How Messenger Kids app helps keep children safe online
As many students adapt to remote learning, children now spend more time online, putting them at a greater risk of being exposed to inappropriate content, cyberbullying, and online predators. Thus, now more than ever, parents should be proactive in making sure their child is safe online.
Messenger Kids app / Source: Messenger Kids
There are different ways to ensure your child's safety online. Parents can install apps to limit the child's access to certain websites, and there are also apps that enable parents to monitor who their child interacts with such as Messenger Kids.
The main safety feature of Messenger Kids is supervised "friending." Parents can manage their kids' contacts through the Parent Dashboard.
Parents can now closely monitor the online interactions of their children / Source: Messenger Kids
Through this app, parents can opt to either have complete control over their kid's contact list or give their child the liberty to add, approve, or remove contacts.
Kids can block and report contacts and once they do so, their parents will be automatically notified.
Moreover, even if a child is allowed to add or remove contacts, the parent will still be able to monitor the kid's friending activity and can still add or remove contacts that he or she deems dangerous for the child.
Parents can have full control over child's contact list or allow child to add and remove people and stay monitored/ Source: Messenger Kids
In a 24 Oras interview, IT expert Art Samaniego said that Messenger Kids also has a proactive detection feature that prevents the sharing of inappropriate content such as those depicting violence, nudity, or sexual content.
Aside from ensuring safety, Messenger Kids also aims to make online communication enjoyable for kids with its fun-filled features like filters and stickers. The app is now available for use in the Philippines.
Similarly, YouTube has also come up with a version of their platform that is safe for children called YouTube Kids. With this particular version, the young ones are only limited to curated, family-friendly videos, channels, and educational clips. And, parents can also disable the search feature completely and limit screen time.
So to all parents out there, always try to stay abreast with the latest trends, apps, or websites to better understand risks that lurk online and how you can best protect your child from them.
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