Qustodio – The new way to monitor (Part 2)

Recently polls have determined that parents think that they really know what their child is doing online, however after being handed their devices to look through realize that they really had no idea as to the things that their kids were saying, or the items they were searching for on the internet.  Its quite a shock to parents when they are faced with the reality and maybe the re-education and cleanup they find when they are presented with the things they are facing after actually looking at their child's devices.  Could this reality maybe have been stopped before hand?  Should you as the parent seen more of what was going on?  These are questions that thousands of parents are faced with when they see first hand what their kids are doing on their devices.

Katie and I ran into a situation ourselves where another student was sending love notes, via text messages to our child.  After looking at the phone, we determined that our child had deleted messages out of the chat, so that we didn't see what was really being said.  After pushing, we determined that our child said "I love you back" to the other student.  When pushed to know why they said that, they replied, because they didn't know how to say no.  This is the peer pressure that kids are faced with all the time.  If we had better monitoring of our child's cell phone at the time, we would have seen that and maybe addressed the pressure they were receiving, or squashed the premature relationship before it got inappropriate to begin with.  

These are the reasons that parents need Qustodio.  With its full suite of social media monitoring, text message monitoring, search history visibility, and being able to block times of use, it is the perfect suite of software to make sure your child is doing the right thing.  Lets play a round or two of trivia:

Another problem that we are seeing all too often is when parents give their children their hand-me-down devices.  There is an alarming amount of parents that are just unsure of technology and its powers.  Most times parents think its fine to give their kids their old smart phones with all of their personal data still on it.  The problem with this is multi-faceted.

• All your personal email, contacts, and apps are probably still on your phone for your child to go through at their will.
• Your WiFi profiles are probably still saved on your phone.  If the device is near any of those access points, your "deactivated phone" still holds the power of the internet.

I don't know about you, but I'm not sure if I'd want my kids going through my old emails.  Mixed in between all the marketing emails, and junk that is there are some very personal things that Katie and I share with each other.  Notes about the kids, their going on's and our thoughts are not things that kids should have access to.  Also, giving your child a connected device, even to just your home wifi opens up every website, social media account that might still be on your phone, and anything else that an adult such as yourself should have access to.  This might not be appropriate for the child that was just given your hand me down to play with for a few hours while as parents we are doing whatever.  Just wiping the phone isn't enough though, shouldn't you then have visibility of what they are doing with it?

More reasons why you should be using Qustodio.

In part three, I'll go into some of the features and why as a parent they are very beneficial to monitoring and securing your kids.

Thanks for reading.  Comment below if you can think of other ways that kids can get into trouble with devices, or situations you yourselves have been in.  I'd love to get the communities insight and maybe bring that up in future articles.