Hello, I've added HomeShield+ Parental Controls to my Deco system and I'm running into tons of issues. I'm frustrated I'm paying for this since it doesn't offer much customization.

After enabling parental controls, my kids are having trouble using the Internet. Even with most restrictions disabled (which negates the point of parental controls), it's almost unusable.

Here are the issues I'm seeing:

• YouTube does not work at all when You Tube Restricted is enabled. According to the notes, it's only supposed to block mature content, not the entire service.
• Many Web Filter apps and services are misclassified. For example, Online Communication and Pay to Surf seem to break many basic things.
• The service automatically blocks sites, but only allows you to approve 32. Further more, you can't add them manually or edit them, meaning you can't whitelist entire domains.
• Many of the sites being blocked are necessary for basic functionality, such as Apple's CDNs and other services. Because Google's and Apple's CDNs are being blocked, many features are temperamental or broken entirely; this includes basic functionality such as push notifications, app downloads (I don't have downloads blocked), media content, and more.

Without a way to whitelist pages, it makes things almost unusable. My son loves watching YouTube, but unless I unblock every CDN that YouTube uses and turn off all YouTube restrictions, he's unable to watch it. Apple, like others, uses over 900 domains, many of which are being blocked and essential to functionality—I can only unblock up to 32 because of the limitations on the router. In theory, none of these should be blocked at all unless specific to a restriction (and ONLY specific to that restriction).

I'm struggling to understand how these controls are helpful and why users have to pay for a half-baked solution. HomeShield should be beta at best. There is also a huge lack of configuration options in the router itself and the Web portal is extremely limited on desktop. These limitations make it even harder to find a solution/workaround to the shoddy parental controls.

I really like the ease-of-use of the Deco system and overall it has decent performance. I get consistently fast speeds throughout my home (700–900Mbps)—even when connected to mesh points—and the network is very stable with minimal jitter. But there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of configuration.