Welcome to KidMoat — Screen Time Without the Nightly Argument

The problem every parent knows

If you have a child between 6 and 16, you know the shape of it. The phone is always in their hand, homework slides, and bedtime becomes a negotiation. Taking the device away feels as bad as leaving it alone.

Why blocking on its own does not hold

Most parental control apps do the same thing: block, restrict, lock down. That turns the parent into the screen-time police and the child into someone trying to get around the rules. It works for a while, and then it produces a second phone, a borrowed handset, or a browser you did not know was installed.

Three things go wrong with limits alone:

• A hard cutoff teaches nothing. Two hours enforced from outside does not become self-regulation; it becomes a countdown to argue about.
• A child who feels watched stops telling you things. The more closely you monitor, the less you actually learn.
• Nothing rewards the good day. Every tool notices the day a child goes over. None of them notice the day they did not.

A different approach: the limit pays

KidMoat starts from the limit you and your child agree on, then gives them a reason to keep it.

Five coins a day

A child earns five coins on any day they stay inside the agreed limit. Not a score across seven categories, not a sliding scale — one clear rule they can hold in their head, because a reward system a child cannot predict is one they stop playing.

Coins buy real things

Coins are spent on rewards you set: an ice cream, a trip to the park, an hour of cricket, a later bedtime on Saturday. You choose the rewards and what they cost.

Coins never buy extra screen time. That was a deliberate decision — paying a child in the thing you are trying to limit undoes the point of limiting it.

Streaks and levels

Consecutive days inside the limit build a streak, which is the number most children check first. Streak shields protect the occasional bad day, and a broken streak can be repaired, because a system that punishes one slip gets abandoned after the first one.

Coins also carry your child up 25 levels, from Starter to Grandmaster. That is the long game: something to show for four months of good evenings.

The controls underneath

• Screen time — a daily limit, per-app timers, and a bedtime wind-down. A per-app timer means forty minutes of YouTube and then it closes, with the rest of the phone unaffected.
• Six ready-made day types — Normal, Weekend, Holiday, Exam Day, Sick Day and Screen-Free Day. Each carries its own limit, its own allowed apps and its own bedtime, so exam week is one tap in each direction rather than fifteen settings.
• Web filtering — content categories, your own allow and block lists, and filtering at the DNS level on the device so it applies in every browser rather than only the one you set up. It also handles the two usual ways around a DNS filter.
• Location — where they are, plus arrival and leaving alerts for places you mark.
• Shared phone — one tap turns your own handset into your child's space, and your PIN takes it back. Each child gets their own space on the same phone.
• Extra-time requests — your child asks from their phone, you answer from yours, inside a daily cap you set so "five more minutes" cannot become an hour.

What KidMoat deliberately does not do

This matters as much as the list above.

• No screen mirroring, no remote camera, no listening. We did not run out of time; we decided against it. A child old enough to notice being watched is a child who stops using the phone where you can see, and starts using a friend's.
• No reading messages or call logs. What protects a teenager is that they tell you when something is wrong, and very little burns that faster.
• No uninstall lock. A determined child can remove KidMoat — and you are told the moment protection is switched off. We would rather send that alert than promise a lock we do not have.
• No forced SafeSearch or YouTube Restricted Mode. If you want search results filtered at that level, set it on the account itself. It is not something we do for you.

Getting started

Setup takes about five minutes:

1. Install KidMoat on your phone, the parent device.
2. Create your family account.
3. Add your child, and install KidMoat on their phone — or hand them yours, if you share one.
4. Scan the pairing QR code. Your child does not need an account of their own.
5. Set the first day's limit, ideally with them in the room.

Our setup guide has the step-by-step version.

Where to start reading

• How do I stop my child using their phone during exams?
• How can I let my child use my phone safely?
• KidMoat vs Google Family Link

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KidMoat is Android for now, parent and child both.