Almost 41% of teens have screen time of more than 8 hours per day. Online exposure to this extent makes an incomprehensible amount of information accessible to children.
Depending on the screen time and content consumed, your child can suffer from mental health issues like depression and addiction. To avoid such precarious situations from uprooting, you must practice monitoring to protect your children from hidden social media dangers.
However, if you are having a hard time choosing a monitoring tool to use, this article can better equip you to make that decision.
What Lurks Behind These Seemingly Good Social Media Platforms?
Before that though, you need to understand what a kids monitoring app for parents can protect your child from.
1. Adult Content
Unlike adults, kids have a very impressionable brain that can make the impact of adult content more gruesome. Frequent intentional or unintentional exposure to pornographic, violent, and graphic content can affect kids adversely.
2. Online Grooming
Likewise, predators commonly target underage children to partake in grooming and sextortion. To put the seriousness of the situation in perspective, almost 3.5% of children have experienced sexual extortion online during the last year alone.
3. Phishing Scams
Teens also easily fall for phishing scams and unknowingly give away their personal information to scammers. Your inability to prevent them from becoming prey to this can lead to their sensitive information like usernames, passwords, and card details being leaked.
4. Identity Theft
Unsafe use of social media apps can result in identity theft. Predators can use children’s personal information and pictures to create a fake profile to lure in other teens. Contrarily, fraudsters can steal their credit or use their security number to carry out illegal activities.
What Are the 5 Best Apps to Keep Child’s Online Activity Safe?
Now to ensure your child’s social media safety, you can take measures like:
Unfortunately, though, all of these measures can prove futile given parents cannot always be bugging their kids and be on their heads at all times.
A more complete solution to this problem is monitoring apps that give parents access to their children’s phone activity and help ensure their social media safety.
1. Xnspy
Xnspy is a kids monitoring app for parents that logs all online and offline phone activities of a target device. Users gain access to messages, calls, IM chats, multimedia files, locations, app clocking, remote controls, etc.
As soon as new activity is logged in the target device, Xnspy uploads it in real-time to its dashboard. Parents can then check all those logs at their convenience.
Xnspy commits to a comprehensive monitoring experience by offering all of these features to its users:
- Phone calls, messages, contacts;
- Gmail, internet history, Wi-Fi networks, calendar;
- Social media chats and call monitoring;
- Phone and third-party apps’ call recording;
- Screen records for content monitoring;
- Phone and app clocking with actuarial records;
- App list and blocking for screen time management;
- SIM, GPS, and Wi-Fi live location tracking;
- Android and iOS keylogger;
- Videos, photos, and other multimedia files;
- Alerts for watchlist words, contacts, and locations;
- Remote controls of surround record, lock the phone, wipe data, take screenshots, etc.
Xnspy Pros
- Operates in 100% stealth mode and is undetectable;
- The dashboard is end-to-end encrypted and has no possibility of a data breach;
- Works remotely and discreetly without informing the phone user;
- The installation takes 5 minutes, and has remote tech support plus an installation guide;
- The user interface is sleek, modern, glitch-free, and interactive with a responsive design;
- Runs smoothly on both Android and iOS with 20+ features;
- Offers monitoring for over 13 social media apps;
- Does not miss any logs or malfunction and provides updates in real-time;
- Has 24/7 live customer support with only a minute-long response time;
- Provide features for both social media chats and content monitoring.
Xnspy Cons
- Require one-time physical access to the target device for installation;
- Does not offer a live camera;
- Sifting through so many logs can be tiresome even with search options and subcategories.
2. ClevGuard
ClevGuard is a Chinese monitoring platform that aims to keep tabs on a child’s phone activity. Parents can check their children’s location, calls, history, keystrokes, and other phone activities to stay in a loop.
To collect these logs, ClevGuard runs in the background of the target device and uploads any new updates on its dashboard via the Internet.
Basic monitoring features available on ClevGuard are as follows:
- Calls, messages, contacts;
- Browsing history, Gmail, photos;
- Screen time, keylogger;
- GPS location tracking and geofencing;
- Social media chats and video apps;
- Remote controls.
ClevGuard Pros
- Encrypted and protected user data with no leaks;
- The user interface is functional and easy to navigate;
- Live camera option available even if with a lack of practical usage.
ClevGuard Cons
- Customer support is below par with only chatbots to help with technical issues;
- To gain full access to its feature range, additional fees are required;
- Stealth mode is not applicable for Android version 10 and above;
- Feature falsely advertised with limited functioning.
3. Qustodio
Qustodio is a parenting app that provides parents with a non-invasive solution to monitoring through content filters. Parents can stay informed while also giving their children much-needed space.
Putting to use its web filters, screen time limits, and social media monitoring, parents can reinforce healthy digital habits in their children.
To aid monitoring, Qustodio provides access to these features:
- Browsing history and web filtering options;
- Screen time tracking and restriction;
- Location tracking and alerts;
- Social media chats and content monitoring;
- Call and message tracking (need additional app though);
- Daily, weekly, biweekly, and monthly activity reports.
Qustodio Pros
- Works on Android, iPhone, Windows, and Mac;
- Blocking options to control exposure to harmful content or excessive usage of an app;
- Does not intrude on children’s privacy.
Qustodio Cons
- Detectable so kids can easily bypass and uninstall it;
- App functioning on iPhones is limited and littered with issues;
- Data loading takes time and can slow down the target device;
- No timely responses from customer support.
4. Msafely
Msafely, better known as a parental control tool, allows parents to monitor and manage their kid’s online activities remotely. With access to phone app logs and social media chat monitoring, parents can ensure that their kids’ activity is safe.
Using this monitoring solution, both Android and iOS devices can be tracked. For iOS, the monitoring offered is cloud-based while for Android, users can select either cloud-based or direct phone monitoring.
To help parents effectively monitor, the following features are provided:
- Messages, calls, contacts, media;
- Browser history, email, screen time;
- Location tracking with GPS (both) and Wi-Fi (only iOS);
- Social media message monitoring.
Msafely Pros
- Compatible with both Android and iPhone;
- 24/7 chatbots and customer support available;
- Ensures data security and is not detectable on the target device.
Msafely Cons
- Social media monitoring is limited to messages;
- Arbitrary arrangement of features and lack of subcategories make navigation difficult;
- Remote commands are not available for proper control of the target device;
- Price is not justifiable given its limited features for basic monitoring.
5. Minspy
Minspy is a phone tracker app that works remotely on a target device. Users can, therefore, access and monitor the activities logged on a device without alerting the phone user.
Users with Android target devices have to install the app directly on the phone while for iOS, iCloud password and username are required to indirectly monitor through its backup.
To make monitoring possible, Minspy offers multiple features to its users:
- Contacts, calls, messages;
- Browser history, calendar, photos, videos;
- Social media chat monitoring;
- Location tracking via GPS (both) and SIM (only Android);
- App list (both), keylogger (only Android).
Minspy Pros
- Compatible with both Android and iPhone;
- Chat monitoring for over 15 apps on Android (only two on iOS);
- Customer support includes FAQs, tickets, and email.
Minspy Cons
- Logs update after 30 minutes for Android and after 24 hours for iOS;
- Features range for Android and iOS vary largely but at almost the same price;
- App malfunctions, lags, delays data loading, and at times hangs up completely;
- Easily detectable by phone security and free anti-virus.
Conclusion
If your child is exhibiting signs of disrupted sleep, chronic pain, and poor mental health, they might have already become a victim of phone overconsumption. However, not all is lost as is already established in this article.
An effective kids monitoring app for parents can help you ensure they are away from mature content, predators, bullies, and abusers. You can further use a monitoring app to keep tabs on whether they are abiding by the safety rules and screen time limits.
In case they are not, you can simply use remote commands and take back control of their phones.
