Parental controls app?

[Watto1]

We've bought dd(7) a tablet for her birthday next week. Before we give it to her, we want to put some sort of internet filter on it. I've looked at reviews of Net Nanny and similar apps but the reviews are very mixed. I realise that they may be written by disgruntled kids though!

What do you recommend? It's an android if that makes any difference.

TIA

A social worker friend recommends SkyDog. DS is just 6, we need yo install something too.

Thank you Bike, I'll have a look at that one.

Oh dear, I can't find Sky Dog on Play Store. Maybe it's not available for Android.

I'm using Parental Board. I would recommend clicking the 'uninstallability' option when installing it to their device. If I had my time again with mine I would also put key loggers on all phones and tablets. Big screen work would have to be done in a through room shared living space with lots of traffic (e.g. TV screen). This is a much better way for children to interact with the internet, get relevant help from tjose around them and choose not to do 'naughty' searches.

Ye Gods that one looks good. Obviously I will be supervising her as well, rather than totally relying on any parental controls I put on. Tablet will not be going into her bedroom.

I'm afraid I've never bothered, DD2 has had a lap top since she was 6.

Is not small DCs who look for dodgy stuff it's teens who will hack any net nanny you try to install.

I trust her far more at 13, because she's always known she could, but shouldn't search for anything dodgy, or give her personal details. If she she nagged now to have the controls removed, I'd wonder what she's upto.

Like it or not DD2 and all DCs younger than her belong to a different, world to even the youngest parents or even their older siblings.

They are almost post FB, which DD2 doesn't want. They automatically use NNs and lie on web site registration forms. They have heard the be careful what you post talk a million times. Unlike their oldest siblings, they heard it first at 6,7,8 when they still listened to their parents and teachers.

If they want to do something stupid or foolish, they know it's wrong. They aren't going to do it in the living room, but on their mates smart phone on the bus.

I think it is expensive, at $12 (or whatever) per watched device but Norton is utter crap and I couldn't see another one for Android that they can't get around. You can set curfews, see which sites are visited (but no distinction between pop up adverts and when they click to visit). I never use their devices to buy anything, so there is no record of my payment methods to be hacked if they pick up a virus.

I bought DS & a tablet and also looked high and low for a parental control app. I found one called "Funamo" cost $19.99 (I'm in UK, worked out at about £13) but it is all singing, all dancing and I love it!

Password protected (obvs), lets you set a time limit on each day for use and what time you want it to switch off. Automatic net streaming (you can choose age) I tested it by putting "porn" boobs" etc, worked fine. You can also see exactly what they've been looking at online. Does loads more as well but that's the most important bits. AND it's easy to use/navigate for those of us (me) hanging on to the back of the technology bus

My main concern is dd coming across something unsuitable accidentally. Her favourite thing at the moment is watching Abba on YouTube! Not bothered about time limits.

Thank you Shakey, I'll look at that one too.

It isn't about trust it is about responsible parenting.

Now DD is older, curfew is set differently and I rarely check the PB board website because we communicate better now. Our relationship used to be terrible and I had no way of knowing it would go like that, no way then of putting controls in place in time. She survived, but she has seen a lot that a child should not see. She may have shared images of herself she regrets. She is moving on and is now mature enough and well enough to manage without (no PC on her new laptop) but I feel I failed her in her early teens.

I wouldn't have necessarily stopped her from seeing what she saw etc, but I would have been alerted to her mental illness sooner. I could have been a better parent.

You can only parent your own children. Both mine are best if you trust them, but know they are loved and safe.

Both know in the back of their minds that DH can spy on their internet use, he's a professional computer person. If they bother to think they know he can hack some kinds of forgotten passwords (usually his own) and all traffic passes through his machines fire wall. Not 3G, but they only had decent phones very recently.

But they know if they give him or me no reason to worry he won't and that suits them just fine.

The more you helicopter children, the more likely they are to do something stupid in a rush egged on by their mates.

No you can't unsee porn, but compared to being investigated by the police for circulating a naked picture of your mate it's small beer.

DDs been thinking about what she posts almost as long as she can remember, I hope it means she engages her brain.

Certainly the internet, social media and messaging her mates is normal and not something to get giggly and silly over.

As for DD1, she has been on the receiving end of so much shit for being quirky and dyslexic, that she only talks on line to a few very good out of school friends.

Her only internet 'crime' was watching the vampire diaries and torch wood when a bit young. Given a bad habit of reading her way through the sixth form library shelf, I'm not going to fuss.

We use the parental controls on our BT homehub. They work well for devises that don't have 3G. When my DCs were younger I would never have allowed them to have free access to the Internet. It would be too easy for them to accidentally stumble upon awful images. It isn't just porn that you need to be scared of it all sorts of horrible and disturbing things.

Pictures of people being beheaded are all over the place at the moment. I think it's 'bad parenting' to not take steps to ensure your child can't see things like that.

No one would leave a pile of disgusting images in a cupboard in a child's room with the hope that their child wouldnt peek at it or accidently find it and yet that is, effectively, what people do if they let their child have free access to the Internet.

My kids are older now but when they were younger I used Bitdefender plus a logger that allowed me to check every site they had visited. They didn't have tablets until they were older so I dropped using device based parental controls and just used the one provided by BT. My DC didn't have Internet enabled mobiles when they were younger either but if they had I would have either bought them IPhones and used the apple parental controls or I would have found something similar.

Even though my youngest is 18 I still keep parental control on our home network. It's as much for my sake as anyone's, I don't want to accidentally come across gross stuff.