Six Best Parental Control Apps for Android

Parental Control Apps for AndroidWhen you give your child a smartphone, you give them the world –  access to a wide world of information, people and possibilities, anyway. That world can come with a lot of fun and education. But it also comes with a lot of risk. The possibilities are endless, but so are the dangers to your children when they immerse themselves.

At the same time, when you send your child out into the world today you no longer have to worry about not knowing where they are. Technology allows parents to monitor their children’s locations with smartphone apps and GPS technology.

Today, there are many free and premium apps on the market designed to help parents monitor their children’s online behavior and physical locations. How do you choose the right app for your child’s android phone? How do you prevent them from downloading the wrong apps or media? Which apps will let you know where your child is at any given moment of the day? Which apps help you know when your child is being cyberbullied on social media? In this blog post we’ll break down six of the more popular parental control apps for Android so you can choose the one that is right for your family.

Related: Cyber Safety Tips for Kids – Preventing Cyberbullying and Inappropriate “Friends”

Top Six Apps for Android Parental Control

MamaBear App: MamaBear is your all-in-one family safety app providing parents information to worry less and encourage larger boundaries for kids to explore more. This app is especially good for kids that are first time smartphone users and new to social media. The app allows kids to keep parents updated with simple check in buttons with added emoticons, “Come Get Me” or “Emergency” notifications. MamaBear allows parents to know their child’s current and recent locations, setup arrival and departure alerts for places like school, home and practice or know when they exceed a preset driving speed. Our favorite feature is a time saver from trolling our kid’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. Parents can set up alerts to monitor only the important stuff like new friends/follows, words on your programmed restricted words list, uploaded photos and tags.

The Kids Place: Kids Place is an app launcher with parental controls and child lock especially nice for shared devices. It protects your personal data and restricts kids to apps you have approved for them. Kids Place also prevents children from downloading new apps, making phone calls, texting or performing other actions that can cost you money. It includes convenient features for parents such as auto app restart and is useful for small kids who accidentally exit launched apps.

Kid Mode: Kid Mode puts all your child’s favorite Android apps in one place also good for shared devices. With the app’s child lock feature, kids stay safely in Kid Mode – the app prevents accidental in-app purchases, deleted texts, or confusing ad clicks. Kid Mode comes with fun games and videos customized for every child’s age, an art studio where kids can paint, color and draw, illustrated storybooks that family members can read and record, a video mail feature that lets kids exchange short messages with family, weekly activity emails on what your kids have been playing and learning and more.

Norton Family: Norton Family with parental controls helps you protect your child from online threats while you’re on the go. Protect your kids from inappropriate web content, unsafe texting and unsuitable mobile apps. The app allows users to track the websites kids visit or attempt to visit, block access to inappropriate websites, setup custom email alerts to notify you when your kids attempt to do something they shouldn’t. A premium version of the app with additional features is available for a fee.

MMGuardian Parental Control: MMGuardian Parental Control enables parents to lock your child’s phone via a simple text message, set time restrictions to limit use, eg: during school hours, prevent your child texting and driving, block incoming calls and texts, monitor alarming text messages, control which applications can be used and when, then receive a daily report on your child’s phone usage.

Screen Time: Screen Time is a parental control app that allows you to monitor and manage the time spent on your family’s tablets and phones. Screen Time is not as invasive as many of the parental control apps available, so it is well suited to families with older children and teenagers, as well as younger children. The app’s features include daily time limits on selected apps, bedtime curfew on selected apps, lights out curfew on all apps, school time curfew on selected apps and more.

There are many great tools on the Google Play app market that can help parents make the most of smartphones and keep their families safe at the same time. Arm yourself with knowledge so you can make the most educated app choices for your Android devices.

 Image Credit: Techradar 

Comparing Family Safety Apps: MamaBear and Life360

Mamabear Family Safety AppChoosing the right family safety app isn’t easy. There are a number of  great options on the market today providing parents some peace of mind. MamaBear App and Life360 are two top choices many families consider.  While both apps have similar features when it comes to monitoring a child’s location using a smartphone or other mobile device, there are some key differences between the apps. Let’s discuss what makes MamaBear and Life360 similar and different.

Similarly, the MamaBear and Life360 app offers parents the ability see their children’s current and recent locations. Both apps also allow kids to check in with parents using the app. They also allow parents to set automatic alerts to track when their kids come and go from places they frequently visit (school, soccer practice, friends’ houses, etc.).

Both apps have some key differences as well.

Here’s a breakdown of the ways in which these two Family Safety Apps differ:

– Mamabear offers social media monitoring.  For example, with MamaBear a parent can receive alerts when a child makes a new friend on Facebook, follows someone new or uploads a photo on Instagram, gets tagged or @mentioned in a photo, message or at a location on Facebook or Instagram.  The restricted words list allows parents to be notified to words or phrases that are posted on their child’s Facebook or Instagram page. The list can include inappropriate language or words that may indicate bullying.

Related: Protecting Kids from Internet Stranger Danger

– MamaBear offers driving speed monitoring for teens. Parents receive an alert when their child drives or rides over a preset speed limit that tells them how fast they were going and where they were when they exceeded the preset limit. You can also view the child’s speeding history.

– MamaBear offers a custom child view. Kids can check in with parents with emoticons or send a quick “come get me” or “emergency” notification from a different view with a child profile log in.  Kids can also customize their view of the app with wallpaper selections.

– Life360 offers a premium version along with their free app. The premium version of Life360 comes with access to a 24/7 advisor connecting you to a real person who can direct emergency responders to your location, give you personalized crisis care, access your emergency profile, etc. The premium version of the app also includes stolen phone protection.

– Life360 has the same map view regardless of the family role as a child or parent allowing parents to share their location if they choose. The app also adds crime updates and sex offenders plotted on the map.

More recently, the app added “Circles,”  a feature to create custom groups of people to share location and messages.

Two great family safety apps with many different features filling different needs for families. Choose the right one for your family and let us know how it goes!

Helping You Get Started with MamaBear 2.0

MamaBear 2.0You spoke and we listened. A new-and-improved version of the MamaBear Family Safety App inspired by suggestions from our users is now available.

MamaBear 2.0 features a number of enhancements that will be of interest to both children and parents:

  • Parents will love the larger map view with one-tap access to all information and more details on a child’s activities, such as their current and recent locations and any recent alerts received.
  • School and safe place alerts are now combined into a simpler feature with notifications letting parents know when their child has arrived or left places. The arrival alert to safe places provides additional comfort to parents.
  • The new view when a child’s logged in makes MamaBear more entertaining for kids and supports the app as a family communication tool. Enhancement to the check-in feature uses fun emoticons to share how they’re feeling.  And it’s customizable allowing children to choose their own wallpaper for the app background.

How to Get the Update

Visit the Apple App Store on your iOS devices and the Google Play Store on your Android devices to install or update the MamaBear App. Remember to update the app on your children’s phones for optimal use of the new features and be sure your children are appropriately logged in.

If it’s your first time installing MamaBear:

1. Download the app on the primary parent’s phone and create an account to add your family members.  Add the phone number and/or e-mail address you want to monitor as the child.

2. Install  the MamaBear App on the child’s phone. Log In with your child’s phone number and your password. The child’s view of the app is different than yours.

3. Be sure MamaBear App stays put. If your child closes MamaBear out of memory or deletes the app on their phone, you won’t receive location points. Check settings on your child’s phone to make sure location services is turned on and background refresh is on. Updated locations are controlled from MamaBear being active on your child’s phone.

Here’s a video to help set up parental restrictions on iPhone to prevent deleting apps.

Related: New Phones – Happy Kids – Anxious Parents

Helpful Tips

  •  Added guardians will have the same parental view as the main account holder. The main account holder and guardians will only be able to view children’s location and alerts, not each others.
  • You can monitor Facebook and Instagram activity without your child logging in to the app. You’ll simply need their login and password for each social site. Build a restricted words list to be alerted to inappropriate language, indications of hate or bullying.
  • Set Up location, driving and social media alerts. On the parent’s MamaBear version, tap “Settings” and select your child. You will see the easy-to-follow options for setting up alerts for location, social media and driving. When entering an address – keep it simple. In many cases, you don’t need to enter the full address.  We use Google to look up what we think you mean.  Sometimes just a place name works for the address to pop-up an accurate “did you mean” box.

Related: When Parents Monitor Kids’ Instagram

Tell Us More

We couldn’t have developed MamaBear 2.0 without the invaluable feedback of our friends and fans. But our work isn’t done – the team at MamaBear will continue to invite the suggestions of our users so that we can continually work to fill as many family safety needs as we can. The MamaBear Family Safety App provides parents with  ways to communicate with and protect their children in the age of digital parenting.

 Your feedback is important to us. Stay in touch and let us know what you think of MamaBear 2.0.  Email info@localhost with your questions, comments and ideas.