Many thanks to Sharon Stouffer, an avid blogger on Mobile Technology and Cell Phone Spy Software, and Mom Since 2010 (MS’10), for this guest post on creative ways to be “smart” about your child’s Smartphone.  I’ve written before, that when we give children adult devices to play with, we still need to “parent” them through the experience, keep them on track, and prevent them from running into danger without realizing it.

Our kids are extremely savvy, with rapid-fire thumbs…I love articles like this that help us keep the seatbelt on!  — Amy

How to be Smart about Your Child’s Smartphone

In this age of technology where every gadget is smart and has a partial brain of its own, it is really useful to have some smart parenting tricks up your sleeve to keep your kids from straying. Keeping tabs on your child’s smartphone might sound like an extreme idea, but it is very useful as it might protect the young ones from several problems. You can easily do this by employing a smartphone monitoring app on your child’s cell phone. These phone monitoring apps are perfect tools to control your child’s smartphone and protect your child from cyber crime, cyber bullying, negative influence and other harmful effects of the internet.

How do these apps work?

These apps run on complete stealth mode and hence are virtually undetectable by your children. So your kids won’t even get to know that they are being spied on. These apps keep tabs on all cellular activities carried out using the smartphone. Most of the features common with all of these apps include call logging and text logging. You will be notified about all the calls and texts that go out from the tracked smartphone, as well as those that come in. Some apps even offer cell interception, which means that you can listen to the calls in real time as they take place. They also relay a copy of all contacts to you, and you can delete a certain contact or block it from your kid’s smartphone without them even knowing you did.

These apps have a set of other features too that are equally important for maintaining your kid’s safety. They send GPS locations to your online account that allows you to track your kids. You can also view the SIM change notifications online, which means you, will be informed if the mobile user has changed the SIM card. All these features will help you know exactly where your children are and whether they are being honest to you or not.

How they provide internet security

These phone monitoring apps are great only if you want to protect your child from the vagaries of the internet. Almost all of the available apps allow you to view mails, texts and even BBM chats, both sent and received by the smartphone. These apps record all the data that you store in the phone including all media files, and even the ones your kid deletes. Another best feature of these apps is that they have keyword alert systems. They have certain set keywords such as drugs, sex, gambling and so on, that activate an alert and you are notified immediately if these words are used. This way you can make sure that your kid is not getting involved in anything that he or she should not be.

Features like a controlled time of net usage, restricted cell phone usage at unsuitable hours, blocking of harmful or illegal sites and pages and other features make some of these apps ideal for parenting control.

These apps, with heavy parental controls should be preferred over other general phone monitoring apps as they focus mainly on parenting and retaining control on your kid’s activities. Even though these apps run on stealth mode, it is always advised that you let your children know that you are spying on them. This way they will not feel betrayed, and would try to stay out of trouble since they are being watched!

Author Bio:  Sharon is an active blogger and a mother who loves to blog on latest Mobile Technology. Visit cell phone spy, to follow her updates on new and innovative Mobile Applications and its reviews.