Being the parent of a 9-year-old boy and a gamer, I'm a huge fan of parental settings.
I love the fact that all of my consoles are a bazillion times more robust in helping me parent than are TVs or movie theaters. And the Xbox Live dashboard update coming in November adds quite a bit more tools to parental settings on the Xbox 360.
As you can see in the video, you can now do things like add exceptions to all of those harsh rules you lay down for your kids in terms of what games they can and can't play on the 360. That means less trips to the TV to tap in your parental unlock code, which is a big win in my book.
You can also turn on a feature called "Family Programming" which disables all mature content on the dashboard. Finally, the console has default settings that it determines based on the age of the gamer, breaking them down into one of three categories: child, teen or adult. Of course you can just turn that stuff off and customize the hell out of it.
My favorite option? The ability to boot someone out of your family. The next time Tristan gets out of hand I'm marching him downstairs to show him just how easy it would be to rid myself of the extra headaches. :D