I admittedly don’t know much about home automation so please bear with me. I’m in search of the best option for me and my wife to be able to control access to our kids TV’s and game consoles. My wife and I both have modern iPhones and our home WiFi is a Google WiFi mesh router system. We also have a few Alexa pods. I’m thinking of getting some kind of smart plug that the tvs and consoles plug into that we can access via app to setup time slots where they are allowed to play games and watch TV. In addition I want to be able to have a kill switch where I can shut them down if they aren’t behaving. I hear a little about homelink and have searched Amazon for smart plugs but the info is all a bit daunting. Do I need to buy a special hub of some type? How does it all work? Can I just buy smart plugs that are home link compliant? Admittedly confused here.
Best thing is use the parental features built into each device. You could tell them the schedule and then turn on the setting in your router for “Known Device Alerts.” Then you’ll get a notification if they turn their wifi enabled console or smart TV on or off as it connects/disconnects to the wifi. You can use that to audit them but don’t tell them how you know.