Our parental control app is designed to grow with your family. We firmly believe that our app’s feature set allows you to guide your children and families through the intricacies of online interactions, building good tech habits from the start. But here’s the kicker, kids don’t like being monitored.

There has to be buy-in

Kids nowadays are learning faster than previous generations, have access to unlimited sources of information, and simply don’t consume media the same way we did as kids . I remember the wall of Britannica Encyclopedias in my parents’ house and that was impressive in my eyes. But now, we have Google, and so do our kids!

The conversation with your kids has to be about accountability, respecting the technology, respecting the privilege you’re giving them (you paid for the device and most likely for the monthly plan, too) and showing them what’s being monitored and why it’s important to you as the parent to keep an eye on things. Honesty is key here. If you’re honest and straightforward with them, they’re more likely to be honest and straightforward with you. It’s all about mutual respect.

Kids will feel a lack of trust from their parents monitoring their device usage. Reinforce to them that trust is a two way street , and that the more well behaved they are, the more you’ll trust them. You’re telling them this trustingly, so that they know that they’re being monitored. Remind them that Apple and Google both save their data to the cloud and no one knows what they might be able to do with it. Your job as a parent is simply to monitor and review data in order to navigate conversations with your kids that might have passed by the wayside if you hadn’t been watching their activity online. Our technology gives you the opportunity to discuss safety and good online behaviour with your kids as soon as it becomes relevant.

What’s in for the kids?

Today most parental control apps are not looking making the child’s life good or making the child rant and rave about that app with their friends! Rather, they don’t want to show their device with the risk of a friend asking “what’s that app do?”

We constantly ask ourselves this question: what’s in it for the kids when using Boomerang? Some ideas that have come up, but that  we have yet to feel 100% excited about, fall in the following categories:

1. Provide children with their own stats of the usage
2. Use Boomerang as your portal for chores – parents set the chores and once completed by the child more time is allocated to their screen time – kids must take pictures and send them to you for approval.
3. Allow the child to request more time or an app to be unblocked with a good reason

What other ideas would you have from your usage in your household?