You have a busy life, and chances are that your child has a busy life too. These days it’s not just parents who have a lot to do. Tweens and teens have school, extracurricular activities, and active social lives, and once they reach a certain age, they might have jobs of their own as well.
When everyone’s schedules are packed, it’s easy for even the most conscientious parents to miss something or for kids who are trying to get away with something to sneak past parental detection. But technology offers a solution that can help parents make sure that their kids are not only safe, but that they’re doing the things they’re supposed to be doing and staying out of trouble.
Parental spy apps offer you the ability to collect valuable information from your child’s smartphone or another mobile device. This information can help you keep track of your child, no matter how busy everyone’s schedules are.
Parental Apps and GPS Tracking
Your child tells you that they have to stay late after school to rehearse for the school play. Great – you want to encourage their artistic endeavors. But are they really practicing for the school play, or might they be sneaking out to visit a friend that you don’t approve of?
It’s not uncommon for kids and teens to occasionally lie to their parents about where they’re going or what they’re doing. Many of us can remember doing similar things ourselves! Most kids who do this probably think that their untruths are harmless, but not knowing where your child really is can be a big problem in the event of an emergency. With parental monitoring software, you can install GPS tracking on your child’s phone that will allow you to check-in and make sure that your child really is where they say they are.
GPS tracking can be useful in other situations as well. Losing a smartphone is much less worrisome than losing track of your child, but it’s very common for children to lose cell phones. Phones frequently end up left behind on the school bus, in lockers, in the school cafeteria, or at a friends’ house. And if your child loses their phone, you may be the one who ultimately has to replace it. With GPS tracking, you may be able to locate a missing phone so you can retrieve it instead of having to replace it.
GPS can also come in handy in more serious situations. For example, if you should become separated from your child during an emergency or natural disaster, or if your child is in an accident and can’t call for help, you can locate them using the GPS tracking system. GPS tracking has also been used to locate children or teens who have run away or been kidnapped. GPS tracking is one parental spy app feature that can be a literal lifesaver.
Download Monitoring with Parental Apps
How many apps are on your phone? How often do you download a new app? No matter how many apps you have, chances are good that your child has even more apps and adds new ones more often.
The popular apps among teens can seem to pop up out of nowhere, and by the time you’ve figured out what they are, your child has already moved on to the next new one. How are you supposed to know whether the new cool app that all the kids are downloading is safe and appropriate for your child?
The best way to find out is to take a look at the app yourself. See what it is, what it’s used for, and what parental reviews say about it online. But you can’t even do that if you don’t know what the apps are. Your parental monitoring software should give you the ability to see which apps your child is downloading from the app store.
With the right parental monitoring software, you can even set it up so that your child can’t download an app without getting your approval first. That way, you can check out the app before your child starts using it. This feature can also prevent your child from spending money on a paid app without your approval, which can help save you from unexpected bills.
Text Message and Instant Messaging History
If you’re like most parents, you probably don’t want to see every single text message or IM your child sends. Teenagers today text message and instant message the way that teenagers in previous generations used to pass notes in class.
If you remember doing that, you probably remember that many of those notes were harmless and not in need of a parent’s attention, and the same is true for most text messages and IMs. But some messages are more serious and do require attention.
Sexting is an important example of messaging that does require parental attention. Sexting is when one person sends a sexually suggestive text, photo, or video to another person – often a boyfriend or girlfriend. To teenagers, sexting usually seems harmless, since the sender only intends the images to be seen by one person, usually a person they trust. But that’s not always what happens.
Sometimes the recipient of a sext shares the image with others, perhaps out of anger after a breakup. This can have serious consequences for both the sender and the receiver. People who send sexts of themselves, often teenage girls, can wind up humiliated. And both sender and recipient can sometimes face legal consequences as well.
Sexts between teenagers sometimes violate laws against child pornography, for example, and spreading sexts can violate laws against revenge porn. Sexting can have potentially devastating consequences for your teen, and if you’re monitoring their text messages and IMs, you may be able to prevent them.
These are just some of the many ways that parental spy apps can help you keep a better eye on your child, keep track of their movements and activities, and protect them from dangers both expected and unforeseen. To find out more about how parental monitoring software can help you, get our risk free trial.
