COVID-19 has brought many new and unprecedented challenges to parents across the United States. One of those major challenges has been the shift from traditional in-person classroom learning to remote learning at home as a result of shelter-in-place mandates instated to lower coronavirus infection rates. The implementation of full and partial remote learning in many school districts has caused a massive increase internet service usage and in screen time amongst young people unlike ever before. This shift to remote learning hasn’t been easy on parents, but with all this increased screen time, it’s no wonder parents are concerned.
EarthLink Internet understands parents want to do everything you can to protect your child. That’s why they’ve launched a new product to help them keep their children safe online. This product, called EarthLink Guardian, is a web content monitoring and screen time management service to help parents ensure their kids are online safely.
With young people spending up to eight hours a day online, there’s just no way for parents to closely monitor their children’s online activities that long. It’s simply unrealistic feat for parents to overcome and EarthLink Guardian can take a bit of that worry away by acting like a digital safety net and filter. EarthLink Guardian helps parents monitor everything digital from text messages, email, and social media to how much time is spent online per day. Their service searches for all signs of potential problems online including cyberbullying, viewing adult content, suspected predators, substance use, mental health concerns, threats of violence and more. EarthLink Guardian won’t contact the authorities for parents, but it does notify them of potential issues as soon as they happen in real time so parents can intervene as soon as possible and have an open conversation with their children about what is going on.
EarthLink Guardian is easily accessed through an app on parents’ smartphones. Parents can opt in to get real time email and text alerts with recommended actions to help parents guide their children to a safe resolution. The EarthLink Guardian app makes it easy for parents to create profiles with custom settings for each one of their children. Within those profiles parents can create settings for things like when their kids can access the internet, what sites types of sites they can and cannot visit. Web filtering through EarthLink Guardian can be approached in two different ways: parents can either allow or block specific sites or whole categories. The service is designed in a way to make this easy on the parent or guardian. Want to restrict adult content and social media? No problem. Want to restrict your children from watching YouTube videos when they should be doing homework? That’s no problem as well. It all can be done through EarthLink Guardian.
In an effort to keep children safe offline as well, EarthLink Guardian also has a feature within their app where parents and guardians can make sure their children arrive at their destination safely with the check-ins feature. With this feature, even if your children forget to send you a text or call when they’ve reached their destination, you’ll know via a notification within the app.
Recently released data collected by EarthLink show a staggering 23% increase in the number of predators escalated to law enforcement who were detected through information provided to parents by EarthLink Guardian.
If EarthLink Guardian is something that can be useful in your home it’s worth trying. There’s a 30 day trial and the subscription covers an unlimited amount of children, devices, social accounts within your household.