Kaspersky Safe Kids
Around 50% of children spend a whopping three to five hours a day using their gadgets. And no matter which strategy parents adopt — limit, recommend or simply observe — they cannot ignore the way their offspring use gadgets, or the impact those gadgets have on their children’s health, mental or physical development, or wellbeing. We have long offered Kaspersky Safe Kids to help parents with this. The application gives parents just what they need: knowing where their children are, and keeping track of screen time and the content their children are interested in; it also provides flexible tools for channeling children’s energy in the right direction.
Parenting is becoming harder with every new year: the number of gadgets kids use is increasing, while younger brothers and sisters seem to catch up with astonishing speed — leading to their getting devices of their own. And Kaspersky Safe Kids needs to keep up with the times — to keep on developing and improving; which it does! An updated version of Kaspersky Safe Kids for both Android and iOS is now available to all users, and it makes parents’ busy lives noticeably easier.
Keeping your kids where you can “see” them
The Kaspersky Safe Kids main screen on the parent’s phone provides instant visibility of kids’ current status.
Parents’ most frequent concerns are their kids’ safety and location, so the main screen puts a map front and center. This displays all kids’ devices and their battery levels so you can tell at a glance where your offspring are, or if it’s about time you called them to tell them to go find a charger.
Settings for your kids and their devices are arranged as a strip with two rows: you select the child’s name above and the device, below.
Updated Kaspersky Safe Kids main screen.
The main screen is composed of widgets, which you can move around to suit your digital parenting priorities. If you’re mainly concerned about what a child is doing most of all on their phone, you can raise the screen time counter to the top and track the apps most time is spent on.
How does your child use their screen time?
If your priority is keeping age-restricted content away, a tap of a button right on the main screen will display the My Kaspersky website with detailed reports on websites visited and videos watched.
These are some of the customizable widgets:
- child’s requests for app launches and website visits
- total screen time
- detailed activity graph showing when various gadgets (phones, computers, and tablets) were used
- favorite apps and time spent in these
- web-search history
- website-browsing history
- YouTube search and watch history
- remote device block with one tap (except calls and allowed apps)
Tapping on a widget opens settings or detailed reports.
New tips
According to many parents, tried-and-tested advice is their biggest helper: tips from pundits, teachers and psychologists, and lifehacks from other parents. Kaspersky Safe Kids has long provided expert recommendations on how to talk to children about cutting down on screen time, obnoxious content on the web, and so on. The tips now cover a broader range of topics and use vivid icons on the home screen below the map (Instagram stories, anyone?), so you are sure to notice them.
Updated Kaspersky Safe Kids options.
Being honest with your kids
We are unwavering supporters of honest conversations between parents and their kids when it comes to setting limits — a subject that hardly any children have much enthusiasm for. The kids’ version of the app used to have only an administrative interface, which parents alone could log in to. The latest version of Kaspersky Safe Kids updates kids’ main screen experience: the child can now check how much screen time is left for the day, and how parents responded to their requests to visit a website or open an app. We’ve made the main screen look a bit playful too — something that kids between the ages of six and twelve tend to like.
Updated main screen for children in Kaspersky Safe Kids.
In general, the updated mobile versions for both iOS and Android have become much more convenient while retaining the most important thing — reliable protection — thanks to which Kaspersky Safe Kids has received the Approved Parental Control Software certificate from independent test laboratory AV-TEST for seven years in a row, blocking almost 100% of inappropriate content.
By the way, instead of just blocking every website or type of content, we recommend that you talk to your child about building healthy digital habits. Let’s be honest — those are something we as adults could use too.
PS: Kaspersky Safe Kids is now included for free for a full year’s use in our new Premium subscription!
Tips