5 monitoring applications for parents
Keep your children safe online
A device-enabled culture comes with lots of perks. Kids today are more connected to the entire world than ever before, and that means they know more about the cultures, backgrounds, and beliefs of the people around them. While this connectivity can be beneficial for your child, it can also put them at risk.
Parents must decide for themselves how to best protect kids in a digital world, but parental control monitoring apps have proven to be helpful when keeping tabs on them. First, it’s important for parents to educated themselves on the danger surrounding technology usage. Children are receiving smartphones at an average age of 12-years-old, but many younger children also have access to devices. Only about 61 percent of teens say they set privacy settings when using social media, and 87 percent of kids have witnessed cyberbullying.
If you want to be more involved in how your children interact with digital media, you can try a monitoring app to better protect them. Below are five monitoring apps we recommend.
1) Net Nanny
Net Nanny helps parents gain control of what their children do and see across multiple devices. It is backed by over two decades of experience, and parents can select plans to protect one PC or Mac, or multiple devices. Once Net Nanny is implemented, parents can filter internet content to protected devices, monitor social media use, block pornography, and administer control remotely (so it doesn't matter where their child's devices are). Knowyour.net is proudly partnered with Net Nanny.
Norton family Premier is a comprehensive solution that protects the entire family. Parents can set and control privacy settings across web platforms, work with their children to create balanced rules for managing time online, view reports about where and how their children use the internet, and monitor/protect multiple devices with a single solution. This is a great app for families that need to cover a lot of digital ground or have children of various ages on different devices.
3) SaferKid
It might be marketed for children, but SaferKid would be better titled "Big Brother." Monitor texts. Check phone calls and contacts. Peep web browsing history. It’s all there, along with adult-content blocker, screen limiting, and app-download alerts and disabling, and even coaching on how to speak with your child about sexting, bully, adult content, and more.
4) Secure Teen
Secure Teen lets parents guard kids of all ages from online dangers by blocking inappropriate content, blocking apps they don’t want teens using, viewing reports of internet activity and all chat and text messages, and tracking a teen’s location via GPS on his or her phone. The chat and text message function on this app is great, because it means parents can see communications via various platforms, making it harder for teens to hide information.
5) Qustodio
Qustodio is user-friendly, efficient, and excellent for parents who are short on time. It offers a dashboard that shows you all recent mobile activity for any connected device, including time spent on specific services like Instagram or Twitter. From there you can set time limits, track texts, filter out certain types of website, and block any game or app
