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My daughter has a propensity towards art.
Her desire to draw is only limited by her own imagination.
But being a first born with perfectionist tendencies, I noticed her start giving up on her passion for design when she made mistakes over and over again.
Unmoved by my comforting words that art is a process and that she simply needed more practice, she took it upon herself to learn how to draw.
She couldn’t seem to find what exactly she wanted to try and how to do it from the library, so she turned to the next logical place for instruction: the Internet.
Excited to see initiative and newfound motivation, I didn’t think twice before guiding her to Google and YouTube for tutorials. We quickly found a mixture of cartoon animals that tickled her fancy, so I left her to her stack of blank paper and colored pencils.
When I heard her beckon for me almost an hour later, I was stunned at what I saw.
Expecting my daughter to show off her art, I instead found my little girl staring at a scantily-clad, animated woman on an ad on the sidebar of YouTube.
Because they never spent much time online before, and never without me present, I hadn’t even thought about where a simple web search could take them or what might ‘pop-up’ while searching for some of their favorite games, or even tutorials.
Unfortunately, my children can never ‘un-see’ what was once seen, so that is why I purposed then and there to protect them from what they couldn’t protect themselves from on the Internet…which is when I found an app that would help me do exactly that.
WebSafety is an app for parents with patented technology that helps to monitor their child’s smartphone activity.
In a world where 73% of teens have shared personal information or potentially inappropriate content and 43% of kids admitted to being bullied online, predators, cyberbullies, and pornography have finally met their match. WebSafety (which just launched Sept. 15) is the first app to offer real-time alerts to parents notifying them of potentially dangerous behavior, as it occurs.
According to parenting expert, award-winning author and WebSafety partner, Michele Borba, Ed.D., a solution like this is long overdue. 43% of children said that they had exchanged messages with strangers and 71% admit they hide online activity from their parents. And, while most parents (83%) are aware of the risks to their child, they haven’t had a way to properly protect them.
Founder and CEO (parent of five and grandparent to three!) Rowland Day, created the app after searching for a way to protect the young ones in his life from the risks online, and finding that existing solutions just didn’t work.
How it works:
• Download the app onto any Android device, and the activity on this device can be monitored from an iPad, laptop or desktop.
• Parents can monitor multiple devices such as phones and tablets, customize alerts, and the kind of the information they want to receive.
• A free 14-day trial will be available for any parent or guardian who would like to try WebSafety before purchasing a subscription.
Product Features:
• Dashboard: A real-time dashboard displays daily activities.
• Monitors apps: Detailed descriptions of apps downloaded by the child onto their phone or tablet are accompanied by WebSafety’s own notes and suggestions for parents.
• Monitors social networks: Parents can view all photos uploaded to Social Media accounts in one convenient location, and receive notifications about words of concern used on social media networks.
• Monitors websites: URLs for inappropriate websites are flagged for parents’ notice.
• Monitors text messages: Options include the ability to view all text messages sent and received, or limited to alerting parents only of words of concern or specific people.
• Curfew: Parents can set time restrictions, with automatic notifications of out-of- hours use.
• Notifications: Reports can be customized to provide parents with real-time, hourly, daily or weekly activity summaries.
• Pricing: Starts at $3.99 per month
And RIGHT NOW, WebSafety is running a promotion where the first 25,000 subscribers will get 50% off their 6 mo or 12 mo plan.
Even though my kids don’t have their own phones or tablets (yet…), I don’t want to wait until another incident like we’ve already experienced to happen before I put a system like WebSafety in place to protect them. After all, isn’t our children’s safety worth $3.99 a month?
Disclosure: After learning about WebSafety and getting to know more about them, I wanted the opportunity to work together to make sure other parents knew about this new app.
