It’s easy to spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet, and understandably parents would rather their children didn’t grow up permanently glued to a screen. Stripping their hands of tablets and computers is one way to impose down-time, or you can go the positive reinforcement route and swap screen time for good deeds. This is where Kudoso’s router software for managing your family’s internet habits comes in. On top of standard parental controls for keeping your little ones away from some of the darker corners of the web, Kudoso lets you set tasks for your children that are worth points with which they can buy internet time.
American children spend five to seven hours per day staring at screens, TV and otherwise, according to data published by the National Institutes of Health. This leads to increased risks of weight gain and obesity, anxiety, depression, and inability to sleep, studies have found. But parental controls – and really, a better understanding of how to manage children’s screen time – are still limited, it seems. After watching technology take over his own family’s life, a father of three, Rob Irizarry, decided to do something about this by developing Kudoso, a system for managing kids’ Internet access using a combination of software and custom hardware. Kudoso works both as a software application you can install on your own (supported) internet router, or you can purchase a router which ships with the software pre-installed. The system is not entirely dissimilar from a number of parental control technologies on the market today in that, at its core, it’s designed to limit kids’ access to websites and services. But unlike most parental control platforms, what makes Kudoso interesting is how it allows kids to earn their screen time.