Top 10 Mobile Apps to Keep Your Kids Safe
In today’s highly digitalized world, everyone seems to be carrying a smartphone, and that includes kids as well. If you entrust your kids with a smartphone, then you might as well use it to keep them safe too.
You can add a bunch of apps to your child’s smartphone to keep them safe in both the digital world and the real world. You can monitor their phone activity, teach them safety lessons, or even track their current location to ensure they stay away from harm.
In today’s post, I’m listing ten kids’ safety apps that will surely be able to keep them safe from various threats.
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1. TrueMotion Family Safe Driving
Irresponsible driving is a big concern for the parents of teens. No matter how much you teach your teens about driving safely, their teen instincts may kick in any time — leading to rogue driving. Not anymore though, with the help of TrueMotion you can not only track your teen’s driving habits but also motivate them to drive safely.
Just install the app on your teen’s phone and it will automatically track all your teen’s driving habits and rate all their trips. You can see their current location and how they drove to reach that location. For the rating, it records overspeeding, sudden breaks, phone usage during a ride, and a few other factors to give an accurate rating.
After the initial signup, you’ll have to tell the app how often you drive in a week. This information is used for accurate rating, so make sure you provide the right information and so do your teens. Afterward, you can use the gray button on the bottom left corner to start adding family members to track their driving habits.
App tracks the driving habits of all your family members and everyone can see the score of other members and compare. This basically creates a competition for the best score where your teen will be motivated to ride safely in order to beat other family members.
To sum it up, TrueMotion offers great tracking features to ensure your family members (especially teens) are driving safely, and at the same time create a sense of competition to motivate everyone to drive safely.
2. SPIN Safe Browser
A browser is a gateway to everything on the web, and the web is filled with inappropriate content for kids. If you are worried your kids might accidentally access something inappropriate on the web, then you should get SPIN. It’s a dead simple browser that blocks all types of inappropriate content on the web without any configuration need.
The filtering simply works. Just launch the browser and start exploring. If kids will try accessing any inappropriate website — either directly or through a link — it will block it. Some of the blocked content include adult content, drugs, alcohol, weapons, malware, phishing websites, proxy sites, gambling, and more.
Interestingly, SPIN Safe Browser allows YouTube, but it automatically blocks channels that show inappropriate content for kids. So your kids can safely enjoy using YouTube. Best of all, it has no private browsing mode, therefore your kids can’t do any hidden surfing.
The browser is based on Firefox open source code and you’ll notice its interface a bit similar to it. You can even install Firefox add-ons by going to Settings > Tools > Add-ons.
3. Family Locator by Sygic
Sygic Family keeps your family safe by allowing you to check the real-time location and the battery levels of your family members’ smartphones. You can also track your children’s whereabouts, or have them check-in periodically to let you know where they are and if they have arrived at their destination safely.
The app also has an in-built messaging system which lets you send messages for free over an Internet connection. You can also set Safe or Unsafe zones — a notification will be sent to you when they enter or leave these zones. There is also an SOS button available in this app, which lets you send out your exact location at the tap of the button. You never know when you might need it.
4. Life360: Find Family & Friends
Being able to track your kid’s location and chat with them anytime you like is probably the best way to keep them safe. And Life360 does an amazing job of keeping your whole family connected all the time. It’s a tracking app that keeps complete record of where your kids are currently and where they were the whole day. You can also send personal messages and even talk in group chats.
All the registered family members are shown on an interactive map in real-time and you can start a chat just by tapping on their profile. If you want to track multiple families or want to create separate groups for kids and adults, then there is also an option to create dedicated groups.
The tracking and chatting features are completely free, but if you want some additional control and features then there is a premium version as well. With Life360 Plus ($50/year) you can see tracking history from last 30 days, create location alerts, track a lost phone, get help in the emergency from real people, and even get roadside assistance.
5. FBI’s Child ID
FBI’s Child ID App is designed by the FBI for parents to keep their children’s photos and important data, such as their height, weight, eye and hair color which can be emailed to the authorities at the tap of a button. The app also includes safety checklists and advice for parents to help keep thier children safe.
6. Qustodio
Qustodio is a feature-rich parental control app to help you supervise the online activities of your kids. It allows you to keep an eye on how your kids use their devices or the installed apps, keep your kids safe from the risks of online harassment or cyber bullying, and manage your child’s device usage limit to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Some of the most prominent features of the app include a report of your child’s activities in last 30 days, adult-content block, setting time limit for games and app usage, YouTube monitoring, internet usage limit, and social media activity tracking among many others.
7. Kaspersky Safe Kids
A smartphone is a big responsibility, and as parents, you would want to make sure your children don’t go astray with their devices. The leading cybersecurity company Kaspersky offers a reliable all-in-one tracking and controlling tool for your child’s smartphone.
Just install the app on your child’s phone and you’ll be able to control it from a dedicated dashboard. This includes which apps and websites they can access and for how long.
Once installed, the app will ask you to create a pin. This pin will be used for securing the app from unauthorized access. When you are inside, you can follow step-by-step instructions to install Kaspersky SafeKids on your child’s particular device.
The app makes it easy for the parents to define rules and halt actions by force that go against the rules. Additionally, whenever your child tries to access anything restricted or crosses device usage limit, you’ll get a notification.
With the free version, it works as parental control app, but you can get more safety feature with a $16.99 yearly subscription. This includes child’s location tracking, call and SMS log, alerts to your email and phone, and detail reporting on app and internet usage.
8. Norton Family
From the famous anti-virus and online security providers comes the Norton Family app. It’s a feature-rich tool that gives parents the ability to monitor their young one’s online activities and create a balanced life for them by scheduling their screen time.
Some of the many kids online safety solutions it offers include providing parents with insights on their child’s internet activities like search terms and videos that they watch, blocking inappropriate sites, and flagging their suspicious activities so the parents can talk to them about it.
9. Zift Parental Control
Zift parental control technology – also known as Net Nanny – offers solid protection to your young ones against the risks of online abuse. It blocks unwanted apps, track targeted device’s activities in real-time, that too, for each child in your family, and helps you set a limit for the screen time.
One of the best features of the app are the intelligent filters that scroll through individual web pages and their content and works in real-time to decide if the pages are safe for kids or not. Moreover, you get efficient support as well as free weekly parenting updated from the app.
10. Bark
With an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard, Bark gives your kid a safe web browsing and smartphone usage experience. By using the app, you can monitor the text messages, emails, social media usage, and web browsing activities of your children.
Created on the basis of proper research and consultation from child psychologists, youth advisors, and digital media experts, the app gives you some of the best parental control features including web filters, screen time management, location tracking, clever algorithms that detect potential risks, and different alerts whenever there’s a suspicious activity.
Bonus: Safety for Kids
This is actually a game rather than an app, but it’s one of the best tools you can have to keep your kids safe. Knowledge is the key to safety, and this game provides exactly that. There are 12 chapters in the game that make your kids go through a different set of activities to learn what to do in different emergency situations.
Some of the situations include escaping the fire, elevator trouble, stranger at door, getting lost, danger on the road, and more.
As soon as the child launches the game, they will be welcomed with an attractive map listing all the 12 chapters with matching pictures. Only 3 can be played for free, the rest can be unlocked for $1/chapter.
The game is voice-narrated in a very clear English and the vocabulary is also very basic. I played the first chapter “Stranger at doorâ€Â, and I can assure the content is child-friendly with lots of extra tips for a better attitude. For example, the child is instructed to help with cleaning the home even though it’s not the part of the lesson.
The game is also easy to play. Your child just needs to answer the right choice in a particular situation to progress further. If they choose a wrong option, they are clearly instructed why it is wrong and you should not do that.
One thing I really liked is that the game usually offers 2 acceptable options in a question, but only one option is optimal. This helps the kids make a better decision as they would know why the other acceptable option is less useful in the current situation.
Overall, it’s a great app to teach your children basics of safety in different emergencies while keeping them entertained.