Have trouble keeping track of your kids? There's an app for that!

Before I get too far into this post, I want to state a few things up front. First, this is NOT a sponsored post. I PAID for both the apps that I will be talking about in this blog post. Secondly, this is a good review and a bad review post. I rarely post bad reviews on my blog, but this is a product I was SO excited about and SO eager to get and have been completely let down. Unfortunately, for me to explain my love for the other product, I have to do the bad review first.

With that said, let's move on. Tracking children on the electronics.


I have four children and two of them are teens. I am sure if you have been reading my blog for a while, you have already gathered that. My nerves are shot most evenings because, well, I'm a mother of toddlers (potty-training toddlers at that) and tweens at the same time. It was very poor planning on my part really. Anyway, my tweens love their electronics ....

Strike that ... ALL my kids love their electronics. The older two are playing Minecraft "together" and the younger two are watching PBS shows on the tablet. My oldest is the only one who actually has a phone. The other two have "play" devices ... or phones/tablets that work when connected to Wi-Fi. We got my oldest her phone last year because she was in so many activities, including Allegro and we needed to be able to keep tabs on her.


Well, since then, she has gained a lot of friends' phone numbers and she has begun playing games. We wanted a way to keep her safe. My husband does a lot of coding and was able to create a few programs in Tasker that allowed us to prevent her from being on her phone after certain times and it also sent us text messages when she either made or received a phone call.

I was ECSTATIC when I went to Type-A Con in Atlanta and met with a new company called WebSafety. They sold me on their app while I was there. This app was going to allow parents the ability to lock phones down during certain times and when the children were in specific locations (school zone area, church zone area). It would send us messages when specific words were used in text messages and we could see what the children sent in text messages, Facebook posts, and so on.

Womp womp womp

Alright ... the things that this app WILL do:

• Allow us to set lock times ON the desktop version of the app
• Allow us to see red flagged words ON the desktop version

Yup ... that's about it. The text messages are available on the desktop version, but it is BUGGY and it takes FOREVER to load. We will get notifications that Peanut has installed or uninstalled a game, but when we click on the notification, it just takes us to this screen:

 after the "ok" button:

Womp womp womp

The app crashes ALL the time. There is absolutely NO way to submit an error report either. In order to get our few questions answered, we actually had to reach out to the social media personnel because my husband's email to tech support went unanswered. We were told the tracking was coming and that the ability to place zones was also coming. *sigh* In my humble opinion, NOT worth the money. Sorry, WebSafety.

NOW ... I still had the problem of needing to know where my baby girl was! Enter my new favorite app. First off ... the initial part is FREE! We DID choose to upgrade to the premium because I really wanted to schedule more "places" and have the premium options. So, what is my go-to app for tracking my daughter?

Life360 is BRILLIANT. Let me try to run through everything we like about it.

1. There are circles. This means I can have the babysitter in a circle so they can see where Peanut is when she is coming home and we aren't there. We can also have extended family members decide to join our circles and they can check in when they are getting close to our house!
2. Places - my FAVORITE feature. With the FREE version, you get to pick 2 places. We immediately selected Peanut's school and our home as places the phone will automatically check her in (as long as her GPS is turned on). With the premium, you get unlimited places. This means we can add the church and a few other select places she frequents.
3. Messages - You can send messages to everyone in a group or just a private message to one person.
4. Premium services include lost/stolen phone reporting and live advisors (think OnStar and AAA).

The entire app runs SO smoothly and we get updates in our emails and on our phones. I have yet to have a crash report come up. We run ours on Android, but it is also available for the iOS system.

We still have to find a way to monitor her text messages and phone calls ... so if you know of a solid app that helps with that, shoot me a message in the comments below!