Monitoring child mobile devices is an important step in parenting today and how our kids communicate is quite different than how we did growing up (remember the one corded telephone in the middle of the living room where anyone could see/hear you on the phone?). Even though many kids will use social media platforms to use their instant messaging features, a good majority will still text and use the phone on their smartphones. In many cases, I worry more about incoming text/calls than what my kids will send. Parents can monitor calls and text messages with Boomerang via their Android or iOS parent device. Here’s what is possible.

Call Logs

Boomerang Parental Control will request your child device’s Contact and Phone permissions. Accept these during app setup. Once accepted we will be able to monitor the phone calls. The information we collect is as follows: contact name, number called and duration of the call. Here some of the other popular options for our Call feature:

Allow calls from local address book only: by default we will allow only calls to and from your child’s local contacts saved on their phones. Any other number will be flagged as unknown and get blocked automatically by Boomerang Parental Control.

Block Specific Phone Numbers: if you wish to block specific phone numbers, you can, even if they are saved in their local contacts.

Allow Specific Phone Numbers only: this is rarely used but great as a feature if your child just received their first smartphone and you want to truly limit their calling to only numbers you choose

Text Message Safety

Our texting features are one of the main reasons parents choose Boomerang Parental Control over all of the other choices they have for mobile parental controls.

Unknown Number Detection: Android doesn’t allow us to actually block specific numbers from texting but we can notify parents when an unknown number is detected. We define an unknown number as one that’s not in your child’s local contacts.

 Inappropriate Keywords: With dictionary of keywords that parents can customize to their needs, when these are detected in incoming or outgoing text messages, parents will receive a notification via our app and an emailed containing the content of the text and with who the communication was with.

Notify when specific numbers are texted: Parents can monitor specific numbers for text messages – entering a number in the list will send notifications to parents whenever that number sends or receives a text message.

Collect Text Content: On by default, Boomerang Parental Control only collects the contents of text messages when we detect inappropriate words from our custom keyword dictionary. Parents can enable collection of all text messages and monitor their child’s communications. Trust and parenting styles matter on this feature. For us, we have used this when our kids were starting with their smartphones and any flagged content was used as conversation starters (most were incoming text messages from friends or unknown numbers). We eventually turned it off and monitored only for keywords in our dictionary.

Get our Call and Texting safety features with our special version

Boomerang Parental Control’s features above are only available via our special download page. Visit it now to install our call and text monitoring features. Parent devices can use our Google Play or App Store versions of our app.