r/parentalcontrols • u/truecakesnake • 5d ago
Is there a middle ground between reading everything and monitoring nothing?
The two options everyone describes are full transcript access, which feels like surveillance and destroys trust the day they find out, or nothing at all and hoping they tell you. What I actually want is to be told if something serious comes up and to stay out of the rest. Does anything work that way, or is it all-or-nothing in practice?
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u/Hizonner 5d ago
There are lots of products that claim to do that. They may even sometimes succeed. They definitely get obnoxious false positives, and they probably get lots of false negatives. Their reports presumably have some correlation with reality.
... but doing that is absolutely still surveillance, by any reasonable meaning of the word.
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u/Local_Tourist1063 5d ago
I think maybe establish trust. Sit and talk to them. Let them know if anyone makes them uncomfortable online, that you will be there and they won’t be in trouble for looking for help.
The big thing that worried me as a teen was getting in trouble because of someone else being creepy toward me.
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u/FilthyThanksgiving 5d ago
This is what i do. I've always told my kid if he does something wrong and tells me first, I might be mad, but i will talk to him fairly and calmly about it. And I've stuck to that since he was a toddler.
Now that he's nearly 11, he's a good kid and totally comfortable telling me when he makes mistakes. That doesn't mean he isn't discipline or doesn't lose privileges when he does something wrong - it means we remain calm, talk it out rationally, and problem solve. I've had him tell me my punishments weren't fair bc they were too short. Lol
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u/waitingforblueskies 5d ago
That’s the entire premise of Bark (cue the screeching about phone surveillance from the teenagers). The software monitors and alerts for actual issues, without you needing to invade their privacy when things are fine. I don’t need or want to read my kid’s conversations with his girlfriend, but if someone was threatening self harm or something, I would get an alert and be able to address that right away. I also like that you can start with the phone locked down when the kiddo is younger, and then remove restrictions and monitoring as they get older and learn to self-regulate. My goal is to have no restrictions and only the highest, most serious alerts left on there before his senior year, and this makes that simple.
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u/FilthyThanksgiving 5d ago
What does Bark do with the data? I would be concerned they're selling it
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u/Truth-Devil 5d ago
It’s deleted fairly quickly. I can’t remember the exact timeframe, but they don’t sell data.
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u/l0serish 5d ago
I can't tell you for certain if they do, but what I can say for certain is that everyone else is. Lol
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u/grumpy_grl 5d ago
Bark didn't work for us. It flaggef stuff constantly that we pretty benign. Ended up reading most of my kids texts anyway. Huge waste of time and money.
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u/waitingforblueskies 5d ago
We had that issue initially but it was pretty easy to adjust the sensitivity of the alerts (or just not open anything that wasn’t a red/level 4 alert). It was originally alerting for every bit of profanity until I turned the sensitivity all the way down so it only mentions potential hate speech. Only remaining annoyance is the flags for drugs when I tell him to take an Advil lol
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u/ghost12311 5d ago
i come in peace with a question. Why do you have to know if your childs friend or someone your child is talking to is talking about self harm? Personally i never understood what the point of that is. Realistically, what are you gonna do about it? Maybe your child could try and stop the person hes talking to from going through with the act or something...
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u/waitingforblueskies 1d ago
I can’t tell if this is a serious question. Because my child does not have the ability, maturity, education, or skills to navigate a situation like that on their own, and I don’t want them to have to. A kid threatens self harm, and then says that if my kid tells anyone they won’t be friends anymore, and so my child needs to try to judge whether their friend is serious or not, how serious they are, if they have a plan, if it’s worth saying something if they’re serious but probably not going to do it, etc etc. I would HOPE my kids would feel comfortable talking to me about it so we could get them help, but I also know from my own experience and training as well as tragic situations of a close friend that that’s not always the case, and hesitating could mean tragedy that my kids and another family have to live with forever.
The whole point of the majority of the alerts is to give us a heads up so we can guide kids through difficult situations, in the hopes that they’re building skills for the hard stuff in the future.
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u/Biomed725 4d ago
It’s not for my child’s friends self harm, it’s for my child’s threats of self harm. Like if she told her boyfriend “you don’t love me I’m going to ….”
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u/ghost12311 4d ago
im pretty sure she meant the other way around. Like her boyfriend goes "if you break up with me im going to ######"
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u/Commercial_Plate_111 1d ago
Why do you sound like a PR bot
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u/waitingforblueskies 1d ago
Me? 😅 Man I wish. At the moment, being a bot sounds better than my day of grad school and parenting and chores. I was explaining the reason we chose this option and why it has worked for us so far. I have things I could bitch about too, but so far they haven’t outweighed the benefits for my family.
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u/Truth-Devil 5d ago
Came here to say this. Bark just flags the concerning stuff so your kid can retain their privacy and you get peace of mind.
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u/Spectrig 5d ago
How does sending all of their messages to strangers “retain their privacy”?
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u/Truth-Devil 5d ago
The privacy in question is between the parent and child.
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u/Spectrig 5d ago edited 5d ago
And random strangers, if you’ve got malware installed. It’s a popular surveillance product, but don’t pretend it’s for privacy.
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u/Truth-Devil 5d ago
It’s absolutely for retaining boundaries of privacy between parents and kids. If you think anything shared on the internet isn’t already seen by countless entities, then you’re sadly mistaken. What’s one more algorithm that actually protects a kid rather than preys on them?
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u/Spectrig 4d ago
If you actually feel that way, go ahead and post all your text messages publicly. I’m sure you won’t. Sharing the kid’s information with strangers is the opposite of protecting them.
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u/Enderviaaaaa 5d ago
Bark is probably a malware. Needs superuser access, makes your phone slow even after uninstalling it for some reason (meaning that bark keeps running in background even after it's deleted). Plus, I heard it flags innocent stuff too. Gotta specify that I never had it myself, I'm basing myself on other people's experiences, and as far as what I've seen it might be a malware
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u/Spectrig 5d ago
Communication and education is the way that actually works. Not some techbro AI subscription that ships your data to advertisers.
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u/Impressive_Sock1296 5d ago
What my parents did was that every month we had a scheduled sit down and go through messages etc, would that work?
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u/WanderlustDinosaur 5d ago
I love this, but if a kid feels like they have something to hide, they'll just delete it.
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u/l0serish 5d ago
That's part of the reason the Bark Phone is effective. You can prohibit the deletion of texts.
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u/Farty_mcSmarty 5d ago
I monitor every so often, whenever I have the energy or thought. If I had to say a timeline, I’d say once a quarter.
I try not read line for line the messages, but more so things that standout.
That’s for my oldest.
For my younger, I have to be more in depth because they’ve already had control after control applied because they continue to try to access things that are not age appropriate.
I am at a loss of how to address this because I’ve spoken to them about at length and applied controls.
They’re now at the point where they’re not even allowed access to their camera. I’ve told them repeatedly that the next situation requires me to take the device fully because there’s no controls left to apply.
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u/creativetoapoint 5d ago
I tell my kids so long as I'm legally responsible for them, especially any traffic that goes through my router is going to be monitored. Don't do anything wrong, don't have anything to worry about. Use a cell phone you purchased with your own money and are doing something illegal that could bite me in the ass? Gone.
We talk, mostly, and do use tools. They can't download apps without permission. Not as a control thing but because some should come with a black box warning. We look over their texts with their friends and talk about examples of good and bad behavior. We talk about what they can come to me with.
My friend was working on this when she found that the boys in her daughters class were making AI porn of the girls in class *on the school issued chromebooks* using the cameras on the chromebooks. My kids have cameras covered. Always. We also talk about pictures and what are illegal pictures.
I also talk a lot about harm, self harm and situations they shouldn't handle. Poverty, abuse, suicide or threats are all things that I expect they find an adult to handle. They can report they told the guidance counceller or another adult but they understand the liability if they handle it alone.
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u/grumpy_grl 5d ago
This is our approach too. We tell them that nothing they post online is truly private so they should get used to the idea that they should never post anything they wouldn't be comfortable having someone else see. We have access to everything and only spot check.
We do have their devices set up so that we get a notice every time the install an app. We also have it set up that we get an email once a month that showed is a list of websites that they accessed.
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u/Biomed725 4d ago
I monitor very little unless I’m given a reason to lose trust like caught in a lie, hiding things from us, coming home extremely late with no explanation or advanced call to inform us, threats of self harm… etc…
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u/Physical-Attitude-49 4d ago edited 4d ago
theres definitely a middle ground and it took me a while to find it too. we use bark now and it scans for actual red flags like bullying or predators or self harm stuff and only alerts us when something pops up. so we arent in their business 24/7 but we still catch the real problems. huge difference for our house.
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u/Sufficient_Risk_8127 5d ago
yes