During teenage, a child starts to explore a whole new world, new friendships, new activities, and new thinking. During this time they do a lot of weird things, unaware of their consequences. Especially during this era of unlimited access to social media and other online stuff making things more complex. To prevent the children to make some false decisions, it is important for the parents to intervene without disturbing their privacy too much. Debate on this intervention is an ongoing phenomenon if it is justified or not to spy children online activities for any reason.
In Support Of Tracking Kids Online Activities:
It is the responsibility of parents to guide their children towards the right path and to guide them what is good or wrong for them. In the growing age, children mostly the teenagers think they know what is best for them, but most of the time the reality is contrary to what they said or think. Especially in the age of unlimited media access and unlimited freedom associated with it, things are becoming trickier. In the recent survey carried out by CBS News revealed that 20% of the teen said they had sent their nude or semi-nude photos to someone else without knowing the consequences. Can any sane parent allow their children to do such activities for the sake of privacy? Tracking activities of children can play an important role in shaping up their life in a much better way.
In Opposition to Tracking Kids Online Activities:
The Voices against tracking a teenager’s online activities carry some weight as well. To understand the consequences of this spying in the name of parenting, one needs to place itself in the shoes of children. What would be your reaction if someone else does the same spying on your online activities? For example, how painful it would be if you just came to know that your boss is spying on you and monitoring every move of yours for a long time. This will surely create a sense of mistrust and dominated and broken. Same is true for your children, they are even more sensitive to such activities. The best thing between you and your child is a bond of trust rather than being his boss kind of attitude.
These pros and cons of monitoring children activities aside, it is important to maintain a delicate balance between monitoring and parenting. Below are the possible ways you can track your kid’s online activities without disturbing their privacy.
4 Ways to monitors your Child’s Online Activities
Use of Parenting Apps
Use of parenting apps is possibly the best way to monitor the online activities of your child. These apps have some distinct advantages compared to other ways. Few of these advantages are as follows.
- The fastest way to get relevant information.
- Very affordable
- Very difficult to track for your children.
- Provides even the minor information about the website your child use the most.
- You can get appropriate information about your child’s online interest.
Web Browser Filters
Best way to monitor and control your kids’ online activities is to limit its access to websites you think is going to harm them. After restricting limit to harmful sites there will be no need to spy further and this way their privacy won’t disturb. Following features make it the first choice for the parents.
- This method allows configuring your web browser to a specific proxy.
- Your child will see a blank page whenever he tried to access the restricted content.
Router Control And Monitoring
Monitoring every device your children possess always going to be a tough task. With parental control routers, it is now very easy to control the abusive and harmful content for all types of devices connected to this parental router.
- With parental control routers, parents can filter and block access to specific online content for all devices connected with this router.
- Parents can also set up a time schedule to access the internet for a specific time only.
Parental Control Software For Computers
Monitoring through apps is feasible for mobile users only. Parental control software is designed to monitor online activities for household computers.
- Parents can impose time restriction and can block access to specific content through parental control software.
- Some advance software even blocks the attempts to bypass this software security by your kids.
Conclusion and Caution
Relationship between parents and children is one of the most sacred one among all the relations. Trust and understanding are the most important pillars to sustain this relationship. It is the responsibility of parents to protect their kids in all aspects and fields of life including the online activities. Children need to understand that by no means parents want to harm their privacy by using these parental monitoring ways but to protect and guide them to live a better life.
Caution: The above-given ways to monitor and control online activities are only for parents to protect their children from all spectrum of threats emanating from the online sources. Using these methods to spy on the private life of other persons is illegal and should be refrained at all cost.
