Every parent wants to protect their kids, and while that’s pretty easy to do when you’re with them, how about all those times when you’re not? Getting your child a kid-friendly phone or smartwatch is a great way to keep in touch (and keep tabs on them), but protecting them from the horrors of the internet is extraordinarily difficult, even with good parental controls in place.
That’s why I’ve been using Bark since 2024 on my son’s phone and just expanded it to a new Bark Watch so he can keep in touch no matter where he might be. But Bark isn’t just any boring old parental control software that restricts or blocks content. It’s got an AI-powered engine that understands context and sends you alerts when it thinks something might be wrong, and that’s helped me keep him on the safe path online for the past 2 years.
What is Bark?
Bark offers parental controls for existing Android and iOS devices, as well as its own suite of devices. You can easily install it on your child’s devices and link it to their social accounts, including Gmail, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more. Bark’s AI engine regularly scans activity on the device and linked accounts and sends you alerts when something is out of the ordinary.
If you don’t want to set these up on an existing device, Bark sells two phone models and one smartwatch model that have everything pre-installed and ready to go out of the box. The watch and phones are all Samsung models, so you know they’re good products, but I chose something else for my son because Samsung displays use PWM dimming, which causes me health issues and could also cause problems for him. Thanks, genetics.
The whistleblower
When your child is little (read: under 10), parental controls are a de facto standard that’s an expected norm, even for the kids. As they get older, things get a little trickier. My son is almost 13 now and quite a bit more independent than he was even a year ago. I want to help him grow into a functioning adult, not to need me his entire life, so I’ve got to help give him more independence as he ages, but that comes with obvious dangers.
You generally know who your child is talking to in real life, but that’s a lot harder online. That’s where Bark comes in for me. Its AI-powered engine scans everything on the phone (including text, pictures, video, etc.), runs it through a private VPN, then alerts me when something is wrong. And, of course, if I really felt the need to read all his messages, I’d just take his phone away and do it. I’m still the parent, after all.
Every so often, I’ll receive an alert from Bark about a conversation my son was having on Discord, or some silly video he recorded. I get around 3 per month on average, so this isn’t overwhelming to deal with, and all of them are quite useful.
Most of the time, Bark identifies conversations as containing “bullying” or “violence,” but in my son’s case, the flagged conversation is just adolescent boys being goofballs rather than something truly harmful. “I’m going to kill you” sounds really bad with no context, but when I realized it was while they were playing some Roblox game where you fight each other, I’m no longer worried about it.
The same goes with videos or pictures he’s taken with friends. One time, I got an alert about some recorded video containing “sexual content,” but when I viewed it, I realized it was just potty humor taken a bit too far. A quick conversation with him nipped that one in the bud.
Another time, he skinned his knee quite badly and sent a picture of it to some friends. I got a quick alert when he did that and knew to grab the Band-Aids and Neosporin for when he walked back inside. It works impressively well, and it makes me feel like I have a digital companion helping me better parent him in the digital age rather than having to manually snoop on every conversation he has.
Bark Assistant
Bark’s proactive alerts are a phenomenal way to keep me informed without having to keep the app open all the time, but there are occasions when I want to look something up in the app. Bark does a lot, and I used to find myself fumbling through menus to find what I want, but that all stopped when Bark Assistant launched.
Assistant is launched via the center Bark button in the Bark app’s navigation bar. As you might imagine, Bark Assistant is powered by an LLM and can answer any question you have about your child’s account or activity. It can also make quick changes to settings or help you set up features you didn’t know existed.
My favorite feature is the “who has my child been talking to” option, which generates a one-page summary of the past seven days. It’s particularly helpful for kids who have access to apps like Discord, which are anonymous and can be nefariously used.
I also love the Advanced Insights tab, which uses a private LLM to summarize recent data and give you quick to-dos. In one humorous example, Bark identified a Google search my son made asking, “where is the eighth heroine?” Bark Assistant says, “the search was auto-flagged for drug/alcohol-related content because early keystrokes matched ‘heroin,’ but it looks like this was likely research for a book, game, or show character.”
That’s some fantastic insight, because the “eight heroine” is actually a puzzle in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, not because my son was looking for illicit drugs. It’s this kind of semantic understanding that makes Bark actually useful, rather than another app that sends me far too many annoying notifications.
Advanced Insights also gives you conversation starters for problems that it identifies. In the silly Zelda puzzle example, the Bark app suggested I double-check with my son by saying something like, “I saw you were searching for an ‘eighth heroine’ online — were you looking up a character from a show or game? I’d love to hear what you were digging into.” Good advice, especially if I don’t want to rush in and immediately accuse him of something.
There’s a lot more to Bark than these features, of course, but these are what set the service apart for me and make it truly special. It feels a bit like the difference between seeing a holistic doctor and stopping by a random clinic whenever you have a problem. Bark seems to understand the big picture, not just the things it should block or restrict, and I absolutely love that about it.