How I Stopped My Teen From Playing Video Games All Night

Published January 4, 2023

Joel Santo Domingo

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: I can't get my teenage son to stop playing Fortnite until the early morning. But I found a tech fix that at least slowed him down: A firewall.

It started innocently enough. My 13-year-old kid got a PlayStation 4 and started staying up late playing Fortnite online with friends. Then he got a gaming PC, became a ranked Valorant player, and seemingly overnight my wife and I were regularly woken up by his yelling over FaceTime and Discord or his YouTube streams.

At first we tried to limit his late-night gaming time to weekends, vacations, and holidays, in part because his schoolwork wasn't being affected. His grades qualified him for the high honor roll last year, he's taking advanced courses, and he has a social life both online and off. But the 3:30 a.m. wake-up calls were a bridge too far.

Kids have been staying up late since what seems like the dawn of time, and devices are only making it easier. Pediatricians agree that children and adolescents need a decent amount of sleep every night, preferably eight or more hours, to reduce the risk of health problems. But in addition to the siren call of TikTok, I’ve noticed the steady growth of large online games like Fortnite, EA's Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Riot Games's Valorant, each of which has hundreds of millions of monthly active users. And if your child doesn't have access to a PC or game console, they can still play mobile versions of Fortnite, Apex, and soon Warzone and Valorant as well. Getting my teen to go to sleep seemed like an exercise in futility.

Soundproofing my son's room was one option, but I really wanted to enforce his bedtime. As a tech expert with decades of experience both in corporate IT and network testing for media outlets (including this one), I was certain I could find a technical solution to prevent this kid from gaming. I didn't want to deploy the nuclear option—taking away his devices—because I want to believe there's a better way to guide our children's use of technology. So I decided to make the devices a little unusable.

Let's explore the options I tried.

Many popular Wi-Fi routers have built-in parental controls, which would seem like the easiest way to prevent a kid from gaming at all hours of the night. Just program your router's controls to block a website like nintendo.com or ea.com and you’re done, right? Unfortunately, it's not so simple. Parental controls and the restrictions built into most routers and mesh-network systems may have been effective five to 10 years ago, but once an online game is installed on a device like a PC or a tablet, it connects directly to a multitude of servers, rendering website blocking ineffective.

A router's parental control tools also let you block or allow internet access to a specific device using what's called a MAC (media access control) address. The Wi-Fi or Ethernet adapter built into tablets, phones, gaming consoles, and laptops has a permanent MAC address, which tells your router which device is accessing your network and lets you shut off or pause that device's internet access.

When my son was using the PS4 to play Fortnite, it was easy to curtail his internet access using the PS4's static MAC address. But when he moved his Fortnite (and later Valorant) play to a PC, things got a lot more difficult.

New versions of Windows (10 and 11) and iOS (14, 15, and 16) offer what's called private MAC addressing. Private MAC addressing randomizes your PC, iPhone, or iPad's MAC address, so it's harder for third parties to track your personal devices on a public Wi-Fi hotspot like at a coffee shop. That's great for privacy, but less great for parents like me. Disconnecting and reconnecting a PC running Windows 10 or 11 randomizes its MAC address, and the router treats it like a new PC that doesn't have any parental controls on it. I could keep a lookout for new MAC addresses, and therefore devices that appear as new, blocking them when they show up, but that's an administrative headache that would require manual updating and 24/7 diligence. It got tiresome after blocking what my router thought were new PCs on my network every week. I could (and did) ask my son to turn off private MAC addressing, but kids will still find a way.

After trying the built-in parental controls on a slew of routers (from Asus, Eero, Google, and TP-Link), which were all easily bypassed by MAC private addressing, I turned to my last resort: a Firewalla Purple firewall and router. It's been billed as a "simple [way] for anyone to be a network expert" by a trusted former colleague at PCMag.com, and unlike some routers and mesh networks (like those from Eero), Firewalla doesn't require a monthly subscription fee. The Firewalla Purple also has other useful built-in features, like ad blocking and a VPN server, but I was mainly interested in keeping my son from online gaming after hours.

The Firewalla Purple was quick to set up, but it's not without its shortcomings. To start, it only has a short-range Wi-Fi hotspot in it for testing and travel use, so I had to connect it to a mesh network for proper coverage. And at about $330, it's really expensive. You also have to know some intermediate to advanced networking concepts to make the most of your investment. In other words, the Firewalla Purple is not for everyone (or even most people).

The Firewalla Purple has an automatic Quarantine mode, so any devices with new MAC addresses that join the network are noted and denied access to the internet. Firewalla made it easy for me to see when my son was trying to join the network by sending an alert to my phone, with an easy one-button option to allow or deny that device internet access. This forced my son to turn off private MAC addressing to keep his access, forestalling one workaround.

I was also able to block gaming access on a schedule (or altogether) with the Firewalla Purple. This still allowed my teen to access the internet when he needed to submit a report to a teacher before a morning deadline or access online study materials for a test the next day. Other routers simply block all internet access. Better yet, the Firewalla Purple's blocking option works network-wide, so it could block gaming on his iPad while allowing study materials on his school-supplied Chromebook. The gaming block can be scheduled with one limit for weekdays (midnight to 8 a.m., for example), while allowing for a few more hours of gaming access on weekends or vacation periods.

Using the Firewalla admin app that I provisioned my son's internet access on, I allowed 24/7 access to the devices my wife and I use.

My son found one way around all these restrictions: He could still use his phone in hotspot mode to get around the Firewalla Purple's gaming restrictions, though using 5G cellular internet via a phone Wi-Fi hotspot is a latency disaster: It made his device less responsive and reliable, which isn't ideal for playing Valorant. And he was also able to stay up chatting on Discord and streaming YouTube and Twitch on his phone. There is a way to limit this: You can pause the internet service on a phone using the carrier's family plan administration page (like AT&T offers) or subscribing to a Smart Family scheduling plan like on Verizon Wireless for $5 to $10 a month. I didn't want the administrative headache, but it's an option.

It's not perfect, but the Firewalla Purple has been a good speed bump that reminds him to go to sleep or at least to switch to a less intense activity. It's worked so far—I no longer have to hear him yelling "Go A" (which means … something in Valorant) at 3 a.m. when he's supposed to be sleeping. Better yet, he's maintained a high GPA, and he's far more mindful when requesting time to game during vacations. And now I don't have to soundproof his room or my bedroom—although I’m not ruling it out entirely.

This article was edited by Arthur Gies and Caitlin McGarry.

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