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How to Help Your Kid Shake the Holiday Blues

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Holiday Blues

For many families, the two months between Halloween and New Year’s Eve are the busiest of the year, and they can be a roller coaster of parties, candy, school holidays, family visits, travel, and even more candy. Add to this mix colder, darker weather and a lack of outdoor time and you’ve got a recipe for the holiday blues. Kids may love all this excitement at first, but it can quickly mount and lead to stress, sadness, and anxiety (not to mention the occasional meltdown).

We know this time of year can be hard, so we’ve put together some resources to help you support your children during the holidays. Once school lets out, remember the 4 Rs to help shake the holiday break blues.

Routine

Kids crave structure to their days — it gives them a sense of security and reduces worry. But with a jam-packed holiday event schedule and a longer-than-average school break, it can be hard to stick to a daily routine. While you can’t control everything, you can give kids an idea of what to expect one day at a time. Write up a daily schedule and stick it to the fridge — kids will appreciate knowing what’s coming up and what they need to do.

Rest

The first thing that usually suffers when routines change is a steady sleep schedule. The holiday season may see many children out late past their bedtimes and up early to travel. Unfortunately, fatigue is a common factor leading to lower moods in children, and many parents know all too well that it leads to grumpiness. Make sure your child is getting the recommended amount of rest. For kids and tweens, that’s 9 to 12 hours a night. For teens, it’s 8 to 10 hours a night.

Realistic expectations

The holidays see some families taking expensive vacations, receiving trendy gifts, and visiting large, loving families. But this isn’t the case for every family, and when kids see on social media or TV what they don’t have, they can be disappointed. Have open conversations about what the holidays will be like for your family, and acknowledge if financial or family circumstances will result in a different experience than last year.

Recognize the signs

There’s a difference between the holiday blues and depression. If you’re worried that your child is more than just upset or sad because of the holidays, learn to recognize depression. Keep an eye out for the following warning signs, especially if they last more than two weeks:

  • Sadness
  • Irritability
  • Change in appetite
  • Change in sleeping patterns (too much or too little)
  • Feeling slowed down or “burned out”
  • Physical complaints (stomachaches, headaches)
  • Behavioral changes
    • Conflicts with family and friends
    • Decline in school performance
    • Inappropriate sexual activity
    • Use of alcohol or drugs

All of this can be pretty tough to think about, and even harder to discuss. Signs of depression often hide deep within a child’s phone as they text friends or post to social media about their feelings. Bark monitors for these warnings signs and alerts you when your child needs your support. While it’s certainly no substitute for ongoing conversations with your child, it’s a “helping hand” when dealing with tougher topics. If you’ve not yet tried Bark, you can sign up today for a free, one-week trial.

 

 

TikTok: What Parents Need to Know

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A new app has been sweeping the social media landscape, and is even more popular in the App Store than Snapchat and Facebook. TikTok (formerly Musical.ly) is a video sharing platform that allows users to create, share, and react to short videos that play over a soundtrack. It’s essentially a hub of home music videos, and when used in the right spirit, TikTok can be fun for everyone.

But not everyone uses the app how it was intended, and just like other social media platforms, TikTok is fast becoming a hotbed of abuses ranging from cyberbullying to sexploitation that parents should monitor with Bark. Here we dive into the app’s development and unpack what you need to know as a parent.

What is TikTok?

2014 saw the introduction of an app called Musical.ly, which became a popular way for teens to share videos of themselves lip-syncing to their favorite songs. Three years later it was acquired by the Beijing-based ByteDance, who merged it with another app it owns —TikTok — consolidating their audiences to edge out competitors. TikTok has now become a social force to be reckoned with, equipped with all-new features and spreading like a virus.

Each video lasts up to 15 seconds, and users can add a variety filters and effects to enhance them. They also have the ability to send videos privately among friends or with the general public. Anyone can see public videos — even if they don’t have an account — and the most popular videos are compiled into a feed that serves as a highlight reel for the entire global platform. Needless to say, TikTok can lead to some unsettling online activity.

The Dangers of TikTok

The public nature of the platform means that users can be contacted by anyone in the world. Although users can block or report others for inappropriate messages, TikTok has no broader parental controls. Even if your own account is set to private, you may still be exposed to sexual or violent content posted to the public feed.

Cyberbullying is also a major issue. People can create multiple accounts, using aliases to target others they don’t like. Trolling is also popular on TikTok, especially through the “Reactions” feature, which allows users to respond to videos with videos of their own. At its core, TikTok encourages expression through music, but sometimes people express things that are highly personal or sensitive. Kids who admit to depression are often met with dismissive and sarcastic reactions — some are even publically encouraged to commit suicide.

TikTok also has a “Duets” feature, which has been exploited by sexual predators who use the platform to groom underage users. One user in particular — TheBudday — is notorious for performing suggestive duets with underage girls, sending them inappropriate reaction videos, and even attempting to meet up in real life.

On its merits, TikTok is a great way for teens to keep in touch online. But that doesn’t mean the app will always be a safe place to socialize. Bark monitors online activities on TikTok and more than 24 other social media platforms, as well as texts, chat, email, and YouTube. Sign up today to keep your kids safer online!

Give the Gift of Bark This Holiday Season With Bark Gift Cards

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gif to bark

This holiday season, you’ll be able to provide online protection for the children in your life with Bark gift cards, available exclusively for purchase on Amazon. These gift cards will enable people to share the lifesaving benefits of Bark’s award-winning technology and spread the word among friends and family, near and far.

Whether you’ve seen firsthand just how great Bark works or are a loving relative who wants to provide some protection along with that new tablet, a Bark gift card is the perfect companion gift to keep a child safer online. And they’ll be in good company — Bark now helps protect more than 2.5 million kids across the U.S.

What We Do

Bark monitors text messages, YouTube, emails, and more than 24 different social networks for potential safety concerns. Designed for iOS (iPhones and iPads), Android, and Amazon mobile devices, Bark provides the most coverage of any parental monitoring tool. Our software uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to search through texts, photos, and videos for concerning interactions.

We send automatic alerts for signs of cyberbullying, depression, online predators, adult content, suicidal ideation, and more. Bark saves parents and guardians from manually monitoring their child’s activities, saving time and respecting a child’s privacy by only surfacing potential concerns. 

Get Yours Now

The Bark gift card provides a prepaid subscription for Bark, and cards are available in 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year subscriptions through Amazon. You can ship them directly to the recipient or to your own house, where they can be included along with a holiday gift.

A Bark subscription is a wonderful complement to a new device, giving the parents peace of mind that their child’s online activity will be protected. At Bark, we’re proud of this new opportunity to work together as a community to help keep children safe online.

Give the gift of Bark!

To learn more about what Bark does, click here.

Why Your Child’s First Phone Should Be an Android

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With Black Friday and the holiday season swiftly approaching, many parents are going to be in the market for their child’s first cell phone. In the U.S., iPhones and Androids dominate the current smartphone market, accounting for more than 99% of all devices. Choosing the right phone these days often comes down to preference and cost.

But when it comes to keeping your child safer online, Androids provide the better user experience and more comprehensive coverage for parents. While Bark can help keep your child safe with both platforms, in this article, we’ll tell you why Androids make monitoring a breeze.

Android plays well with third-party apps

Apple is known for taking a more aggressive stance on application security than Android. While this isn’t a bad thing — no one wants to get hacked — it can hinder legitimate, potentially lifesaving apps like Bark from working quickly and easily.  Conversely, Android’s open-source platform lends itself well to apps that monitor content, which is why Androids and Bark’s app work so well together.

Setup is super simple

To get started with your Bark account on an Android, all your child has to do is download the app and start connecting their accounts. Bark monitors the phone 24/7, regardless of whether it’s connected to Wi-Fi. Because of this, we have a better possibility of picking up more secret activity like deleted messages.

With an iPhone, on the other hand, monitoring is a bit more complicated, requiring program installation and daily phone backups.

Want to keep your kids safer online?

Bark can help.

Bark covers texts, email, YouTube, and 24 social media channels.
That’s 4 times more than any other monitoring app.
Download our app today

Get it on the Apple App Store    Get it on Google Play

More coverage on the 3 most popular apps

On Androids, Bark can more comprehensively monitor the popular trinity of teen and tween social media platforms — Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube.

For Snapchat on Android, this means we can monitor the text direct message (DM) capability that so often eludes parents. These DMs disappear on the phone itself, but not before being caught by Bark’s algorithm. With Instagram on Android, we can monitor the text DMs as well as photo DMs.

YouTube also sees more expansive coverage with Android than with its iPhone counterpart. Bark monitors a child’s posted videos, comments, searches, and history/views, enabling parents to get a truly holistic view of what their kid is getting into on the video platform.

No matter what phone your choose, you can be proactive about how your child uses it. Download a tech contract for you and your child to sign, and make sure to get started with Bark. Sign up today for your free, one-week trial.

Late Night Fright: The 3AM Challenge

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The 3AM Challenge has become a phenomenon on YouTube, with some videos reaching millions of views. Kids all over the world are now waking up at 3:00 in the morning — the “witching hour” — to hunt for signs of paranormal activity.

While on the surface the 3AM Challenge seems like little more than kids having a laugh late at night, its most popular YouTubers have edited their videos to make them as frightening as possible. Plenty of kids are old enough to handle them, but younger kids might find them disturbing. This can keep your child up late at night, afraid that every sound is a sign from the other side.

A Chilling Challenge

The premise behind the 3AM Challenge is that harmless daytime activities — playing with a fidget spinner or talking to Siri — become haunted late at night. One of the trend’s most popular creators, Jason Ethier, says, “What makes them scary is that when you are doing things that attract ghosts into your house — even if you don’t believe in ghosts — it’s always in your mind that it could be real.”

Dr. Barbara Greenberg, a family psychologist, says that it’s perfectly normal for kids to enjoy scaring themselves, but younger kids are at risk of giving themselves nightmares if they push past their limits. Children are extremely impressionable, so parents should be aware of what they’re watching on YouTube. It’s hard to spot-check every device every night, but monitoring services like Bark can alert you to issues like these that might be harmful to your child.

Older kids know better than to believe everything they see online, but that doesn’t mean they will always act responsibly. Not only is staying up late bad for a teen’s health, but the 3AM Challenge can also become an excuse to sneak out of the house to go “ghost hunting” with friends around the neighborhood.

What Parents Can Do

One of the best things you can do as parent is to teach your kids to spot evidence that the videos aren’t real, including sales pitches for apps and suspenseful background music. These are things that younger kids may not pick up on by themselves, but they’re all telltale signs that the 3AM Challenge is just for entertainment.

Dr. Greenberg also says that it’s important to validate your child’s fears, and to help them feel empowered. “If your kids are coming to you talking about what they’re afraid of, that’s a beautiful thing and it’s an experience that provides them with the opportunity both to be soothed by you, and to learn to soothe themselves.”

Monitoring your child’s online activities can be extremely helpful when it comes to protecting them from inappropriate online content. Bark monitors chat, texts, email, and 24+ social media platforms and alerts you to potential issues. Sign up now to keep your kids safer online!

Kids Are Using Google Docs for More Than Just Book Reports

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Many parents are familiar with Google Docs, Google’s online word processing app. It’s become a staple of the workplace — easily shareable, great for collaboration, and with a fool-proof autosave feature.

For these same reasons, Google Docs has also become popular in schools, with many children using it for schoolwork, homework assignments, and even group projects. But kids are incredibly inventive, and they’ve managed to turn Google Docs into a de facto communication and social media hub. Confused? We’ll break it down for you.

Chatting

When one person is typing in a Google Doc, it’s like a piece of paper. When you share it with a friend, however, it becomes one large text conversation. You can invite as many people to join the conversation as you want, and everyone can contribute in real time. How do kids tell who’s who? Little avatars in the corner show who else is viewing the document, with assigned profile colors that match that user’s cursor.

Kids have turned to chatting in Google Docs in class out of necessity. Schools often block stand-alone chatrooms and social media platforms with a firewall, and students know that websites for school work can’t be blocked. Classroom chats in Google Docs can then pick up right where they left off when kids get home. While parents may think their child is deep into a history paper, they may actually just be chatting with friends.

Bullying

A few weeks ago, we discussed how rampant cyberbullying is with today’s kids, and how it’s different from the schoolyard bullying parents may remember.

At Bark, we’ve seen more than 60,000 cases of kids ganging up on other children in Google Docs. They work in tandem to write mean or hurtful things in a shared Google Doc. In other cases, kids create private, digital “burn books” and invite others to contribute while leaving out the teased child.

A DIY social media platform

A blank Google Doc can also become more than just a chatroom. By adding images and embedding videos, kids can make it into a repository for jokes, memes, photos, and more. Kids can comment on images and text, and create jokes and stories filling page after page. Like Snapchat, kids can post images and then quickly delete them.

Electronic diaries

Google Docs can be accessed on any device that connects to the internet. Many kids use it as a diary; a convenient one that can be pulled up anywhere and anytime, whether on their phone, tablet, school Chromebook, or home desktop. But unlike traditional pen-and-paper diaries, these new electronic journals are entirely private, leave no paper trail, and don’t have to be hidden under the bed. Kids often pour their hearts into Google Docs, keeping hidden the signs of depression or anxiety they don’t share on social media or in texts and emails.

Whether your child uses Google Docs at school, at home, or both, Bark can help monitor what they’re getting into.

Bark for Schools provides free monitoring for student-issued accounts for K-12 schools in the U.S. Ask your child’s school if they’re currently using Bark — if not, direct them to bark.us/schools to learn more.

Bark for Families is $9 per month and monitors texts, emails, YouTube, and 24+ social media platforms. Sign up today for a free, one-week trial.