As expectant first-time moms and dads, we sought out as much information as possible about milestones at every age and stage. Fast forward to the present and there’s no handbook guiding us through the tween and teen years with mobile devices and ever-changing landscape of social media. Even though we can’t turn back time, we can rely on smart technology like Bark parental controls.

How Bark Parental Controls Monitors Devices to Protect Your Child

One huge milestone for today’s kids is getting smartphone and if your child has a smartphone, they’re likely to be using social media. Social media is not just Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, YouTube, and other tools your kids are talking about today. It’s any website or app that connects users with other people. Even though popular apps and platforms shift, the need to keep our kids safe in the online and real worlds is constant.

Social media is a lifeline for kids because it helps them stay connected to the people in their world outside of school but like any technology, it comes with risks and rewards. As parents, we’re well aware risks associated with social media. Technology tools like Bark are here to help monitor and protect our kids.

Introducing Bark

Bark parental controls features technology that keeps children safer online and in real life. Created by fellow parents who make the safety of our kids their top priority, Bark is a monitoring tool that helps you stay on top of your kids’ online activity by sending alerts about potential issues.

How Bark Parental Controls Work

Bark uses advanced artificial intelligence to scan your children’s online activities like text messages, social media posts, Google Drive files, and many more to look for potential dangers. It monitors social media activity as well as device activity (texts, photos, videos) and if an issue is detected, it sends a snippet of the message or thing, along with recommended steps to help you handle the situation.

Bark parental controls will send parents an alert for potential issues like bullying, suicidal ideation, self-harm, violence, sexual content, online predators, and more. To understand how Bark’s advanced monitoring works and what is monitored on social media, email, text, online storage platforms and more, visit their page on Monitoring.  

How Bark Keeps Kids Safe without Helicopter Parenting

If you’re thinking Bark sounds like a way to helicopter parent, it’s not. Bark preserves the autonomy your tween and teen crave by providing alerts via text and email when an issue is detected but doesn’t reveal every sordid detail. Alerts provided to parents provide kids with more privacy than traditional spot checking their accounts does. 

Instead of just relying on keyword analysis, Bark’s advanced AI and statistical analysis recognizes and alerts you to potential problems as it reviews texts, photos, videos, etc. Advanced AI looks at the context, not just keywords or phrases, and constantly adapts based on the ways kids and teens talk, search, and share. 

Their sophisticated analysis engine helps keep kids safe online and in real life by extracting potential issues from connected accounts but it also helps to preserve the trust you’ve built with your kids. Kids appreciate that Bark gives them appropriate privacy and their parents can’t read everything they’re doing. Bark lets us parents decide when and how to have conversations with our kids about what we’re seeing through our monitoring dashboard.

When my kids were tweens and teens, Bark empowered me to have conversations with my kids about important topics related to online safety.

Bark alerts can come with recommended next steps for how to address and deal with these issues. Toggle on the Conversation Starters setting in the Notifications tab to get prompts that can be helpful in having critical conversations with your tweens and teens to help foster trust and open lines of communication.  communication.

Setting Up Bark

If Bark sounds too good to be true, it isn’t. In all my years (17!) of reviewing parental control tools, I’ve found it to be the most comprehensive monitoring tool that’s the easiest to set up and use. In just three quick steps, you can have Bark parental controls up and running by doing the following:

• Sign up for an account using your email address
• Sit down with your child to connect their social media accounts, text messages, and email
• Wait for Bark’s watchdog engine to analyze activity on your child’s accounts

Bark monitors activity on your child’s accounts constantly and you’ll receive an email or text alerts if potential issues like cyberbullying, sexting, grooming, potential drug use, acts of violence, etc. are detected. As scary as is to think about these topics, it’s much scarier to be unaware.

Putting Bark to the Test

When I first evaluated Bark, my oldest was a middle schooler who had had her phone for a year. I tested it at the start of a summer where my kids were spending more nights away from home than in it, enjoying unplugged adventures at camps without devices. Since my test subject’s smartphones was switched off and gathering dust at home, I connected my social accounts, email, and texts messages to Bark to see what kinds of content their advanced AI might pick up.

Almost immediately I started getting alerts of potential issues both via email and text. It notified me that my Twitter account had been disconnected (the first sign of my 2018 Twitter hack!) and other issues regarding content. Note: You can change notification settings to get alerts about potential issues on email and/or text.

Clicking on the Review Potential Issues button took me to my Parental Dashboard where 16 issues waited for my review. These issues were flagged across my accounts and included items that came in through texts on my Android phone, Instagram DMs, Twitter, email, and even photos that I had snapped with my phone’s camera.

Clicking on the top issue gave me a peek into the content Bark had flagged on Instagram. It was a DM between me and a friend where we were talking about our vacations, including the adult beverage that she was consuming.

Bark also flagged a photo that was sent via text that included a drink menu because of references to alcohol. Can we just pause for a moment to appreciate that Bark scans text in images?!? That’s pretty amazing!

As an adult over the age of 21, the text I got from my fellow mom friend with a photo of the drink menu and the fact that she was feeling a bit drunk wasn’t so concerning.  I knew she was being responsible and in a safe place. If Bark had alerted me to the same content about alcohol on one of my kids’ accounts, I would have seized the teachable moment to have a conversation about underage drinking and why it’s not ok to drink until you’re 21.

In scrolling through the rest of the issues that needed to be reviewed, Bark notified me about drug/alcohol-related content and profanity including:

• Instagram comments about a new taco restaurant that has tequila as part of its name
• My retweeting of content from @AskListenLearn about how parents are the number one influence on their kids’ decision to drink or not drink alcohol
• A recommendation of a brewery to a friend vacationing in the same place where we were earlier this summer via Instagram DMs
• An invitation to a neighbor’s happy hour that came via text
• A new video posted by the tech site, Engadget, featuring a Weed Panini Press

It also flagged this as profanity even though in the context “hard on” was said, it was anything but.

Could this language have meant something more if it had been on one of my kids’ accounts? Absolutely. Such language could be indicative of sexting or grooming and falls is definitely something I’d want to know as a parent.

Bark constantly runs in the background to monitor connected accounts. Notifications are only sent if there’s an issue and you can always log into your parent dashboard to see how many messages Bark has analyzed. Every Sunday a recap email will appear in your inbox that will summarize the number of potential issues and topics to be aware of.

The email I received last Sunday looked like this:

Ideally, your child’s account will have an entire column of uninterrupted green checkmarks!

Bark works. Rather than sensationalize tragic stories, they collect and examine hard data from children nationwide (ages 8-17) across social media, texting, and email and the analysis is compelling. At the time I tested Bark parental controls, it detected:

• 3,662 grooming occurrences
• 493,001 cyberbullying incidents
• 152,102 mental health issues
• 336,136 sexual content occurrences
• 53,322 self-harm/suicide incidents
• 566,084 drug/alcohol-related conversations

Throughout 2024, Bark analyzed more than 7.9 billion online activities from teens and tweens across the United States. The company found:

• 37% of tweens and 60% of teens were involved in a self-harm/suicidal situation
• 63% of tweens and 77% of teens encountered nudity or content of a sexual nature
• 4% of tweens and 7% of teens encountered predatory behaviors from someone online

You may be shocked at these numbers and think “not my kid” but yes- your kid, your neighbor’s kid, and possibly every other kid you know. As parents we know that even the best kids can have momentary lapses in judgement and the importance of keeping an eye on their mental health. Bark helps us stay in the know to help keep our kids, their friends, and the larger community safe.

Bark Summary

After testing Bark, I am confident in their mission to keep children safe online and in real life. Their cutting-edge technology analyzes content in a way that I haven’t ever seen a monitoring application do in the 17 years I’ve been writing about technology and digital parenting.

The overview Bark parental controls provides about topics of concern guide you in having important conversations with your tween or teen. It is not supposed to parent for you but it provides helpful guidance in how to have conversations about with your kids about these topics.

Bark is easy to set up. It can monitor multiple accounts for multiple kids in a family. Once you connect it to your child’s many accounts, it runs in the background, making it a must-have for every parent who has given their child a smartphone.

Bark is $99/year (or $9 per month) per household, regardless of how many children are in your family and devices you have. I think it’s worth every penny because you can’t put a price on your kid’s safety. Sign up for Bark and get 20% off for life using my affiliate link!

In addition to my experience, you can read what other parenting influencers had to say about using Bark with their kids:

• Making the Summer Safer, No Helicopter Parenting Required by Jeff Bogle on OWTK.com
• 5 Ways to be a Trans Friendly Parent by Casey Carey Brown on  Life with Roozle
• Bark and Byte: Protecting Kids on Social Media by Whit Honea on Family Life on Earth

Bark affiliate links included in this post. All opinions are my own and based on personal experience. Images courtesy of Bark. Originally published August 1, 2018 and updated in 2025.