These days almost every child as young as 11 years has a personal smartphone, which means they have access to unlimited apps and all sorts of information. Teens tend to act older than their age, they think they have grown up and can do whatever they want. Which means they feel they are old enough to be using any dating, sexting or adult app they want. And what’s troublesome is that most such apps have an age limit of 12 years, so there’s no stopping them. Well, one thing you can do if you want to monitor your teen’s online activities would be to use parental control apps, to stop them from using apps not meant for their age. But what apps exactly count as the age-inappropriate or adult and what’s the risk involved?
Which apps to monitor?
There are countless apps on the Google Play and iTunes app store that may not be very healthy for your children especially the pre-teens. Your children can download these apps out of curiosity or to look cool, but these apps may expose them prematurely to information that their young minds won’t be able to process duly. These apps function on self-marketing; this can make your child post explicit pictures in order to get maximum ‘likes’ from other people.
A few examples of such apps could be Tinder, Snapchat, Sext Messenger, etc.
Dangers of using these apps
First, you need to know what inappropriate apps teens’ use nowadays. Research has found that thousands of teenagers especially the ones aged 15 or under are using “adult” dating apps such as Tinder every day. The aim of such apps is only to hookup and dating, which might be inappropriate for your teen or pre-teen. Tinder requires your location to find you a match near you home and who knows any predator might use this information to harm, harass and threaten you and your family?
The use of teen dating apps can make children vulnerable to be contacted by adults who might harm them emotionally or physically since the age limits are often poorly moderated. In 2014, the same survey also found that about 1/3rd of the children also spent up to ten hours or more on Snapchat, and contrary to their belief that those images would vanish for good, they were leaked online by a third party!
These apps also increase the risk of cyber-bullying; last year 35% of teens reported to being cyber bullied which is double the number than 2013! What is more frightening is that these numbers are only growing and will not stop until parents take additional measures to safeguard their children online.
FamilyTime has the perfect solution!
What would you do to prevent your teens from using these apps? Check their phones daily? Not a good option, it would only create rebellion from their side as well as trust issues. Talk to them about avoiding inappropriate apps? It might work at start, but they’re teens, they’d do what they want! Secretly check their phone when they are not around? Very bad choice, if caught, it would create serious trust and privacy issues between you two!
So what do you do? Well, FamilyTime is here to help lessen your worries and keep your children safe. FamilyTime basically, lets you view all the apps installed on your teens’ smartphones and tabs. Once, you have all the apps in front of you, you can easily Blacklist any app you find inappropriate. Your teens will simply get a notification that they cannot use this app as it is not safe for them. You can also view their browsing history and bookmarks to see which websites they visit.
All you need to do is download FamilyTime-Dashboard for parents in your iPhone or Android phone from here and you’re good to go:
Teens would do anything that’s trending, no matter how awkward it becomes for them later on. They’d use any app just to ‘fin-in’, not realizing the sheer security and privacy risks involved. If you’re concerned about their safety but don’t want to damage the bond between you two; simply shake hands with the smart parenting! With FamilyTime you can not only monitor their cyber life but also control it!
So say hello to the digital parenting and make parenting a wonderful and easy ride with- FamilyTime parental monitoring!