Searching for the best parental control software in 2024? Using a parental control software for monitoring your kids means you can sleep a bit better, understanding what websites and programs your kid is using is important for parents to keep their kids safe. A full review of the best parental control software available in 2018 and a detailed analysis of the pros and cons of every software. We review the leading software and give you the bottom line, including screenshots and videos.

Best Parental Control Software You Can Rely On

If you want to keep a sharp eye on your kids’ activities online while they surf the internet, or visit social media sites, and access internet in one way or the other, it is important to have the best parental control software.

In fact...

52% of children in elementary schools have a laptop or desktop at home. The usage increases to 67% for middle and high school. As a parent, how far can you actually keep tabs on what your kids are being exposed to? This is considered to be a major problem by 82% of parents.

Probably because our kids are exposed to a range of threats online, some of them being:

In order to prevent your kids from accessing inappropriate content, having a good parental control software is the need of the hour. With the help of this software, you can monitor your child’s activity online, place filters on the content accessible to them and also monitor the time they spend online.

Let’s have a look at a few features which an ideal parenting control software must have:

Remote Reporting

Whenever you are looking to get the ideal parental control software for your home, it is best to go for something that facilitates remote reporting. Such a feature allows you to monitor your child’s activity all the time, even when you are not at home.

Whatever be the requirement, you will always be available to stay updated about your child’s browsing activities. The best parental control software available in the market today like Net Nanny, Qustodio and Norton send notifications to your phone to give you an idea about the status of the activity so that you can take the required action accordingly.

Filtering & Blocking

Content filtering is the most basic expectation that you have from a parental control software. After all, the idea behind using such a software is to prevent your child from accessing content that they should not be focusing on.

Most software have several such categories that can handle content filtering in a very effective manner. For instance, if you define certain topics like hatred, violence, pornography, and the likes, you can stop your child from accessing websites based along these lines.

Various software like Norton and Qustodio even notify you if your child tries to access any of the blocked websites. Thus, you can stay assured that your kid is safe online.

Time Management

Time management is offered only by certain parental control software, but it is a really useful feature to have at your disposal. How does this work? Basically, you can set a certain duration for which your child is allowed to be active online.

For instance, if your child is allowed to spend 2 hours on the system on a particular day, they will be alerted once the time is up. Beyond this, the internet will become inaccessible to the child. This helps you limit their access and usage of the phone or computer.

Effectively, you would be creating a weekly schedule for them. This feature could also set and assign certain time periods during the day when the children are allowed to use their phones and computers.

Activity Record

This is one feature that is present in almost all the parental control software. This ensures that the parents have complete access to the child’s internet usage log. This would include the sites visited by them, the keywords used by them, the searches made by them, their time online and the likes.

As parents, you can monitor these records and be aware of how your child spends their time on their phones and computers.

Messaging and Social Media

After a certain point of time, simply filtering online content for your child might not be sufficient. You would need something more in order to keep tabs on their activity.

Their social media profiles are a good place to start. This is where they get to interact with different people, exchange thoughts, ideas, hold discussions on a number of things and the likes. Thus, it becomes essential to monitor these social media activities.

Even though it would not be right to spy on them through this tool, but you could still supervise their interactions and activities. This also applies to SMS texts.

Pricing and Platforms

The pricing mainly depends upon the functions and features offered by the particular parental control software in question. If you want to make your bargain the most effective one, it is best to pay a little more and opt for an unlimited plan whereby you could connect any number of devices to the same software.

This comes in handy when you have more than one child or need to keep adding devices at home. Besides, this is also a very dynamic approach. This means that you do not have to work with a fix set of computers and phones only. The most basic protection is usually offered on a free trial period for everyone. Other than that, there are annual plans and monthly plans that you can choose to go for.

However, there are exceptions. For instance, Norton Family and Kaspersky Safe Kids do not put any restrictions on the number of devices.

Parting Thoughts

With this in mind, we would highly recommend you to take some time out to actually research the various parental control software available and make the right choice!