As the world becomes increasingly digital, life has become robotic. With the ease of a click, everything and anything is possible. But parents' concern for their children will never change. Hence parental control has become an essential attribute of online life.
What is parental control and does my child need it?
Smart Parental Control allows you to manage your kids’ mobile devices, see how they spend time online, and make sure your internet rules apply even when your children are connected to the internet away from home.
Parental controls are designed to help protect children from inappropriate content online, such as pornography or other adult content. These controls can be used in many ways, e.g. to help ensure that your children access only age-appropriate content, to set usage times and to monitor activity. The best use of parental control can be to provide disturbance-free studying time to your kids.
Parental control apps for 2023
The best parental control apps can give a better understanding of how your children spend time online. Knowing your child’s physical location, scheduling and monitoring their screen time are some of the functions provided by these apps.
Net Nanny
It has a modern, intuitive design and excellent web-filtering technology that analyzes pages rather than just blindly blocking them and lets you create filters of your own. The iOS version lets you block more than 100 apps on your kid's phone; the Android one lets you block them all. The built-in App Advisor gives you a heads-up on which new apps you should watch out for.
The only thing Net Nanny can't do on a smartphone is monitor calls or texts. No apps we tested can do that on iOS, but a couple still do on Android.
Qustodio
It supports iOS and Android devices, Amazon Fire tablets, Macs, PCs and Chromebooks. It also lets you set time limits for individual apps and individual devices. This service's location tracking works on both iOS and Android, as do its geofencing and a Family Locator feature that shows you where all your kids are at once. You can manage about 6,000 apps on iOS, and all Android apps, but the web filtering doesn't work that well on either mobile platform.
Norton Family
The power and features are ideal for Android (and Windows) households with many children, offering nearly every feature a parent could want from one of the best parental control apps, including recently added geofencing.
This service's location-tracking, time-scheduling, web-filtering and monitoring capabilities work on both iOS and Android. It has a feature called School Time to keep children focused during remote-learning class time.
But app management doesn't work in the iOS app at all.
OurPact
It used to be one of the most powerful parental control apps for iOS but now it has been whittled down a bit by Apple. It gets kids involved in managing the daily allowance of screen time that you give them, and it does a good job of scheduling. Its Premium Plus plan lets you get screenshots from the child's device, even on iOS, and you can block messaging and texting apps even if you can't read the messages themselves.
Despite these drawbacks, OurPact's well-designed interface and intuitive features make it a joy to use, especially if your kids have iPhones.
Google Family Link
This is the only option that’s totally free. It gives parents control over the system permissions each individual app has on a child's Android device. It also lets you decide which kind of apps, or any apps at all, your child can download from Google Play.
There's no iOS version of the Google Family Link child app, but parents can use either iOS or Android to monitor kids' devices.
Mobicip
It offers an excellent range of parental control features with three very affordable subscription pricing options. Parents can keep tabs on their child's location, monitor the YouTube videos they watch, and manage their screen time limits.
The premium plan also offers social media monitoring.
Happinetz
It provides safe internet for kids. Happinetz when connected to your home router wired or wirelessly filters age-inappropriate content and comes with a personalised screen time manager.
Plug the Happinetz Box into your home router and download the Happinetz App. You’re now ready to manage internet screen time, filter out age-inappropriate content and get insights into your kids' internet activity.
Read more about Happinetz here. You can compare parental control apps here.
Do parental control apps work?
Yes, The Happinetz Filtering System serves as a guardian for your children's online activities. It sends all app and website requests from their devices to a central filtering system, which determines whether the requests should be permitted or denied.
Why parental control apps are good?
Here are 8 reasons to use parental control for your kids:
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They help monitor your kids’ devices
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They allow you to manage what your kids find on search engines
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They can block certain features of games your kids can access
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They may allow you to track your kids’ location
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They help establish good cyber safety habits
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They can set screen time limits
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They can prevent too much private information from going online through social check-ins, reviews etc.
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They can help back up data
Can I control my kid’s mobile and spy?
Happinetz provides you insights on all websites the child has opened and the time spent there. However, it doesn’t believe in controlling your child and invading their privacy. Hence, the exact pages are not monitored. It gives you a chance to start a conversation with your child and promotes a healthy parenting bond.
Can I monitor my kid remotely?
Happinetz allows you to monitor through its insights feature. It provides an overview of your child's internet activities. You can get usage by device or content type.
Dangerous apps that should not be on your kid’s phone
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Social media apps like TikTok
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Messaging apps like Snapchat
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Violent games like PUBG
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Games with chat feature like Roblox
FAQs
Can I control my child’s phone from mine?
You install a parental control app on your kid's phone and parents can check everything that their kid does on his phone remotely from the parent's device. Also, read this.
Can parental control see WhatsApp messages?
WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption to prevent anyone from seeing your messages. Regardless of that, parental control apps can decrypt messages. Check more here
Which phone has the most parental control?
Happinetz can be downloaded to any parent phone and access up to 10 devices irrespective of their UIs.
Which is the best parental control software for my kid?
Happinetz Box once connected to your main router provides safe internet for kids and monitors screen time management.
