Companion site to the book

Build, or be built.

This is the living half of The Family Fortress: Seven Days to Real Digital Boundaries at Home. The book holds the principles — the things that will still be true in ten years. This site holds the click-by-click instructions — the things a vendor can break with next Tuesday's redesign. When they redesign, I update this site. The book stays right.

If you scanned a QR code from a chapter, you're in the right place. Every page here matches a chapter, and every page carries a "Last verified" date so you know how fresh the instructions are. The updates page logs every change.

Start with Day One →

The seven layers

One layer per day, seven days. Each layer covers a gap the previous layers can't reach. The order matters — don't skip ahead.

1 The Network Wall DNS filtering for the whole house — Day One 2 Identity & Accounts Child accounts, family groups, real birthdays — Day Two 3 The Devices Screen Time, Family Link, and the traveling wall — Day Three 4 Streaming & Consoles Profiles, PINs, and the living rooms screens — Day Four 5 Time Boundaries Windows, budgets, and rest days — Day Five 6 The Keys Password vault, wall keys, passkeys — Day Six 7 The Perimeter Walk Bypass hunting and the test protocol — Day Seven

Before and after the seven days

The Household Inventory Count everything before you govern anything (Ch. 3) Maintenance The Monthly Five, the Quarterly Walk, the New-Device Protocol (Ch. 11) Updates Every change to this site, newest first

An honest word before you start

No system on this site is a guarantee. Not one. What you build over these seven days reduces risk — meaningfully, measurably — but it doesn't eliminate it. A determined kid with enough time will find a seam, and a vendor update can quietly open one for them. That's why the fortress comes with a maintenance routine, and why the real work is the relationship behind the walls. The book says this at length; I'll say it here in one line: the fortress buys you time and conversation — it doesn't replace either.