In today’s digital world, parents and guardians must ensure that children are always safe when using technology. Parental control apps offer a great solution by allowing families to monitor screen time, manage internet safety, and enhance overall family security. These apps assist parents in managing their children’s technology use and highlight the significance of parental control in today’s digital age.
This article explores the top parental control apps that cater to families’ needs in managing their kids’ phone usage. Each app offers unique features for device management, content filtering, and location tracking.
These apps are leading the way in helping parents keep their kids safe online. They offer features for internet safety, managing screen time, and enhancing family security.
Parental Control Apps
Here are our selection for the top parental control apps to help monitor your kids and to ensure their safety in the online and real world.
Find out about the best phones to buy for your kids in our article here.
Aura
Screen Time Analytics
Aura’s comprehensive digital security suite includes a screen time analytics feature, enabling parents to monitor their children’s device usage effectively. This feature tracks how long kids spend on their devices, helping to identify changes that might indicate issues like cyberbullying. Parents can control their children’s online activities and track their app usage with Aura, helping to limit screen time.
Content Blocking and Restrictions
With Aura, parents can filter content and limit screen time through parental controls. This includes customizing what kids can view online, setting time limits for apps and websites, and restricting access altogether to ensure a safe online environment. Aura’s Content Filters and the option to pause the Internet make it easy to enforce these limits, providing peace of mind for parents concerned about their children’s online safety.
Cyberbullying Alerts
Aura strongly emphasizes protecting children from online predators, scams, and cyberbullying. The app offers 24/7 in-game voice and also text monitoring for over 200 of the most popular PC games, alerting parents to any threats. This feature is powered by the award-winning ProtectMe from Kids, ensuring that kids are safe from cyberbullying and other online dangers while playing video games.
Online Safety Advice
Understanding the importance of online safety is vital, and Aura helps parents to convey this to their children effectively. The app encourages open discussions about screen time, social media, mature content, malware, and online privacy; by talking to kids about why online safety matters, parents can set meaningful rules and boundaries, making Aura not just a tool for monitoring and restrictions, but also an educational resource for the whole family.
Qustodio
Content Filtering
Qustodio stands out for its ability to balance screen time, filter content effectively, and provide comprehensive activity reports. By enabling parents to customize features to supervise their family’s online activities, Qustodio ensures a safe digital environment. Its web filtering capabilities extend to popular browsers like Safari and Google Chrome, allowing parents to monitor and report web searches and activities without requiring a specialized browser.
This is achieved through the Family Portal, where websites can be filtered by category or set to trigger alerts when visited. The Activity Timeline tab offers a detailed view of all web activity.
Activity Breakdown
The Activity Timeline is a notable feature of Qustodio. It offers a minute-by-minute breakdown of a child’s device usage, including all the apps they use and the websites they visit, providing parents with a comprehensive overview of their digital footprint. Qustodio’s detailed daily, weekly, and monthly reports of online activity, sent directly to parents’ inboxes, along with real-time alerts for blocked website access, ensure that parents are always informed of their child’s digital activities.
Help Center and Customer Support
Qustodio prioritizes user support through its Help Center, where users can find answers to all the common questions, troubleshooting guides, and videos. The platform encourages feedback and product suggestions with a dedicated survey and help form for users to share their experiences and ideas. This feedback loop has led to the implementation of many user-requested features, demonstrating Qustodio’s commitment to improving based on its community’s needs.
Considerations for VPN Users
While Qustodio provides robust parental control features, users should be aware of potential incompatibilities with antivirus software, particularly on Mac devices. The app’s use of VPN technology for monitoring and filtering content can sometimes conflict with other security software. Additionally, some networks and internet routers may block Qustodio’s VPN, requiring adjustments to router settings or temporary disabling of protection for uninterrupted internet access. Despite these considerations, Qustodio’s comprehensive features and dedicated support make it a strong choice for managing kids’ phone usage.
Net Nanny
Net Nanny® revolutionizes online safety with its dynamic Internet filter, which contextually analyzes webpages in real-time. This technology, hailed as the #1-rated Internet filter, allows families to limit exposure to inappropriate content while accessing beneficial websites. By evaluating the content of each webpage as it loads, Net Nanny® ensures that its filtering keeps pace with the rapidly evolving Internet, offering peace of mind to parents.
YouTube Monitoring
With the growing concern over kids’ YouTube usage, Net Nanny® introduces a comprehensive YouTube monitoring feature. This feature enables parents to monitor the videos their children watch, including video names, lengths, and viewing dates, directly through links provided to each video. Additionally, YouTube Search Reports reveal what videos and topics kids are searching for, combined with Net Nanny alerts to inform parents of potentially dangerous or questionable content. This integration of YouTube reports and alerts helps parents create healthy limits on YouTube usage.
Platform Limitations
Despite its strengths, Net Nanny® faces challenges with platform limitations. Notably, its current version does not support Android, Kindle Fire, and Chromebook devices, with updates expected in 2024. This limitation underscores the importance of considering device compatibility when choosing parental control software.
App Reliability Issues
Users have reported reliability issues with Net Nanny®, including problems with the app turning off or becoming disabled unexpectedly, even without the child’s intervention. These issues have been particularly problematic on older devices, such as the iPhone 5, where Net Nanny® has been reported to block essential features like FaceTime and significantly slow down the device. Such feedback highlights the need for ongoing evaluation and improvement of the app’s performance across various devices and operating systems.
Norton Family
School Time Feature
Norton Family introduces the School Time feature, a direct response to the challenges of remote learning. This feature restricts access to potentially distracting websites while allowing educational content during designated school hours. Parents can customize the list of accessible sites to ensure a focus on education.
The Instant School Time option offers flexibility, enabling parents to activate school time settings instantly whenever necessary. This ensures that children are only exposed to educational web categories and specific websites approved by their parents during school hours.
Geofencing Capabilities
A significant addition to Norton Family’s suite of features is geofencing, referred to as “Favorite Locations.” This tool allows parents to set approved boundaries for their child’s physical locations and receive alerts when their child has entered or left the designated areas. Geofencing improves the app’s ability to track locations, giving parents more security and peace of mind about where their child is.
Limited Features on iOS
Despite its comprehensive offerings on Android and Windows platforms, Norton Family faces limitations on iOS devices. Apple’s stringent policies for third-party parental control apps have restricted Norton Family’s functionality on iOS, iPadOS, or macOS devices. Parents relying on these platforms may find Screen Time—a free feature offered by Apple—to be a more practical solution for managing their child’s device usage. This limitation highlights the importance of considering device compatibility when selecting a parental control app.
Unlimited Device Support
Norton Family stands out for its support of unlimited devices and child accounts across supported platforms, including Android, iOS, and Windows. This feature is excellent for families with many kids or devices. It lets you monitor and manage online activities for all devices without any limits on how many you can monitor. Norton Family supports many platforms and devices, showing its ability to meet the needs of different families in today’s world.
Bark
Bark is revolutionizing parental control apps by emphasizing a compassionate approach to monitoring children’s online activities. The app is changing the game by focusing on a caring way to keep an eye on kids. Bark is different from other parental control apps because it prioritizes a compassionate approach.
The app enables parents to monitor their children’s online activities in a caring manner. Unlike traditional device mirroring, Bark employs advanced AI to scrutinize texts, social media, images, videos, and audio for threats like cyberbullying and inappropriate content, ensuring unparalleled safety for your child.
Cyberbullying Alerts
Bark’s smart AI finds cyberbullying signs and alerts parents with reports and advice on how to deal with these situations. This proactive measure helps parents initiate crucial conversations about online safety and friendship, creating a supportive environment for children to talk about all their online experiences.
Communication Recommendations
Upon detecting potential issues, Bark not only alerts parents but also provides advice on addressing these concerns. This feature helps parents have essential conversations with their children, making family bonds stronger and ensuring a safer online experience.
Limited Tracking and Monitoring
Bark focuses on monitoring for safety rather than invasive tracking. It tells parents about problems without giving detailed reports, following a belief in respecting children’s privacy. This approach is particularly suited for families with teenagers or children who understand basic online safety principles.
Platform-specific Limitations
While Bark excels in social media and email monitoring, it may not cater to all parenting styles, especially for those seeking more hands-on management for younger kids. Additionally, its functionality might be limited on specific platforms, highlighting the importance of assessing device compatibility.
Bark’s unique approach to parental control, combining advanced monitoring technology with a focus on privacy and open communication, offers families a comprehensive solution to navigate the complexities of the digital world.
Conclusion
In our journey to explore parental control apps, we’ve discovered some excellent solutions that are all about keeping kids safe online. From Aura’s all-encompassing digital security to Bark’s caring monitoring approach, each app brings unique features to help balance kids’ digital well-being with parental oversight. These tools do more than just manage devices – they’re all about creating a healthy relationship between kids and the digital world, showing how vital technology is in keeping families safe.
The impact of using these parental control apps every day is enormous. They not only give parents peace of mind but also start essential conversations about healthy tech use, showing how setting boundaries and understanding the digital world is critical. As families keep working on online safety, these apps are like essential friends, offering both protection and education. The journey to make the digital world safer for our kids is ongoing, and these tools give us a strong base for a more secure and knowledgeable future.
FAQs
What is the top-rated app for managing my child’s phone usage?
The top app for comprehensive protection in managing your child’s phone usage is Qustodio. It is recognized for its ease of use and effectiveness in monitoring activities, although it is on the pricier side and may require sideloading for full functionality.
How can I keep track of how my child uses their phone?
To monitor your child’s phone usage effectively, consider these top picks:
Best Overall: Net Nanny offers comprehensive monitoring solutions.
Best Monitoring: Qustodio provides a 30-day free trial of its premium service.
Best for Large Families: Norton Family accommodates multiple users well.
Which parental control app is the best in Australia?
In Australia, the leading parental control apps and software include:
Qustodio: Best overall for its comprehensive features.
Kaspersky Safe Kids: Offers the best value for budget-conscious users.
Google Family Link: The top free option available.
Net Nanny: Renowned for its superior web filtering capabilities.
Bark: Exceptional for monitoring a wide range of activities.
Life360: Ideal for tracking location with precision.
