How Can I Monitor My Child’s Text Messages

Though children these days are well-informed about the positives of technology, they are often unaware of its dangers. Despite the fact that you may well trust your child with being responsible and mature, they might still get into trouble unintentionally.

In relation to text messages, keeping an open mind and enabling free discussions is essential. However, you might also want to monitor their text messages in specific situations. For instance, they might be depressed or acting suspiciously for one reason or another.

Parental controls vs. monitoring services

Apps that allow you to control various aspects of your children’s devices are abundant on the app stores. And while they serve their purpose, they do not actually provide as many features as you might want. Below you can see some of the key features of both types of services.

Parental control apps:

• Blocking specific apps
• Limiting screen time
• Disabling Wi-Fi and phone signals
• Restricting access to specific websites
• Monitor videos and app usage

Monitoring services:

• Precise location monitoring
• In-depth call logs
• Detailed browser history
• Monitoring social media accounts
• Tracking text messages (often including deleted ones)

As you can see, there are some clear differences. Tracking text messages in particular is a service that you will not be able to find in parental control apps, especially if they are free.

Paying for a service

In this day and age, we are often used to apps and services that do not cost a penny. Monitoring text messages, however, is no simple task. Services that can actually offer that feature are always premium ones as they involve quite a lot of background work.

With that said, there is a very simple way of monitoring your children’s text messages for free but it requires cooperation and honesty from both sides. You can simply take your child’s device and go through the messages. Alternatively, you can log into their account and check everything from there.

This is particularly helpful with iPhones. If you know the details of your child’s iCloud account, you can easily read their iMessages. In Android, text messages are not synced across accounts.

Examples of monitoring services

Now that we have gone through the basics of monitoring services, you probably want to see a few examples. Though the list below is not comprehensive, it should give you a good idea of where to start.

• KidGuard
• Mobistealth
• MobileSpy
• FlexiSPY
• Pumpic (iPhone Only)
• TeenSafe

Originally published at www.kidguard.com on January 3, 2017.