You can help by making sure everything is set up correctly at your end. Buy new
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and Trapper Keepers, but you might need to lay out money for a new laptop for
your kid. Chromebooks are especially good for tight budgets.
Going a step further, check with your school district to see whether there’s a
program for students in need of computers and related tech. That old laptop
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- KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR KIDS’ FRIENDS
Before the internet, keeping your children at home all the time could have been
sheer torture. No going out to play, and no interaction with their friends (except
by tying up the landline). Modern kids are connected in so many ways that
parents can hardly keep up. Texting? Old hat. Facebook? That’s for parents.
What about WhatsApp, TikTok, Discord, and Twitch? The one thing they’re not
is isolated.
In the past, some parental-monitoring systems promised to let parents track
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to send you the content of any texts from unknown contacts, at which point you
could trust the contact (meaning no more snooping on message content) or
block access. That feature ended when Android locked down texts, but it doesn’t
matter, given the plentiful other ways kids can communicate.
Bitdefender’s Premium parental control went further, analyzing texts and
images sent using WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. Its AI-
based analysis looked for patterns of abuse or bullying and warned parents as
necessary, without violating the child’s privacy by giving parents access to
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service in August.
Technology really can’t help you here. If you clamp down on one messaging
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messages? That seems invasive. I already mentioned that none of us at PCMag
are child-behavior experts, but surely it makes sense to keep the lines of
communication open.