Keeping kids with phones safe

A new school year brings new technology for kids. Whether you’re deciding to give your child their own device, or something is being provided by a school, a huge question is how do you keep your kids safe from all the risks out there.

Last year, we gave the twins their first phones – which ended up being iPhone 12s because that’s what came free with our plan (we had discussed a much cheaper phone, but free beats cheap…)

There are a lot of reasons to hold out on a phone, especially a smart phone, for as long as possible – but for now I’m going to focus on what to do when you have decided to go for it.

I spent a long time looking at the various options for monitoring the phones – and I went back to check it this summer when I got frustrated with how hard apple make it to monitor their devices.

Which is my first point – apple devices are almost impossible to monitor. But we’re an apple family, and that isn’t going to change, so we chose to just keep on top of the options. There are easier to monitor options – and good phone choices – for another post.

I’ll start with my final point – I went with Bark to start with – and despite getting frustrated with how annoying it is on iOS devices and going looking for something else, I decided it’s the best option for what I want to do.

What I want to do is monitor what’s going on with texts and other content on the phones – and bark does this better than anyone else. It does require a computer to sync with the phones (via wifi) to monitor, so it’s not live. But for most things, that’s ok.

It does take up a ton of space on the computer that’s being used to monitor – which was an unwelcome surprise and something I spend far too much time dealing with as the laptop I use for Bark is seriously short on space. Basically it’ll take everything on the phone and import it – so you need as much free space as your child uses (and oh wow, can they take a lot of photos and videos).

It also takes time to set up and time to monitor what’s going on. I started out by making almost nothing available and telling the girls to ask for what they wanted and we’d make decisions. If they were less willing to work with us, I think this could have been more frustrating of a process, but in general it worked ok.

Bark also gives you options to set times (school, after school, night etc.) which I tend to ignore. The school the twins attend has pretty awful connectivity, so I’m not too worried about what goes on during the school day, and we make them plug in their devices in the living room before heading up to get ready for bed each night (their mom says she does the same when they are with her). In later years we may want to do more with the timing, but the amount of effort it takes feels unnecessary considering our context.

When used in combination with apple’s screentime and family settings and FindMy tools, we have pretty decent overview of what’s going on. And the twins know their phone passcodes etc. must be shared with us at all times, so we can do random checks. Do we miss anything? I’m sure we do. But this is as good as it’s going to get.

As I also mentioned, Apple make it really hard to track devices. Now you have to enter the passcode every time you want the phone to connect to your computer for review. This drove me insane until I worked out that the phone needed to be set to ask for the password after a decent length of time (immediately, 1 minute, 5 minutes all caused the analysis to restart over and over). This makes the phones a little less secure – but is an important trade-off.

I’ll make a more detailed summary of other options in a different post. There are tools that do different things and that work better for other types of devices. An open and ongoing conversation with the twins is a huge part of this working ok. And a willingness to put in one or more hours per week reviewing flagged content. It’s not easy, but it does help to know that when issues arise, we can address them early.