Looking at getting involved in her phone again since she's fucked up again and lost it for a week.

Unfortunately she needs it back soon as she watches my youngest son when I'm at work during the night. And when she's on the bus and at school activities.

Her friends have Life360 and their parents like it but I've heard about bark too. Although that monitors EVERYTHING including every single keystroke for text everything. And I'm not sure I want that much control just yet.

So I wasn't sure what's the best
option and I'm looking for real use feedback

might wanna go TEAM on this one

Damn figured I'd get more of a response than this.


Should have out Russia is using today for Ukraine air strikes to root out the Jews for Hamas in the title

This is relevant to my interests.  

It seems like Bark has more parental controls, where Life360 is more about location tracking, which Bark also seems to have.

I'd like to see some input on this thread as well.  I want to get a phone for my kids buy the wife is resistant due to wide-open internet.  I can't blame her.

ETA: Mine are 13 and 10, so I'm all about the parental control...

ETA2: And as someone who is in IT, and is an internet junkie, you'd be crazy to not want a certain level of control, unless your kids are much older.  The internet is a fucked up place.

The internet was a fucked up place 30 years ago.  The nut-jobs tracking their kids and spouses, are well, nuts.  Good luck with your family tracking.  Fucking weird.  If your kids are going to be shit-bags, they're going to be shit-bags.  If your spouse is going to cheat, they're going to cheat.  No amount of tracking is going to change that.

Just saying.

You either trust your daughter or you don't.  Don't trust her, no phone, no babysitting.

If you can trust her to watch her younger siblings, then phone.

How would you have turned out if you knew your parents knew your every move, every electronic comment, could record you every time you spoke?

Have you read 1984?  And you want to do that to your daughter?

Interesting responses here well I'll take it to team then

You should also give her total control of your finances, every single dime.   If you trust her with a child, you should trust her with your money.  

Tag.

Guess what - at some point, that will probably be the case if I live that long.  The number of people on this site who profess freedom, but want to track their child's every movement baffles me.  If I need to know where my son is, I text him.  If I couldn't trust him to be a responsible teenager, I wouldn't have given him the car keys.

I agree.


some people just rock their $30k a month with three homesteads, five children who are perfect and work the land and everyone is perfect angels with zero problems.

im not one of those

What's wrong with the built in Apple regulation / tracing apps?

We use Life360 and like it for what it is. Keep in mind that it only shows you where the phone is, not where your child is.

Subbed for interest.

Up until this point, we have used the built-in Screentime on iOS, but it's very limited. It does allow locking down of the device to an extent. But what it doesn't give you is fine-grained control and visibility into things your kid may be doing within apps like web searches, Youtube video views, contents of texts received, etc. You have to go to the device to check all that. With multiple devices, it can be a pain.

Our kid has been good at self-limiting, but curiosity always wins at some point. Would like to hear some more experiences with Bark. Seems like Life360 is all about location, which we don't have to worry about too much (yet) with a tween.

My son got scammed on SnapChat for $2k - guess what, he fell for a scam just like my elderly father did.  That was a $2k lesson in how not to get scammed.  I could have prevented that if I had total control of his phone and watched his every move - but what would he have learned?

What you are teaching your daughter is you don't trust her farther than you can spit, and Big Brother surveillance is so normal even her father uses it on her.

You are confusing anonymity of location with freedom.  Those two constructs are not the same.  I am positive that you will come up with some logical fallacy to make those two concepts identical, but you’d still be wrong.  You are also confusing governmental over reach (freedom in this case) with parental love and (potential) protection.  I am also sure that you’ll somehow try to equate the two as being identical, but you’d be wrong again.



By your definition, are the only lessons worth learning done by the individual?  Serious question.

There are many dangers in this world.  If my child (or any loved one, including my ADULT wife) was missing for ANY reason, I would be in a better position to help if I knew the last position of their phone.  By proxy the last position of the person.  

Are you going to tell all of us, that location information would not be valuable to you?  Or is the anonymity of location of your son more valuable to you?

Before paying for a kids phone monitoring app,  Google "how to get around insert app name here" because that's what the kids will do.  I had issues with my son when he was a teenager and paid for the Qustodio app which I later found out was easy to get around.  

I ended up buying a cheap flip phone so anytime my son broke the rules I would swap sim cards and he got the flip phone as punishment for a certain amount of time.

This....  My 17 year old is a bonehead at times but is generally a good kid.  We have 360 but he has figured out how to turn it off.  I've also found that it isn't all that accurate, but it's free.

Taking their phone from them kills them.  They don't even talk to their friends, as everything is done by SnapChat, which they think is parent / cop proof.  I've told my son that all it takes is a simple subpoena and Snap will fold like a piece of paper.  Heck, the kids take photos of the class powerpoints so they "need" their phone to do their homework which is a scam so they can Snap all night.  

Whatever, he's a 3 sport Varsity athlete and is on the honor roll, things could be much worse.

My oldest daughter is 6, but this is something that Im already thinking about when my wife and I eventually agree she is ready for a phone (probably 8th grade at the earliest).  Im less concerned about where she is every minute because as some posters point out, that is about trust which is developed over time and up until that point.

My concern is everyone else. Sure, a posters son lost $2k getting scammed. Money, while important, is replaceable. It is, as he mentioned, an opportunity to learn. Some scams target things that can NOT be taken back or replaced. That is my concern.

Yeah they can all be defeated somehow, if your kid is smart enough. If they can root/jailbreak the phone then they could add a GPS spoofing app that'd report the location as whatever they instruct it to.

If your kid goes missing, LE can get an exigent circumstances phone ping in about 20 minutes (without needing any apps whatsoever). If the phone is currently "off grid" it'll show the last known position. Updates are at 15 minute intervals.

Lol, you're one to speak of logical fallacies, given you've already led off with one.

Freedom DOES include anonymity of location - at least it used to before license plate readers and cell phone tracking.  And parental love includes TRUST - as a child cannot grow to become a functional adult if his or her parents do not trust her further than they can spit.  How did the world function before you could track your children 24/7 to the square meter?

Lessons are clearly learned by individuals - and how they apply those lessons results in societal learning.  Societies are not particularly good at learning, though Germany & Japan seemingly have taken the hint.

If FW_wife goes missing, I'll just post a GD thread that will be full of helpful information and who to call, she'd be found in 87 minutes.  The anonymity of location of my son is FAR more important to me than knowing where he is at all times.  99% of the time I know exactly where he is - in school or at home.  I pray for me to not know where he is - out socializing with his friends instead of upstairs playing video games.

There are far more important things at stake here than the very unlikely scenario of a child or spouse being kidnapped.  Children have to make their own mistakes and suffer the real world consequences.  Speeding, car wrecks, internet scams, heartbreak.  We're not going to be around forever, and if you cripple your children from the outset, they will cripple your grandchildren as well.

At 13?  Yes.  Yes, I do.

Exactly.  For the life of me I don't understand all these supposedly mature parents projecting their own selves on young kids as if they have all these "rights".

Don't monitor your kid's grades. He's gonna be stupid and there's nothing you can do.

Deerrrrrpppp

This is truly a where get both applies

When you have a 13 year old girl you might feel differently.  Kids and perverts go on Omegle, Snapchat, reddit, etc.  it's far worse now because it's monetized, everyone knows someone with an only fans, and there are millions of people telling your kids that it's okay to cut their dicks off and other bs propaganda.

I do not see how a smartphone for a child is beneficial in any way, shape or form. You don’t need to track your kid. Give her a means to communicate via text and voice and be done with it. She’ll be better off in the long run. Her friends make fun of her? Good way to sort the wheat from the chaff.

ALL data points to detrimental effects of smartphone use with teenage girls. There is not one single positive. Not one.

I assume that if your kid wanted to change their gender, you'd be down with that.

What if they talked back to you in a disrespectful way?

What if they wanted to make a choice that was going to hurt themselves or someone else.  Would you stop them?

These apps also allow the parent to block sites and limit usage.  It's not all about tracking and surveillance.

When my son talks back, I correct him.  I grounded him one summer & took away his phone, internet access, and video games.  He had nothing to do but read.  Significantly improved his reading comprehension scores on the annual state tests.

He did make a choice that hurt him.  It cost him $2k.  That's a college level course in not getting scammed again.  Well worth it.  Afterwards, we held an AAR, figured out how he'd been scammed, and we went through his SnapChat and removed all the contacts he didn't know personally.

He's a teenaged boy.  He's going to see porn, you just don't want it to show up in his browsing history.  I installed TOR on his computer.

Some of you have forgotten the freedom you had as children.  Why you want to take that away from your children is beyond me.  What sort of adults will they become knowing their parents watched their every move?

Your parents turned you loose on a bike or with car keys, no phone, no way to track you, and for you to call home you had to borrow someone's phone or drop a quarter in a payphone.  My mom trusted me to walk a mile to the library w/ two dimes in my shoe to call her if I needed a ride.

Here you are now, you turned out ok without 24/7 surveillance.

There is a significant difference between looking at your child's report card and monitoring your child's phone's location 24/7, listening to their phone calls, reading their texts, blocking their access to websites, and seeing everything they email, post, and view on the internet.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.  How do you bring up a future citizen understanding the importance of the 4th Amendment if you've raised em to have no expectation of privacy whatsoever?  And what will your future relationship be with that adult, with them knowing you never trusted them?

You are raising the people who will raise your grandchildren and choose your retirement home.  Proceed with caution.

For shizzle.

It absolutely clear to me that you have no understanding of what a logical fallacy is, given your wording.

The anonymity of location is not freedom.  In your definition, that may be true for you, but it anonymity of location is not freedom.  I realize you will not understand this concept.

Specifically speaking on the anonymity of location of your son being more important than knowing where he is at all times.  So, thats not the question I asked you.  The question was if he were to go missing, would you want to know his last (most recent) location?  Of course that would be the location of the phone, not the person, but by proxy.  

Are you telling us that information would not be useful to you?  I am directly calling you out on this specific use of location services.  Or do you think you’ll be able to rely on a court order to track the most recent location of the phone?  If that’s your plan, good luck with that.

At this time.  I can track my kids phones, and my wife’s phone AND they can track me.  I have NO idea how you can equate tracking a phone by a person that loves you and only has your best interest in mind (and in heart) with a 4th amendment violation by the US Gov.

As s far as tracking someone 24/7 via their phone, the time “before” that gas was $1.53 a gallon.  A lot has changed since then.  Or do you think that the USA is a safer place now?

If I had the knowledge to stop my kid from making a negative life altering choice, I would.  If location services helped me to stop them, I will use it.

Snap Chat was a bad one, since it deletes messages it's hard to catch them, plus from what I saw kids often had more than one user name/profile.  My son would pretend to be asleep but stay up all night long on Snap Chat, literally until morning time to get up.  My son was great at home around family and friends.  Problem was at school with a bunch of other teenage boys and no parents, it was a different story.  As a single parent I was so glad to get through the teenager years.  Coming up on 2 years since he moved out and he's been doing well  learning to be an adult and supporting himself.

Throw away the smart phone.

Get her a flip phone.

Problem (mostly) solved.

Nobody has to wait for any court order.

If they're missing, that's an exigent circumstances exception to their 4th Amendment rights and LE can ping the phone immediately.

Yes, I am saying that information is not particularly useful to me.  If I need it, I call 911, report a missing family member, and let them deal with it.

Violent crime in the US has been dropping since I was born.  So, yes, the US IS a safer place than it was when I was in high school.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/

You guys have heard about helicopter parents?  You ARE helicopter parents.

Get her a dumber phone, make her earn back the smart one.

I just started reading this.  The correlations between unfettered adolescent cellphone use and depression are incredible.  

City Journal Review:  The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt

Ummm - growing up, our next door neighbors were drug dealers.  One of our downstairs neighbors was wanted for murder.

Is that slum enough for you?

A couple things here:



This is a clear example of you projecting your adult responsibilities and understandings of your relationship with the Federal Government into a parent/child relationship.  Almost no one who enables "controls" on their kid's phone does what you are badly mischaracterizing in your first sentence.  Do they block certain categories of things?  Sure.  Do they occasionally check on their kids whereabouts?  Absolutely.  Do they spot check things in their kids texts and media for clues into bad behavior or to pursue suspicions?  Heck yes.  A parent who doesn't do any of those things is whistling past the graveyard.  At the same time, few actually keep up with their kids crap 24/7.  Ain't nobody got time for that.  The ability to do so is just another tool in the toolbox for parents.

It's not that much different from when I was growing up.  My parents could listen outside a door to conversations or pick up a receiver, have their friends report on me, scrutinize my tape collection, go through my room.  They could tell if I abused their car too much, heard about it if I was seen somewhere, or paid attention to the details of my life.  I had to be home by a certain time, was not allowed to go certain places, or to be with certain people.  They paid attention to who my friends were, made sure we were under the supervision of a responsible adult most of the time, and set guardrails around my life.  I could choose to break them, but that would mean consequences.  I was expected to obey and I knew that there were enough checks and balances in place to not let me get away with disobedience long, most of the time.

They were good parents and they did a good job.  The scenario of how kids interact, the things they do, the places they go, and the trouble they can get into has evolved a little.  Sure, some of it is the same, and maintaining those same guardrails for my own kids is important.  Dismissing any control and authority over one of the most important, precious, and potentially damaging devices kids have these days simply because "freedom!" is pretty simpleminded.  They aren't adults.  When they are adults and paying for their own phone, they can be excused from my rules.  Not before.




Saying that you would report a missing family member via 911 and just let them deal with it is bizarre.  I question your honesty in representing yourself as a father of youth.  It takes a huge leap to make a statement like you did, and an amazing amount of naivete to think an immediate last known location wouldn't be useful.  That one earns a stunning out of

Good lord, with some of the responses here it's no wonder kids are so messed up these days

@azerious58

We have both on their phones.  

Life360 is the best for location tracking by far but lacks in everything else.
Bark location tracking is worthless but gives you a lot of control over monitoring and apps.  It is however a pain in the ass to use and you have to constantly be updating and syncing the phones.  At least once every couple weeks we have to get their phones and re-sync/update.

We use life360 as a family and have been happy with it.  Great for knowing where they are and if they drive the routes they take, speed, etc…

In the early stages of Alzheimer's, my grandmother walked off from dinner and was lost in the wilds of Dallas for a couple of hours.  My grandfather was frantic, of course.  Nothing happened, police brought her home a couple hours later.  One of the things that led to her diagnosis.

If my son - or step daughters, or wife, or Texas in-laws, or Texas relatives go missing, they won't be missing for very long.  If you've not noticed, we live in a surveillance society.  I think I passed a license plate reader at every county line this last weekend, and as KitBuilder has been pointing out, in exigent circumstances, the police can get a trace on a phone.  There's not much issue w/ bears eating people around here, and none of my family drive electric cars that will lock the windows & drown them in a swimming pool.  Missing people, in my circle, hasn't happened in more than 35 years, so it's just not much of an issue for me - and when it did happen, the local constabulary was able to recover the person in a couple of hours BEFORE cell phones.  So an immediate last known location isn't particularly useful, and if it's important, the police can get it anyway.

You can question my parenthood all you want - fairly well known on this site that I chose to raise the late Fatalwishes' son as my own.  I'm quite proud of his achievements, so please, go COC yourself.

I remember when Fatalwishes passed away, but I had no idea you stepped up to raise his son.  Good on you as far as that goes.

But you already stepped over the line yourself back there when you referred to people who have different opinions about "Find My" or Life360 or whatever to be helicopter parents.  As has been pointed out a billion times in a trillion threads.  When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.  But you know, maybe you are right.  Maybe thinking to myself "It's 9pm, do you know where your kids are?" is helicopter parenting.  Yes, I know.  At least I know where they are supposed to be.  Maybe the police can figure out exactly where they are a few hours or days later when I call them?  Or maybe I can just have that information available at a glance whenever I have a worried thought about my daughter who might be driving 30 miles home on a dark and rainy evening.

My grandfather never had an iPhone and even if he did, wouldn't have used it for anything except a paperweight.  His old flip phone was in a drawer, dead, 99% of the time.  I'm not going to count on "surveillance society" to locate anyone unless its my last option.

We had bark for a while for our kids. Apple limits a lot of the effectiveness of Bark on iPhone. If you go Bark, I'd suggest getting an Android. Also, Bark was essentially useless for us once their phones became "too obsolete" according to Apple.

We opted to do just smart watches until our kids destroyed those. Currently they have nothing due to their own bad choices. The next step is cheapy flip phones from the Dollar Store that won't have internet access.

I have three boys.  Only my 14-year old has a phone.

We have used the Apple ScreenTime settings to really limit most of everything.  Here is what we have done:

There is no Safari or other web browser. It’s been removed.

App Store also removed.  I will allow it for some periods to get apps that are necessary for scheduling.

Time limits for communication.  Wife and I are available at all times, his friends…not so much.

NO SOCIAL MEDIA.

We use Bark to help with some teachable moments…but it’s janky on iPhone and loses connectivity.

He’s still glued to the damn thing.

What are you going to do w/ the last known location if your daughter is kidnapped?  Rescue her yourself?  Or call the cops?

If your daughter is 30 miles away, and slides into a ditch and is rendered unconscious, you won't be looking for her for another 45 minutes.  And then you're 30 minutes away.  If she's on the Interstate, unless she managed to fall into a hole w/ no traffic - not something my son deals with, he HATES traffic - someone's gonna call.

I have pointed out before, I would rather NOT know where my son is at 9 PM.  He's an adult now, and I'd rather he be socializing with his friends than playing video games upstairs.

I find it extremely sad so many of you have chosen to monitor and spy on your children in such a way, just because you can.  I think this normalizes surveillance and damages our future citizens and society.

If you need to know where your kid is at 9PM at night - try calling her.  If you trust her enough with the car keys, you should trust her to tell you where she's at.  If you can't trust her - no car keys.

FW_wife thought about tapping the middle girl's phone when she was a teenager, and I talked her out of it.  She got caught sneaking out - and got grounded.  She's still together w/ the same decent guy, who's a Paramedic now & they've just moved in to their 1st house.  No electronic spying necessary for her to become a responsible adult.

We use Life360 and love it.   Paid version tracks hard breaking and speed.

You need to get her a Gabb phone. It's completely locked down. Service plans are extremely affordable as is the phone itself. If you really want to make her life difficult get her the Gabb watch.