The thought of installing a Parental Monitoring App on your teenage child might put you off, but if you consider its necessity, you will change your mind.
Monitoring apps can indeed raise some privacy concerns, but given that they promote digital citizenship, it becomes worth it.
Stated digital citizenship entails being digitally responsible. Anyone who utilizes technology to connect with others, such as computers, the Internet, and digital gadgets, should do so responsibly.
As the world becomes more digital, children must be taught about this issue.
Parents should discuss with their children their safe and harmful Internet usage, as well as appropriate and improper online activity.
Parents can respond to teens’ queries by addressing them and giving assistance. But it is easier said than done because there is a huge generational gap between parents and children.
And often, it requires context in which kids may be discussing matters.
This entails taking real actions to monitor their children’s online conduct, such as tracking the websites their children visit, scrutinizing their social media accounts, and monitoring their friend lists on social media.
All of these are made feasible by using a phone monitoring app for parents.
Considering these factors, let’s discuss monitoring apps in more detail—the positives they offer and the cons they have—so you can decide once and for all if they are something you would want to invest in to ensure the safety of your children.
The Case For Parental Monitoring Apps
Parenting and constant supervision have become increasingly difficult to maintain because of parents’ hectic schedules and children’s increasing reliance on technology.
Therefore, it is critical to use appropriate digital tools to help educate and monitor children when parents aren’t around.
By using digital monitoring tools, parents can establish the safe use of technology and instill these principles of digital responsibility in children.
This is good for parents and children both because it gives parents a chance to step back and stop micromanaging and controlling their children at every opportunity.
But if parents don’t use digital monitoring apps, screen addiction, sexting, violent content, virus attacks, ransomware, and phishing scams are just a few of the issues that children can fall into when parents take an eye off their kids.
Sadly, it is one of the outcomes associated with this new technological era, and its harm is most prominent when kids do not take digital responsibility and are unaware of the consequences.
Not to mention the detrimental impact of excessive phone use on academic performance.
Excessive and irresponsible technology use also causes kids to be careless online, disrespectful on social media, partake in cyberbullying, and lack awareness when using the Internet.
But if parents use monitoring apps for their children’s digital well-being, kids can be sympathetic while speaking online, making meaningful relationships, and remaining cautious. This is why monitoring apps aren’t as bad as they are often made out to be.
They give parents a break, too, as they don’t have to be the ones constantly looking after their kids all the time as these Mobile apps can do it for them can do it for them.
Apart from the cyber threat and harassment protection, digital well-being also helps kids
become involved in life outside their phones and form meaningful connections in real life.
Adopting digital well-being habits increases kids’ focus and attention span, prevents them from getting exhausted, and reduces distraction.
This is proven by the study that showed kids who use their smartphones twice or thrice a day are much more focused than those who check their phones every few minutes.
Kids who don’t focus on better digital well-being habits continue to get negatively impacted by technology’s overuse.
This overuse of technology increases kids’ anxiety, burnout, and dependence on it for emotion regulation.
Suppose kids continue to use technology to distract themselves. In that case, their mental and physical well-being quickly begins to decline, and they are less likely to work on studying and engaging in extracurricular activities.
This is why parents must instill digital citizenship in their children at a young age so that it becomes instinctive. They can do this by using monitoring apps.
So, concentrating on healthy digital habits reduces the risks of these ailments.
Monitoring apps have become a lucrative business to help parents instill digital responsibility. They make smartphones less disruptive and allow users to turn off distracting notifications or block apps that waste time.
Sure, sometimes monitoring apps can make it hard for kids to live their lives without being under surveillance, but this is okay as long as they are under 18 and have to live by their parents’ rules.
Unless parents can guarantee that their teens have had plenty of training and are able to live a digitally responsible life online independently, they will have to rely on monitoring apps for the time being.
Related: Top 5 Parental Control Apps
Take A Friendly Approach When Monitoring Kids
Despite the insurmountable evidence showing the validity, utility, and effectiveness of monitoring apps, some kids will still be put off by the idea of having a surveillance tool on their phone that tracks their every move throughout the day.
Having a kid’s point of view on this is necessary because unless you put yourself in your kids’ shoes, you won’t be able to get where they are coming from.
So, if you and your partner are at a crossroads, approach this by removing all prejudices from the equation and starting with a topic you both can agree on.
That subject matter is internet safety. You and your child can both agree that internet safety is necessary, so start the conversation in a friendly manner, reminding your child about the Internet in case they forget.
Remind them that your installing a monitoring app is for their safety, so their phone is safe from strangers and scammers trying to harass, bully, or cheat your child into handing over their personal information.
By having a friendly outlook on this situation, you and your child can agree much quicker, and your kid might even welcome the idea of being tracked.
Recommend A Parental Monitoring App That Respects Privacy
Lastly, the right way to monitor your kids is to use a phone monitoring app for parents who respect privacy. That app is XNSPY.
It is easy to use, doesn’t share data, and deletes all collected data after 30 days.
XNSPY also records both the screens of teens and their physical surroundings while protecting their online experience.
Cyberbullying, phishing scams, and malware attacks are mostly carried out over social media. Because XNSPY works in the background, parents can safeguard their children against such threats without needing physical access to their devices and without alerting them.
Since parents can always remotely monitor their children’s activity, they won’t have to worry about their kids’ online actions but can still protect them from the aforementioned risks.
Parents can select any of the monitoring features on their dashboard to select what aspect of their child’s device they want to monitor. These features are:
– Screen Usage/ Installed Apps Blocking
XNSPY shows you how much time your child spends on their phone and on which particular apps. You can then block the apps your child is excessively addicted to to manage their screen time.
– Web History Monitoring
If you are concerned that your children are spending too much time online and accessing sexual or violent content, this app will come in handy.
The app displays the total number of visitors, the time and date of the most recent visit, and any stored bookmarks. It even shows web history that has been wiped clean from the monitored smartphone.
The dashboard’s left menu offers you access to XNSPY’s internet history tracking feature as well as the rest of the child monitoring features. Remember that you must be signed in to your dashboard to view your children’s browsing history.
– Ambient Recording
One of XNSPY’s useful features for protecting youngsters is the ambient recording functionality. Parents must be particularly vigilant in protecting their children when they are visiting friends alone or going to an unsafe part of town.
Using XNSPY’s ambient recording, parents can rapidly listen to and record their children’s physical environment to ensure they are safe and not with bad company. This promotes safety and peace of mind for parents.
Many monitoring systems lack this capability, making it one of XNSPY’s widely adopted features for ensuring kids’ safety in the real world and not just online.
– Screen Recording
You can also access the Screen Recorder function from your XNSPY account, which monitors everything that happens on a user’s smartphone. Using the Screen Recorder feature, parents can get a detailed picture of the kind of conversations their children are having and with whom.
Since this tool captures screenshots from all social networking sites, parents do not have to create individual accounts for every social media site and manually follow their kids online or send them friend requests to view their posts. It will even work if your kids have blocked your account on social media.
It not only logs messages sent and received through instant messaging applications, but it also displays activities on the user’s social network profile whenever they log in to the account without hiding any information.
This includes your kids’ social media posts, their followers’ lists, the accounts they follow, and the searches they enter.
The Screen Recorder makes this possible by taking screenshots of the users’ phones every few seconds, allowing parents to remotely check on their kids whenever they feel necessary.
It also helps bypass the phone’s security and encryption to ensure no messages are overlooked.
To know more about how you can use XNSPY to your aid, visit their official website.
Monitoring Apps May Not Be For Everybody, But They Should Be
I don’t blame you if you don’t find the appeal in tracking your kids all the time using monitoring apps, but after reading this, your viewpoint should be impacted, hopefully, and you can finally see why so many parents swear by them.
They offer great utility in the real world, are practical, and are easy to use.
With monitoring apps, you can decrease the impact of excessive phone use and teach your kids to be better digital citizens so their online habits are responsible.