There are so many different approaches that I find it difficult to feel comfortable about her using the internet without my 10-year-old daughter feeling like I'm constantly looking over her shoulder. She's generally sensible and doesn't go searching for age-inappropriate stuff, for which I'm grateful, but recently she said she was searching for butterfly pictures and came across something that freaked her out a bit. (She doesn't want to tell me what it was because she's embarrassed - I've not forced her to tell me because I want to give her time to tell me in her own time, but I know she'll tell me eventually and we'll be able to have a conversation about it. In general she'll ask if she's not sure about something, which is also reassuring.)

Currently on her laptop I have the kids version of Kagi and uBlock Origin on Firefox, as well as a browser extension that you have to explicitly whitelist domains before they're available. It's the last of these that I'd like to drop somehow - it feels too limiting that every time she goes to a new domain I have to whitelist it, and I'd like to delegate that to a service that approximates my feeling about what's appropriate, or works that out from a few settings, so she's freer to explore the web.

A while ago I tried setting up a Google account for her to filter what she could watch on YouTube, but (a) had issues with my personal Workspace account not being able to be used as a parent account and (b) at the time the filtering was too restrictive because it was like a Google-approved whitelisting approach that excluded lots of channels that weren't specifically targeted at kids, but she was still interested in. (There was an interesting discussion of what you can do with YouTube and whitelisting here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44740380 - that didn't quite seem to resolve itself.)

I used Claude to write a browser extension that allowed me to do what I mention above - whitelisting YouTube channels - as well as hiding shorts by default, but I'm not convinced it'll function consistently given that it's just a CSS / JS layer over the YouTube UI. I could just feed it back into Claude if it starts failing, but I won't know when that's happens because I won't be the one using it.

I'd be interested to hear everyone's approaches and ideas about how to do this because I'm sure there are some good ideas I haven't thought of.