Keeping Students Safe with Social Media

Parents often wonder how they can monitor their teens' phone usage. In fact, according to Parents.com, the average teen spends 7 hours and 22 minnutes on their phones daily.  The repurcussions of inappropriate social media and online activity is one of the most challenging issues for school officials today.

These days, just requiring teens to provide their passwords is not enough, since it is impossible to navigate all of this activity.  While many parental control apps can block or restrict certain apps and inform a parent if the child has used the apps, some don't provide real-time feedback or show the specifics of what conversations our teen is having on social media.

The following apps do provide usage reports, but also more. While they are not free (some will allow a free trial), it might be a good investment to use one of these tools to assist you in monitoring and planning follow-up discussions to help keep your teenager safe.

Bark

Bark’s dashboard proactively monitors text messages, YouTube, emails, and 30+ different social networks for potential safety concerns, so parents can save time and gain peace of mind. The parent can get alerts for issues like bullying, predators, sexual content, and more. it also allows you to customize daily screen schedules for your chilld's device.

Truple

Truple reports contain randomly captured screenshots that show exactly how the device was used. In addition to website tracking and screentime reports broken down by the hour, you can see randon screenshots of anything your teen is seeing.  This is particularly helpful to monitor if your child is accessing inappropriate websits or engaging in unhealthy chats.

Famisafe

You can enable a detection feature which will search for harmful pictures on your child's phone, then you can blur or delete those pictures.  Another feature detects toxic messages on any social media apps, including Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. You can arrange to receive alerts when a user engages in high-risk activity. You can even se a daily report of the videos your child viewed on TikTok.