These days there are so many options when it comes to parental control software and applications. And it's really confusing to figure out which one is the best one because almost all of them say that they are the best. So, which parental control software is the best? I'm going to let you know in this video. Hello friends, I'm Sarah Kimmel, your friendly neighborhood tech expert.
I've been an IT manager. for over 19 years supporting hundreds of small to medium-sized businesses. I'm also a mom to a tween and teen with over 50 connected devices in my home. I break down the tech talk to help you understand and manage the technology in your home. You can find me helping families with tech problems on TV news, podcasts, Instagram, Facebook, and my website, FamilyTechZone.com.
Hello and welcome to my channel Family Tech where I give you all of the information that you need to help you manage and control the technology that is in your home so that you can keep your family safe, that you can use technology to the best of its ability and have fun. So this is a very tech positive space. I really love technology. I've been in IT for over 18 years so it's in my blood and I love to help families understand and manage the technology in their home so you can feel confident that you have the best solutions in place today we're talking about parental control applications and it kind of need to lay the groundwork before we get into the individual apps because there are a lot I'm not gonna cover every single one you know new ones are popping up all the time I am just gonna cover the ones that I think are the best because I literally have tried them all and I want you to benefit from my experience in all of the different applications. First what we want to talk about is subscribing to my channel so make sure you're subscribed and you hit that notification bell.
I do upload every Thursday so make sure that you are notified of these new uploads so that you can help your family get the most out of technology. That out of the way, do all the liking and subscribing things. First I need to lay the groundwork about parental control applications because there are really three types and you need all three types. I did already talk about the four layers of parental control so if you've missed that video definitely check that out.
Make sure that you understand all these different layers so that when you get to these applications you know exactly which layer you're protecting and you can continue. protecting each layer with these different applications and i'm going to get into which applications are going to be better at different levels we'll get into a little bit of the hardware parental control devices as well let's jump right in to these three different types of parental controls first we have monitoring so monitoring is going to just show you Things that are happening on the device, so whether it is instant messages or text messages or browsing history or YouTube history, monitoring is going to give you insight into all of these different things. When you have a monitoring app, it will either maybe notify you of things that are concerning or you'll just be able to look through the reports and figure out, okay, he wasn't supposed to be using that or things like that.
So you can monitor how much time they've spent. You can... have all sorts of reports on when they've been on their phone or what apps they were using during their time on the phone and what was happening inside those app. Monitoring is definitely a very important part of any parental control system that you're going to put in place. The second part of parental controls is filtering.
So filtering is going to help protect your child from anything on the internet or anything that you might not want them to see. any inappropriate content, inappropriate websites, that's all going to be controlled with filtering. And you can usually set different kinds of filters.
We'll get into that in a little bit. But so the second one is filtering. So we have monitoring and we have filtering. The third, we have management. I also like to say maybe control is how you're going to limit their access.
So limiting what apps they can download or limiting... what they can do inside those apps or limiting how much time they're spending on their phone or how much time they're spending in individual apps. So that's everything that you're going to get through control or management.
So those are the three areas we've got monitoring, we have filtering. We have management. Now that we kind of understand the three different areas, because some of these applications are going to be better at one area than the other. I like to have kind of different applications at each level and at each. Layer of parental control the last thing I want to talk about about laying the groundwork here is that androids and Apple devices?
Handle these very very differently my recommendation for a child is an Android device Because you do have a lot more options into the monitoring Portion the management portion can be handled pretty well across the board for Android and for iOS but for the monitoring portion, having an Apple device for your kid is going to be a serious hindrance into that area of parental control. And the reason is Apple is so concerned with privacy, even if it's the privacy of a 10 year old. So they don't allow third party applications, windows into these other areas or applications on the device parental control apps that I'll get into have to kind of come up with really creative ways in order to have monitoring on iOS but it doesn't work as well and you're not going to have a you know true window into what they're doing on their device so it doesn't matter what device you have as the adult what really matters is what the child has because you can manage an Android device with an Apple device the same that you can manage it with an Android device.
The opposite is definitely not true. If your child has an iOS device, you are going to have a very hard time if you have an Android device to manage that device. If you both have iOS, you have slightly more ability to manage that, but you still won't have a very good window into the monitoring portion.
So that's my little disclaimer. So for... The kids definitely start them out if they're getting a smartphone start them out with Android Like I said, it doesn't matter what you have you can have the iPhone But as long as the kid has an Android device, you will be able to have all the monitoring that you want That's my disclaimer.
First. I want to get into your free options so for Apple devices your free option is called screen time it is built into iOS and You can set up your child's Apple ID under yours in a family sharing plan. I do have a blog post exactly how to do that.
So you set up their Apple ID. Do not set up their phone with your Apple ID because then it's gonna make this whole thing impossible. But if you set up their Apple ID for their device, you can set them up in family sharing. It's just in the settings of your iOS device.
And you can control or manage a lot of the things on that iOS device, including screen time, how long they're using the device for, how long they're using individual apps for, and shut it down at the end of those time frames. You can also make sure they're not downloading any applications from the app store that you have not approved. The one caveat about that is once you do approve an application, you can't take it back so if you approve instagram and then decide later that you don't want them to be able to have instagram they can download it and you will not be notified that they've downloaded again at that point it's best to just have them download the application and put a one minute time frame on it and have it shut down at the end of the minute um unfortunately there's no way to just take back that approval um through ios just yet that's the free option for apple um Again, if you don't have an Apple device, it's going to be very hard for you to set up those screen time protections. You can set it up on their device and protect it with a pin code, but unless you're really good at pin codes, sometimes kids are pretty smart and they will get around those pin codes.
It's just easier if you have an iOS device as well to manage that. But the Android version, so free... for iOS a screen time Android is Google Family Link and there are two different applications there's the parent application and there's the kids application and so there's a kite and there's two kites pay attention to which one you're downloading once you download the parent application and again you can download it on iOS or on an Android device so but once you download the parent application it will walk you through exactly how to set that up for your child's Android device so you'll have to install it on their android device it will make you log out of any additional So if they have their school account on there, you will have to log out of the school account, but you can add that school account back on their device after you've set up Google Family Link.
Another thing people get really concerned about is if their child is over 13. What it's going to say is they have the ability to uninstall or disable this access at any time. You will be notified if they do disable Google Family Link. Unfortunately, 13 year olds in the tech world are able to make their own decisions.
This is actually due to COPPA restrictions, so the Children's Online Protection and Privacy Act that expires at age 13. That's why most social media applications actually require you to be 13 to join them and why kids are just given the keys to the kingdom at 13. Where is legislation proposed to... change that age but nothing is being happening with that at the moment. Google Family Link is the free version on Android. Again same thing it's gonna allow you to make sure any applications are approved by you before they are installed.
It will also notify you when they when applications are installed even if it's been approved in the past. It also allows you to limit what they can see in the Google Play Store. Apple, the same thing, it'll limit what they can see in the Apple Store.
And then you can also set safe search on YouTube and safe search on Chrome through Google Family Link. It also controls any Chromebooks that you have. So Google Family Link is something you'll really want to get set up if your child has this.
any kind of Google account so those are your free options now let's get into the paid options let's dig into the individual apps now the first one I want to talk about is bark I really like bark I use it for my children's devices I like it for the monitoring portion I actually don't even use the management portion but bark does have a way to manage applications on your child's device as well. But I don't use that portion. I only use it for the monitoring of social media and text messages.
It will also, it will monitor anything that my daughter draws. So if she draws something inappropriate, I'll be notified for that. If she takes a screenshot, I get notifications for bad words that are in the screenshot. So it's really smart in what it can parse. language and everything like that and so it can monitor direct messages on snapchat it can monitor instant messages on Instagram lots of other applications social media applications so that's why I really like bark is for that window into the monitoring portion one kind of downside is especially with text messages it will only give you kind of a short intro and an outro of whatever was concerning.
So say there's three texts and the concerning thing was in the middle but you don't get the full picture of like what the conversation was about. So you just get alerts from BARC and it will tell you whether it was flagged for bullying or for sexual content or for violence or things like that. So it's going to tell you kind of what the item was flagged for.
And there's been some really funny flags that have happened that I've been, you know, totally cracked up about because it will see an image and think there's something inappropriate in it, but it's completely benign. But I would rather be notified and have it be benign than have it not be benign and not be notified. That's what I really use Bark for, is for that monitoring portion. Like I said, it does have the ability to manage the device as well.
But it does so with a VPN and I don't like the way that works. So a phone can only have one VPN running and I use the Verizon VPN. So that's going to disable anything that's going to happen through Bark because I've got the VPN running through Verizon. Only one VPN allowed at a time for a device because as I mentioned in that previous video, definitely check that out if you're not sure what a VPN is. It will take the device and put it on a different network virtually.
It takes it off of any Wi-Fi controls that you've put on here. My daughter's VPN is only running when she is on self-service. So Bark is about $100 for the year. I have a discount code right in the description. So definitely if you want to get Bark for I think $80 a year, go ahead and click on the discount code and...
get access to that discount. My next favorite parental control application is called Boomerang Parental Controls and I found Boomerang because it was the only one that was gonna give me full listing reports of YouTube videos watched which I was blown away I loved that aspect of Boomerang Parental Controls. Boomerang Parental Controls is what I use for additional management.
Like I said I use Google Family Link for some management of applications but I use boomerang to enforce that so actually when my children download an application I have to approve it in two different locations I have to approve it on Google family link and then I also have to approve it in boomerang what I also like about boomerang it's gonna give me GPS to show where my child's location is it also has an additional feature that no other parental control app has and that is the ability to shut down access to safe mode. This works on only Samsung devices because it uses Samsung Knox. If your child tries to circumvent the parental controls by rebooting the phone or going into safe mode, this is going to prevent them from doing that, which is fantastic. Boomerang also has some monitoring.
It monitors text messages. I can see entire text message threads. If your child is getting a text message from somebody that they've never texted before it's not in their contacts you will get flagged for that saying this person texted your child and they've never been they've never texted them before so that's really helpful to get those flags to see if you know they're meeting somebody new that you don't approve of there's a lot of really great things about boomerang parental controls and it is one of the least expensive of the bunch boomerang parental curls Boomerang parental controls is about $30 for the year and it covers up to 10 devices so that is definitely the least expensive one that we've got and as I mentioned before I love Boomerang I definitely use that in conjunction with bark and with Google Family Link there's a lot of parental control stuff going on in my house the next application I want to talk about is our pact oh you are packed and you know this one is gonna have kind of the same features that all of the other ones have it's gonna have monitoring it's going to have management and it's going to have GPS location one thing I really liked about our pact that I think makes it slightly better for monitoring Apple devices is the fact that it does screenshots for monitoring and it can do screenshots with Apple and with Android so something like bark actually works based on backups so When your Apple device is away from home and they're doing something inappropriate, they're sending text messages and they delete that before they get home.
The way that Bark monitors an Apple device is through backups on a computer. So you have to have a computer with Bark software running on it at home. So anything that happens when your child is off the Wi-Fi and they delete it before they get home, you'll never know about that.
because of Apple's privacy. So they can't do anything on the phone itself. They have to wait until the phone backs up and then it reads the information from that backup. That's how they kind of get around Apple's privacy.
So they can't do it on the phone. They have to do it from the backup. So that's why I like R-Packed maybe just a little bit better for an Apple device because it uses screenshots. Again, it's not going to catch everything because the screenshots are at specific intervals. If your child is really smart and can do things really quickly before the interval that it's going to take the screenshot, you're still going to miss a lot of things.
Again, this is more of a limitation on Apple than it is on the parental control software itself. So, ARPACT is really great for that, I think. That's it.
The kind of specialized feature, like I said, they all monitor, they all do management, but R-PACT has that screenshot feature, which I really liked. R-PACT is $10 a month for up to 20 devices, about $120 a year. That will cover management of 20 devices.
So another parental control app that is very popular is called Custodio. It's with a Q, like Custodio. It's kind of a hard one to pronounce.
but again that one offers management monitoring there's nothing super special about that you know like with boomerang it's got that samsung um feature with rpac it's got those screenshots um so it's not necessarily super special um it just has all of the basic features um that's going be $55 a year for up to five devices a bit fewer devices but it is a little less expensive as well so custodio is one custodio is nice because it does actually cover a lot of other devices as well so custodio will cover your Windows computer and it will cover Chromebooks and Kindle fire and things like that so you know most of these other apps will only cover Android or iOS But Custodio does have a broader range of devices that it can cover. Bark also covers a couple more, but not as many as Custodio does. Finally, we also have MM Guardian, which again, GPS, monitoring, management, filtering.
But MM Guardian is $70 a year for up to five devices, so a little bit more expensive than Custodio. So if you're going to just go basic, I would probably choose Custodio over MM Guardian. Having mentioned all of those different parental control apps and the ones that I choose for my family, let's get into the parental control hardware. So there's a few devices that offer parental controls that will cover your entire Wi-Fi network.
One of the most popular is called Circle that you might have heard referred to as Circle by Disney. It is no longer affiliated with Disney. It never really was.
I have a whole blog post about... that but circle is not my favorite I tried it a couple times they sent me one and they actually sent me three each time it completely killed my network speeds and I have over 50 to 60 devices on my network speed is very important to me so the circle device killed my network speed they kept saying I had one that wasn't that was bad or whatever they kept saying that it was bad so they sent me another one finally after the third one i'm like don't send me anymore i don't think this works for me um circle also the newer generation makes you pay for parental control features i feel should be included in the device so if you want to set a bedtime or anything like that you're going to have to pay a monthly fee on top of the fee that you bought the hardware device for so not a fan of circle Another one that's kind of like that, you know, it just plugs into your network. If your kids want to circumvent the parental controls, they just unplug the device. You would be notified that they've unplugged it, but it doesn't prevent them from doing so. Another device that's kind of similar to that, Bark Home.
again talking about bark this is their hardware device that you can buy that goes on your network the monthly fee is kind of you know included in the fee that you're already paying if you're using bark for monitoring but it offers that management portion for your home Wi-Fi and kind of similar to circle where you can assign devices to different users so any of my devices doesn't have any time management but although maybe it should right but any of my children's devices have bedtimes and you know lock out after a specific amount of time or i can block different apps or websites to their devices and keep them open for my devices so both of those will also cover smart tvs which is something that's really helpful if you want to block youtube on a smart tv you can definitely do that through bark home or through circle My preference though on top of those is a Griffin router. So the Griffin is actually a Wi-Fi router itself and it has parental controls built into the router. So a kid can't get around it by just unplugging the router because if they unplug the router it's going to bring down the entire internet. So I love using the Griffin.
The speed is fantastic. The user interface is great. So like I said the Griffin router is a Wi-Fi router itself you can create a guest network and give you know any of your kids friends that password so they're not on your main network and it will automatically filter their devices when they connect to that guest network you can block devices from connecting so as soon as somebody you know if they've got the password they type in the password and it's going to block access to the internet until you manually approve it so that's a setting that you can create so Griffin has a lot of really awesome features. I'll do a complete video on just the Griffin router itself But that is my preference another option is Netgear also has parental controls built in It actually uses the circle software So again, if you use a neck your router you may have to pay for those bedtimes or anything If you want to set that through the neck your router if you bought one that has the circle parental controls built in. So those are kind of the hardware parental controls.
I know I've thrown a lot at you, so hopefully you've got a little bit better idea of the different parental control apps and what they can do. We'll do a whole breakdown as to which apps can monitor which social media networks and which devices, so stay tuned for that video. but hopefully this gets you a little more direction into which app that you want to install. Go ahead and subscribe if this was useful for you. I have a lot of tips that I'm going to be sharing over the next, you know, several years every Thursday.
So definitely subscribe, hit that notification bell and I will see you next Thursday.