As broadband is an always-on connection to the Internet, it’s all-too-simple for your kids to spend all their time, online. Indeed, if they have their own computer, how do you know they’re not up late at night surfing the web or chatting with friends? It’s enough to keep you up at night, with worry.

The problem is, you won’t want to disconnect your broadband router evening and set it up each morning. It’s also too easy to forget. There are ways of managing your broadband account from your modem, but if your kids figure the password, you’re stuffed. They could quite easily turn on or off the modem-based restriction, without you being aware.

The answer is to control from within your operating system. Vista has limited support for parental control, although XP is even more limited. You also have to dig in to the preferences to be able to control and setup this information, whereas it might be easier just to manage from a configurable security tool.

Webroot Parental Controls is a tool you can use to completely manage user accounts and how each user connects to the Internet. You can block Internet usage at specific times of the day, what each user can do on the Internet (web browsing allowed, chatting banned) and also the applications they can run on their computer, so your kids don’t play games instead of browsing the net.

In addition, you could enable access at limited times, but also go further by banning specific websites.