Tips for Monitoring You Teen�s Cell Phone Use

Cell phones give teens a sense of freedom and privacy. Unfortunately, a lot of teens are abusing this privilege and engaging in illegal or dangerous activities � like the recent trend of �sexting� and sending nude photos. As a parent, it is your obligation to find out what your children are doing on their cell phones and who is contacting them. There are many applications and reverse cell phone directories which can help keep your children safe.

Reverse Cell Phone Directories
Reverse cell phone directories allow you to type in a phone number � cell or landline � and find out who that number belongs to. The free reverse phone directories are usually just for landlines and may not provide very accurate results. For the most accurate results, you will have to pay for a service but it is worth the extra expense. Most of the best reverse cell phone directories also work as people search engines. For example, you can find out if the person sending your child nude photos is really a schoolmate or a registered sex offender.

TextGuard
It isn�t enough to just sign up to a reverse phone directory to monitor your kid�s calls, since your child could obviously just delete any calls/messages that he wants to keep private. That is where applications like TextGuard come in handy. You just install the app onto your child�s phone and it will log all calls, messages and email messages on the web. Once you track a number with the reverse phone directory and find out it belongs to an unscrupulous person, you can block activity to/from that number with TextGuard.

My Mobile Watchdog
This application works a lot like TextGuard. The key difference is that My Mobile Watchdog will give you alerts in real time for certain numbers. For example, let�s say that the reverse phone directory shows that a predator is calling your teen daughter. Whenever he tries to call, you will get a warning and will be able to intercept the call or alert the authorities. The app will also route all the suspicious calls to a data center where they can be catalogued to help keep other children safe.

Whrrl
This is one of many GPS programs that you can upload onto your child�s phone. Once installed, the program will tell you exactly where your child is located by using cell phone tower triangulation. You can�t use this on people who are calling unless they have also agreed to install the program and share information. However, it can be a big help if you need to find your child � particularly if you combine the program with My Mobile Watchdog and a subscription to a reverse cell phone directory.