I’m personally still trying to figure out my stance:

[1] https://taylor.town/child-tranqs

My gut-feeling is to first envision what you want an average day to look like for your family, and then work backward from there. I think I’m going to prohibit YouTube and other extremely addictive sites with my daughter, but be pretty lax about the internet in general. Not certain yet though!

Regardless of tech, it’s probably a good idea to observe your child and frequently ask them how technology is making them feel, and how it’s interacting with their goals

Thanks! I am all about pre-emptive steering and similar, but it's something my wife just doesn't 'get'. She regularly gives the kids options that she doesn't want them to pick, which... has been it's own battle. Or reflexively says yes when the kids ask to watch something without thinking about it (eg starting a movie 5 mins before we need to be leaving, then fighting to pull them away from it).

Things that we agree on in principle (especially before we had kids) don't always get executed/ enforced as they need to once you're in the thick of it. (Of course I have my own faults when it comes to this, as well.)

YouTube is a non-starter for us (she's seen enough slip through the cracks on YouTubeKids to thankfully be 100% on-board), but the kids have long figured out who will give up their phone a restaurant table in exchange for no-more-tears.

Which usually means kids netflix (still not a fan), but it's a complete unknown on eg my in-laws phones. But that's a whole issue on its own.

Re: >Regardless of tech

...Everything above is part of why I'd like to find a tech centered solution, because it's a fallback I know we'll need despite trying to lead first with a more ideal hands-on-parenting approach. You may might not need it, and I wish we didn't either, but there are real marital and parental relationship benefits sometimes, especially being able to 'blame it on the technology' occasionally, instead of, eg, always having the ideological argument at the dinner table.

Right now we limit at-home to a 'kid appropriate' NAS share that kodi points to on the living room tv. Other than that, we make them ask us if they want something else. And even then, accessing that is primarily a treat/reward.

(Although we admittedly leaned on it a lot last week when everyone had a stomach bug, trying to keep everyone resting, and the vomit contained to one room. But I digress...)

A bit more personal background:

We're primarily an android house, but have a couple of apple devices, use segregated wifis, run a pi-hole and iptables home firewall, and have some local (non-cloud, non-voice) home automation and security installed.

While I have past experience hacking together some in-house app solutions, it's been years since I've touched the stuff, and no longer even have my laptop set up with devtools (I'm an engineer, not a dev/programmer/etc).

I also used to keep up with android rooting and custom OS, but again, it's been years.