You were a teenager yourself once. Yet you probably didn’t realize how difficult teens were until you started raising one yourself.
You need to find a balance between monitoring your teenagers, while also keeping them out of trouble. Fortunately, there are a lot of great apps that help with that. Here are some worth looking into.
Alarm
You want to be home every night to monitor your children, but that simply isn’t possible. At some point, you need to leave for a few days to go on a business trip, celebrate your anniversary, or to visit your sick mother-in-law.
You want to trust your teenage children to stay home alone. However, they may not be able to resist the temptation to throw a party.
Alarm is a good app to look into. This app lets you monitor your home through live video. You can access through any Apple device for only $40 a month.
Family Orbit
The downside of many monitoring apps is that they require parents to jailbreak their children’s phones. This is a problem, because many kids know how to jailbreak their own phones as well, which makes it easy to remove any monitoring app you install.
Family Orbit is a more novel alternative. This app lets you sync to your children’s phone without jailbreaking it. You can monitor their calls, texts and social media activity from the cloud.
Family Orbit is compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices.
Net Nanny
There are a lot of websites that you don’t want your children looking at. Since 1995, Net Nanny has been a great site for limiting their access to harmful websites.
Unfortunately, it has become more difficult to monitor sites your teenagers access through their smartphones, because you don’t have direct access to the phone yourself. Fortunately, Net Nanny came up with an app that works on mobile devices.
Net Nanny can also alert you if your children search for anything that should concern you, such as anything related to suicide or cyberbullying protection tips.
Find My Kids – Footprints
Does your child have a boyfriend, or a bad group of friends that you don’t want them spending time with? Have they ever told you that they were going to their friend’s house when they were really going to a bar with a fake ID?
Teenagers often lie about what they do and where they are going. As a parent, you need to monitor them carefully.
Find My Kids – Footprints, is an app that helps you track them much more easily. This app lets you monitor their position in real time. If they are somewhere they shouldn’t be, you will know.
Make sure you are discreet when installing the app. Clever teens may find a way to disable it.
SecureTeen
While it is important to know where your children are going, it is also important to know who they are talking to. SecureTeen is a great app that helps you monitor their calls and texts. It’s a great way to not only make sure your kids aren’t spending time with the wrong crowd, but also protect them from bullies and potential predators. A recent review from Techno Mag claims this is one of the best apps for parents trying to keep their teenagers safe:
“The brains behind this child monitoring and protection solution certainly seem to have done their homework, correctly identifying the primary concerns that most parents have over the growing prevalence and influence of the internet on the young impressionable minds.”
Being the parent of a teenager can be very challenging at times. You want to respect their privacy, but there will be times when you need to be more of a helicopter parent.
Fortunately, there are a number of great apps that can help you monitor their activity online.
Featured photo credit: Pexels / JÉSHOOTS via pexels.com
