices, blocking all others, or block certain devices, allowing all others. Since it’s 2021 and you probably have more than a couple Wi-Fi devices in your house, the “Reject” or “Block” setting is probably the best.

To block a certain device, you’ll need to know its MAC address—a 12-digit number unique to that specific device. You can find a device’s MAC address by checking your router’s list of connected devices, which might be under the “Network Map,” “Client List,” or similarly named option. It’ll match MAC addresses to conventional names like “Jack’s iPhone.”

Sometimes, these names are difficult to understand—many Windows computers have names like DESKTOP-BD0GFIT—so you may need to do some extra digging with third-party software to get more information on a given device. For example, you may not know whether your daughter’s laptop is DESKTOP-BD0GFIT or DESKTOP-SE8WDRE, but if you can determine which is the Dell and which is the HP, you can figure out which MAC address belongs to her.

With the MAC address in hand, add it to the aforementioned block list, and apply your settings. They should get kicked off the network until you unblock them. Be sure to block both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz band, if given the option, and block all their devices—if you only block their computer, you don’t want them switching to a phone or tablet.

Note also that if your kid is particularly tech-savvy—or just really good with a web search—they can easily spoof a different MAC address and get around your controls. Though frankly, it’s hard to be mad at a kid smart enough to figure out your ruse; that ingenuity might get them a job in tech someday.

Enable Parental Controls

If you’d like to automate the process—so you aren’t constantly blocking and unblocking your kids’ devices when they’re allowed back on the internet—many routers come with built-in parental controls that perform similar functions. You may find these settings in the Parental Controls page, or it could be part of your router’s security suite.

On my Asus router, it’s part of the AiProtection page(Opens in a new window), which is a collection of tools offered in partnership with Trend Micro. On some routers, you may even need to pay a subscription fee for the Parental Control features.

If your router doesn’t have them at all, you may need to purchase a device like the Circle Home Plus, or install parental control software on all your kids’ devices. You can also use the built-in parental control features on their phone, since your router’s Wi-Fi settings won’t apply to their cellular data plan.

Again, setup will vary from router to router and device to device, but even basic parental controls on a router will allow you to enter a MAC address and limit mature content, certain protocols like streaming or instant messaging, and set time limits, so your kid can’t connect after 10 p.m. (or whatever time you decide to set).

Just like MAC filtering, there are ways around this, so they aren’t foolproof for tech-savvy teenagers, but it’s worth a shot. If they work their way around it, you may have to go back to that nuclear option I mentioned earlier: put them on a guest network and change the password manually whenever you need to kick them off.

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