Child Monitoring and Security Information Archive 2019 - 9.40.34
Home
Best Child Phone Monitoring App
An excellent way to explain smartphone rules to kids is to talk about how you use your smartphone. Although this may cause you to question your own smartphone habits, it can teach your child the potential advantages and hazards of smartphones. For example, you could talk about why you set time limits for yourself, why you value privacy, why you avoid certain types of online content and why you don’t text while driving. By setting an example your child wants to emulate, you become a powerful influence in developing healthy smartphone habits for your child.
Our tests focused primarily on using parental control software on Android devices, with additional testing on iPhones as necessary. We chose Android because it gives parental control apps more freedom to monitor and control device settings than the iPhone. As we tested the software, we verified whether features worked instead of assigning specific scores based on how well they worked. We did not test any features that require you to root or jailbreak your smartphone, which can lead to phone performance issues and make your device more vulnerable to malware.
Norton Family Premier packs just about any feature a parent could ask for into its mobile-device-management offering, giving you control over multiple features on multiple devices. You won't be able to monitor every aspect of how your kids are using their Android phones, but with the web-filtering, app-monitoring and location-tracking features, you'll have enough control to remind them to responsibly use their mobile devices.
Parental control apps are subscription services, so you pay a yearly fee to use them. On average, you can expect to pay around $60 per year for most popular apps, including Qustodio and Net Nanny. However, some services cost as little as $30 a year or as much as $100 a year.
SecureTeen is an effective way of protecting your kids from cyber bollies, mature content, violent games and stalking. SecureTeen has been designed to make parents feel safer for their children and monitor their day to day phone activities.
11 Best Apps For Parents To Monitor Their Kids
If your child has an Android smartphone, you can use Google’s parental control app: Family Link. This isn’t built in like Apple’s Screen Time, but it’s easy enough to find in the Google Play store. Family Link allows you to track your child’s smartphone usage, manage apps, limit screen time, lock devices manually or on a schedule, limit Play Store purchases and track their location.
Child Monitoring Services
Unlike social media, which typically requires a person be 13 or older to sign up for an account, there’s no commonly accepted age for when to give smartphones to children. Common Sense Media and ConnectSafely both suggest that your child's maturity level, rather than their age, is the most important factor.
Top 10 Parental Monitoring Apps To Spy On Your Kids' Smartphones
While it can't match the robust feature set of Norton Family Premier or PhoneSheriff, Qustodio is a worthwhile alternative, especially if you live in a household where there are more than just Android phones to manage. Qustodio costs $55 a year for five devices, including Macs and PCs. For 10 devices, it's $97, and for 15, it's $138. Qustodio also offers a tool for iOS devices (included in this pricing), which we reviewed separately because parental-control capabilities are much more limited on the iPhone than they are on Android phones.