Hardware based Parental Controls:

There are two types of Hardware based Parental Control devices. A Router and a Proxy Server. Both of these generally go between your broadband connection and your network.They in essence capture all the traffic coming into and out of your home and filter or block that traffic depending on how they are setup.

The Router with parental controls:

A Router with parental controls built in has some type of software either running on it or it directs all of the traffic in and out through an external Proxy server that is hosted by the  hardware vendor on their network. This is all seamless and you won't even know its happening.  It does the same thing that a piece of filtering software running on your PC will do but it does it for all the connected devices in your home. This is nice in that it relieves you from having to install and update each computer in your house and if a computer gets messed up and needs to be reloaded you don't have to worry about reloading your software. Most of the Routers up to this point that had parental controls built in required you to pay some monthly fee for filtering capability.

PIA offers a router that is pre-configured with OpenDNS  a free online filtering service. Please click here to learn more about the PIA Router or Click here to learn more about OpenDNS.

These routers also have the ability to limit the time the internet can be accessed but it affects every computer in your household not just the kids computer.

The second hardware option is a Proxy Server that resides in your home. This is a lot more complicated but not impossible to do. The Proxy server is a computer loaded with special software that has 2 network cards inside for intercepting all the internet traffic coming and going through your internet connection. The special software can range vastly depending on what you want it to do. 

IP-COP  is a proxy server software that contains DansGuardian, when this software is loaded it will take over an entire computer to be the proxy server as long as it has 2 network cards. You can use an old computer that's sitting in a closet somewhere and install a second network card and then load IP-COP. There are several other similar programs out there but they all require a dedicated PC except Untangle. Untangle can be loaded just like IP-COP but there is also a version that will run on your Windows based computer and act as a proxy server for your home network. Untangle has lots of ways to protect and monitor your network and if your brave enough to try its free.These proxy servers can be configured with user based policies, meaning you can customize the filtering for the user. If mom or dad logs in to the comuter no filtering can be the setting and if Jr. logs in the maximum can be the setting. 

There are also many commercialy available proxy servers out there if you have the money.

Brands include: 

WatchGuard
Blue Coat
SonicWall
Cisco

and many more..