Why ViewHelm exists.

Our boys are 10 and 12. Old enough that YouTube is a useful place. Khan Academy for maths. Crash Course for whichever essay is due. How to fix a bike tyre, how to beat a level, how a French verb should actually sound. Mark Rober for afternoons that still feel like being a kid. But not all of it is useful. Young enough that the recommendation engine still runs rings around them.

The afternoon kept coming apart.

One of them would open YouTube for a homework video and we'd look up ninety minutes later and he'd be watching something neither of us would have picked. He wasn't looking for a distraction. The algorithm kept offering him something one half-step off the last thing. One half-step is nothing. Forty half-steps in a row is a different child watching different content.

And it's on every screen.

It isn't just one device. Our eldest has a school Chromebook that's fine at school, wide open after. He's in Year 7 now, which means his first phone. The 10-year-old bounces between the family iPad and the Mac. And the TV in the lounge has YouTube built right in. Five screens between two kids. Any one of them is another door to an afternoon we don't get back. Or worse, to us spending it policing instead of parenting.

We tried the obvious things.

YouTube Kids has been irrelevant to both boys for years. Nothing on there interests them.

Apple's Screen Time is the opposite problem. It works, but it's all-or-nothing. YouTube is on, or YouTube is off. There's no setting for “Khan Academy and Crash Course are fine. MrBeast can wait until Saturday.” That's the thing we actually wanted.

Router-level blocks were a sledgehammer. Turn off YouTube and half their homework goes with it.

We took it off anyway, plenty of times. Then one of them needed it for a homework video, so we'd unblock it. Forget to re-block it. Be back in the same spot by Thursday. Just talking about it turned into us having the same talk every week.

What we wanted was more specific than any of that.

• The channels they need for school, available when school wants them. Khan Academy and Crash Course at homework time. Not at 10pm.
• The channels they love, on when they've earned some downtime. Mark Rober on weekend afternoons. Not during revision.
• Rules per channel, not per device. It shouldn't matter whether they're on the Chromebook, the phone, the Mac, the iPad, or the lounge TV.
• A bedtime that meant bedtime, without a nightly negotiation.
• Not a camera. We didn't want to read their messages or sit through every video with them. We wanted a fence.

Nothing we could find did that. YouTube Kids is too blunt. Bark is built for snooping. Screen Time is device-shaped, not channel-shaped. Every existing tool assumed the enemy was the kid. It wasn't. The enemy was the recommendation engine.

So I built it.

ViewHelm runs on our Mac. It covers every browser the boys use. They can't get around it by going incognito, or switching accounts, or trying a VPN (we thought of that too). They see exactly what they're allowed to watch. When they want something new, they tap a button and I get a notification on my phone with an AI summary of the channel. I approve or deny in five seconds.

Afternoons are different now. They come home, watch what they chose, get off YouTube when the clock says so, and stop asking for more. That's the part we didn't expect. “The app is off” turns out to be an easier boundary than “I've decided you've had enough.”

If you're tired of losing the same fight, ViewHelm is for you. Free for one kid and two channels, forever. No credit card. Five minutes to set up.

I hope it gives you your afternoons back.

— Nick, founder