The current world has changed a lot in a few years in terms of the technology and now it is usual that a house has more phones than people.
We today live in a digitized society, where young people are called digital natives and parents are recognized as digital immigrants. This is because technologically, they occupy the same space but were born in different cultures. At this point in history, for youth to access to information and communications technology is not a privilege, as it was for previous generations. Now it is a right. The sooner you learn to use the law to their advantage, the better.
Parents are frightened by the risks of such digitization. They fear losing contact with their children, abducted by screens, data, music and photos. They fear them accessing inappropriate information for their age or being harassed by undesirable people through the internet. They fear that their children no longer live in the real world and abandon the sport, excursions or physical and real social contact. Parents fear their children are immersed in a parallel world and become zombies when they return to the real world. In their fears, parents make the bad choices. A bad solution they usually pick is cutting off access to the digital world. This is wrong as we must begin to become familiar with the proper use before we give them their first ever device. We need to establish the basic rules of use when the child is young, not during the war of hormones and rebellion. They have to get used to basic rules such as not allowing device use during the different meals, establish areas of the house where they cannot go on, arrange schedules logical use or distinguish between use for academic work and leisure use. I know this is a little difficult task to make kids follow your established rules but this certainly in not impossible. Screen limits apps like FamilyTime are there to help parents with all mentioned concerns. With the app parents can:
Keep an eye on their kids’ browsing history along with the date and time for each URL.
- View their bookmarks and favorites.
- Monitor call logs and check the caller details and view their call timing along with date stamps.
- Mirror contacts and view every contact saved in their kid’s phone along with the listed details.
- Watchlist contacts and get instant alerts on the connection.
- Check all of their installed apps along with app version and date of installation.
- Block questionable apps & games.
- Check location-history and stay in the know where their kids were the whole day.
- Add specific places to Places list and get alerts when their kids enter or exit those places.
- Receive SOS alerts in case of emergency from the kids with location details.
- Receive PickMeUp alerts from your children and stay informed when it’s time to pick them up.
- Schedule auto screen locks for certain time durations such as study hours, meal breaks and sleep time etc.
- Put screen locks at any time they don’t want kids to use their smartphones.
