Kids are Smarter than Parents

The above statement is a fact and known to millions of parents who have young children. Sometimes when I need to know some feature in the new iPhone, I turn to my son, who is 11 now. I have a password lock on my phone, only known to me and am careful about it. Even the fingerprint is activated, as I don’t want my kids to use the phone and access internet or play games. Recently, I discovered that my son was able to open my phone with ease without the passcode; somehow he has set his own fingerprint on the phone. There goes my password protection model, demolished by him totally.

Useful Parental Control Tips

So what should parents like me do, when they realise that their kids are smarter than them and will outsmart them in most ways, in case we block their access to devices or internet. Do we give up and let them access whatever they want, whenever they want? We all know that the variety of content available on the internet has an indelible impression on the kids, especially those kids in the age range of 8 – 16, called the impressionable age.  This is the age when they are most vulnerable to things that they see or hear, on their own and form judgements on their own, most times influenced by their peer network or content available.

And if we resort to blocking of content or devices, they will find a way to bypass the same. So the answer is Smart Surveillance, where the children shall not know that whatever they do is being watched by a concerned parent. Now how will the parents achieve the same?

The answer is simple.

Parents need to become smarter than their kids. But this is quite an impossible task, and if it were so, the problem would not have occurred in the first place. So parents like me use smart tools to alert me, for any unusual behaviour. I use software to alert me of the browsing history on my PC, for categories that I want to track; and apps which tell me if any suspicious apps downloaded on my phone are violating my privacy.

Parental Control software is one of the tools, which can make parents monitor their kids and probably outsmart them; and there are many other ways. Please write back to me if you know of things parents can do to get Smarter !!