Parental Software Reviews

Not long after planning this site I decided it would be important to do some parental software reviews. If you are visiting this site you may be looking for help with your kids’ internet safety. I have great news for you! I have done the research, installed the programs, and tested them all out to see their effectiveness so you don’t have to! The three products here are the best that I could find. I chose them in part because they take three different approaches to protecting your children, which means you can choose the product or products that best suit your needs.

This is an excellent software designed to let your kids safely browse the internet without constantly reminding them that there are all kinds of bad things out there. I think the best way I can describe Net Nanny is, in a word, “Friendly.” It’s friendly for your kids and for you as you monitor what they do. Click here for the full Net Nanny review.

This is a fantastic software for you to see all of your kids’ activities while they are on the computer, not just online. The theory behind PC Pandora is monitoring, not prevention. Click here for the full PC Pandora review.

Kaspersky takes prevention to the extreme and does a good job with monitoring as well. Kaspersky’s parental control comes bundled with its security software so it’s really designed as a one stop security shop. Click here for the full Kaspersky parental software review.

There are other types of child safety services out there as well. One type of parental control I came across was online subscription services that direct all your web surfing through a proxy server. I wasn’t able to test these, but I have no doubt that some of them do very well with prevention. One major drawback that could arise is that some of these services might blacklist a site your child needs access to and you may have no way of overriding this. Another type of service is a child safety router. This is a hardware device that can both filter dangerous sites and monitor your kids’ activity. Some of these products come with anti-tampering ability, meaning you don’t have to worry about your computer-savvy child disabling the device the way they may be able to do with software. The software products that I reviewed did not allow me to disable them with any of the standard methods, but that doesn’t mean they are fool proof. A particularly savvy child may be able to work around a lot of preventative softwares. One such device you may want to look at can be found at www.pcmoderator.com. I have not tested this device and have no way of knowing how well it works.