Parental Control Software Pros and Cons to Monitor My Child

In the modern world of the internet, parents are concerned for their children safety on the internet. 

As we all know, the internet is not the safest place for children. We hear about various cyber crimes and bullying that might occur on your child when you do not monitor their internet activities. Kids like to expose everything as they require the internet for studying from an early stage of life.

Kids often misuse the internet and move towards the wrong track, so parents want to control their children.  Many kids get robbed online as they do not know what is wrong and how to use the internet productively. 

As a parent, you need to give your children more time during their growing phase. If your children do not get proper care, they tend to misuse everything and might be cybercrime victims.  

So it is your responsibility to look after your children and give them maximum time to train them about the proper use of the internet. 

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Pros and Cons of Parental Controls

Installing parental control helps you to control your kids as you should not check their smartphones or PCs manually on a daily basis and allow you to track your kid’s activities from anywhere at any time. 

On the other hand, using parental control can impact the parent-child relationship. Parents often hesitate to use parental control due to specific fears that could hamper their bond.

 

Here are a few positive and negative aspects of using parental controls below. 

Pros of Parental Control 

The positive aspect of parental control is it can help establish guidelines and rules for your kid. However, you don’t need to become a stalker parent as the parental control app enables you to pass every information from your child’s browser history. You can prevent your children from being involved in cybercrime, bullying, gambling, cyber threats, and other online dangers.

You can get the necessary features in Fenced.ai that allows you to block unnecessary websites and disable your kid from using sites that have inappropriate content. This website is one of the best parental control solutions to keep your kids safe and prevent them from any kind of violence. 

Your kids might be involved in adult sites, gambling, violence, and any kind of cyber threats. So, using parental control, you can monitor your kids’ online activities.

Parental control software allows you to observe how much time they spend on social media, which website they use, and any other activities they perform online to safeguard your child from any potential online dangers. 

Track All the Activities of Smartphone

Parental control software like fenced.ai, netnanny monitors every activity made by a kid’s smartphone, including calls, messages, photos captured, SMS, contacts saved, etc. It also monitors the videos captured, watched, and saved on kids’ smartphones. 

Likewise, you can use parental control to keep an eye on your kids’ activities, monitor their internet usage time, and know about websites they are engaged on. After installing this app on your devices, you can watch what your children are doing from any place. 

Parental control helps you to track the browsing history and let you know either your kids are using violent content or not. You can secure and safeguard your children from negative digital exposure using this website. 

The app tracks call log information from your kid’s device, allows you to see incoming and outgoing messages, views all the contacts saved on the device, and views photos and videos saved and captured, connected wi-fi and hotspot, etc. made by smartphones. 

Parental control apps are simple to use, and even a non-technical person can easily use and understand this software.  

Basically, it allows you to track the following activities:

• Social media usage
• Browsing history
• Incoming and outgoing calls and messages
• Mobile application installation 
• Screen time 

Internet Safety For Kids 

Internet safety is an act of staying safe and protecting oneself from online risk and potential dangers. The internet risks include harassment, cyberbullying, online fraud, identity theft, invasion of privacy and many more. Internet safety for children is a critical part of modern life. Discussing with your kids about the online dangers they may face and how to ignore or report threats is one of the essential steps you can take to ensure their safety online. In this digital era, technology is evolving rapidly, and similarly, the online risk is also increasing day by day. 

Hence, to reduce these risks, various internet safety apps and tools are developed for children’s safety. To provide a safer internet environment for your child, you can use Safety For Children, an educational web quiz game developed alongside UNICEF to ensure a safer Internet environment for children. The benefit of using this web educational game is children will enjoy the game, and along with playing, they will learn the steps to be safe on the Internet and know how to react in case of emergency. It will also provide a certificate at the end of the quiz, which will motivate a child to complete the quiz.

It is free of cost, and you can even contact Riseup Labs whenever you want to.

Track your Kid’s Location   

Parental control allows you to track your kids’ location with a GPS tracking feature’s help. You can quickly know where your kids are at the moment from any place. It shows you their precise location along with directions and path of travel. 

If you research correctly, some software even helps you track your kids’ location. With the sim card they use. As it tracks sim card details and allows you to know where they are within real-time. These apps are easy-to-use location monitoring software that includes the recording of visited location and latitude, longitude, date, and time. 

You can track your kids’ location remotely and secretly. And view every detail like address, date of visit, time of stay, travel routes, etc., with a GPS monitoring feature. 

It also allows you to see when your kids entered and left a particular location. And a detailed address of the location along with a map link. 

Sometimes your kids may say they are at home. While they are not at home, and this app benefits you to know whether they are lying to you or not. Also, location monitoring helps you to decide whether your kids are at a belonging place or not.  

Block Websites Having Inappropriate Content

Parental control software is excellent for blocking websites that encourage and advertise inappropriate content. When you install parental control software, it provides an alert when your kids access any inappropriate content websites.

Some inappropriate contents are listed below:

• Violence sites
• Pornography contents
• Gaming sites 
• Gambling content
• Drugs and alcohol-related sites
• Sexting sites

With the parental control website’s help, you can view whether your kids are using websites with inappropriate contents or not via browsing history and block websites to prevent them from being involved in these websites.   

Those websites that are not related to their study can be blocked and do not allow them to access websites having inappropriate content. 

Generally, those contents appear on users as an advertisement, and children do not know the details and might click away and become cyber-criminal. So you can turn on the notification, and once it pop-up advertisement, you can automatically block them. 

Therefore, as a parent, you need to safeguard your children not to reach inappropriate content using parental control software.

Parental Control can Set Screen Time Limits

When your kids get smartphones, they spent the whole day on the screen playing video games, online games, watching videos, messaging, and so on, which can negatively impact their sleep, health, and social skills as they might become isolated. 

As a parent, you need to encourage children to limit the use. Parental control helps you to set the screen time limits so that your kids can use devices for a limited time.

Considering the health, the estimated screen time for teens takes more than six hours a day and for younger kids more than two hours a day, recognizing that the internet can play an important role in learning if appropriately utilized.  

Thus, you can set a screen time limit and monitor internet usage using parental control.

Cons of Parental Control         

Everything in this world has pros and cons, which must be known before taking action. Parental control also has few cons that every parent should understand before using parental control software and spying on their kids’ online activities. 

The negative aspect of parental control is that it can create distance in a parent-child relationship and do not allow children to use anything inappropriate for them. 

Here are few cons about using parental control software and internet safety.  

Impact on the Parent-Child Relationship 

Every relationship becomes strong with loyalty and trust. When you install parental control software on your kids’ smartphone, they get betrayed. They feel as if you do not trust them and feel unhappy. 

They start to doubt the loyalty and do not believe you, affecting parent-child relations mentally and emotionally. 

Similarly, blocking frequently visited websites can be irritating to your kid, and they might start behaving unmannered. They might raise the question of trust and belief. 

You can use it secretly so that your child does not get information on how you are spying on them. 

Expensive  

Parental control has advanced features. And provides all the necessary things to track your child’s activity that comes with a high cost.

It might be expensive and not affordable to some users. Similarly, different apps may provide a free trial for a few days. In addition, you need to use a subscription for monitoring every activity of your kids’ smartphone that can be expensive. 

You can research different parental control apps with essential features and affordable prices. So that you can monitor your child’s activity as you want. 

Fake Softwares  

Different software is there on the market by various companies. Those might be fake and doesn’t provide you the necessary features. They might not cover all the parts to monitor your children’s internet usage activities on smartphones and can be fake. 

Before using subscriptions, you can check different parental control software and read their reviews to choose the appropriate software to monitor. If you randomly select any software, it might not fulfill the requirements and might not be sufficient. 

You can ask your relatives or colleagues whether they use parental control software to track their children’s behavior or not and take the suggestion from them to use the best software.

Beware of Kids Intelligence   

Children’s minds are more intelligent, and there is a difference in thinking due to the generation gap between parent and child. They do not prefer their parents to spy on them and choose freedom. Also, parents always get insecure about their child.

Moreover, when children know that their parents monitor every activity they perform on their smartphones with parental control software, they can uninstall it anytime.  
Therefore, kids’ intelligence can never be underestimated. As technology has made them very clever. Once they know that you are spying on them, he or she could search for ideas to stop it or uninstall the app anytime, and you can no longer be able to track them. 

Conclusion 

To keep a healthy relationship with kids, it is always better to interact with them and become friendly as they can share with you every problem, and you can help them figure out the solution of the issues. 

Thus, you can install parental control software if you feel that your child is on the path of doom so that you can control him/her to choose the right direction by spying on all their activities. 

It helps you protect your child from unnecessary peer-pressure, sexting sites, gambling, and any other crimes that might occur via the internet.   

Frequently Asked Questions