A short list of good links, right where your kid opens the browser

The kid who googles their way to the approved thing

Your eight-year-old needs three things: the school portal, the typing site the teacher assigned, and the two games you actually said yes to. What happens instead is that they type part of a name into the address bar, land on a search page, and click the third result, which is an ad for something else. You have watched this happen. You have typed the URL for them yourself, for the ninth time this week.

Bookmarks are the obvious fix and they do not hold. On a shared family computer the bar becomes a landfill inside a month; on the kid's own profile it is a row of favicons that a new reader cannot decode. The problem is not that the good links are blocked, it is that they are further away than a search box.

Build the list on your account

Make a board with your kid's name on it and keep it short. Four to six links per category is the target, because the entire value of this is that a child can scan the whole thing without reading much.

• School — the portal, the class page, the lunch menu
• Practice — typing, math, reading, whatever is assigned this term
• Watch — the two channels or video pages you approved
• Play — the games that made the list, and no others

Make it the page they open

The browser extension can turn your boards into the new-tab page. On the kid's profile that means every new tab opens on their four categories instead of a search box. It renders instantly from a local cache and it is searchable, so an older kid can type two letters instead of hunting.

That single change does most of the work. The approved link stops being something they have to find and becomes the thing already on screen, which is a much easier habit to keep than a rule you have to enforce.

It helps to prune the board every term. The typing site from second grade stops mattering, the class page changes, and a list that has gone stale teaches a kid to go back to searching. Five minutes in September and again in January is the whole maintenance cost.

View-only keeps it the list you made

Share the board with your kid's account view-only. They can open everything and change nothing — no deleting the typing site, no quietly adding a new game — and the view-only cap is enforced in the extension too, not just the web app. You edit from your own account, and their next tab shows the update.

Say plainly what this is not: curation, not parental controls. Linksley does not block anything. The address bar still works, search still works, and a determined ten-year-old will get around it in an afternoon. Keep whatever filtering you already trust — the school-managed account, the router, OS screen time. What this replaces is the daily friction of getting to the good links, which is a different and more winnable problem.