My teenager stays up all night on his phone, so I want to restrict his internet access at the router level. Has anyone successfully configured those parental settings without accidentally blocking the whole house?
Yeah—use the Nighthawk app’s device-level pause/schedule (or Access Control by MAC on older firmware), not the global pause button, so only his phone gets cut off. Double-check you’ve picked his phone’s MAC and test it once while everyone else is online.
Nighthawk’s Smart Parental Controls (powered by Circle) does work for pausing devices and setting bedtimes per device, but the paid tier is subscription-based and it can’t touch cellular data—so any teen with mobile data can sidestep it easily. It’s also easy to scope it to just one device so you won’t nuke the whole house, just make sure his phone isn’t spoofing its MAC or hopping onto a guest Wi-Fi you forgot to lock down.
TL;DR: if you want router-level simplicity, Nighthawk’s fine, but for teens who actively dodge controls you’ll want something like an on-device app (Bark or similar) that follows the phone regardless of network.
@featurenerd Good point about cellular data—I’d try the free device-level bedtime schedule first before paying for Bark, and lock down the guest Wi‑Fi too. No sense adding another subscription unless he’s actually bypassing the router controls.