Our Five Favorite Apps for Connecting with Children

Connect with School

SeeSaw is a highly trusted app for communication among parents, teachers, and students. Stay up to date on class activities, see real-time progress on assignments, or simply open a line of communication with your child while they’re away from home. While using SeeSaw, you’ll only receive communication about your own child, which adds a layer of security mass emails lack. You’ll also stop worrying about miscommunications between what your child remembers the teacher saying, and what they actually said!

Safe Video Calling

For parents who travel for work, co-parent, or who want to connect with distant family, video calls can bridge a seemingly ever-widening gap between our children and the people who love them. When you’re dying to connect with your family, not all video apps are created equal. Not only can the advertising in apps like SnapChat range from annoying to absolutely inappropriate, but these apps can also make your child easily accessible to anyone around the world.

JusTalkKids creates a safer online environment by requiring your password-protected approval before a contact can be added.

Chat Apps

Parents must be especially cautious about utilizing chat apps, as many are designed with advertising, and not security, in mind. Apps like Instagram and Facebook make it difficult to monitor or control which companies (and what people) are able to reach your children. WhatsApp allows you to add friends based on whose phone number you have, and sidesteps third party advertising entirely.

Your child can make phone calls, send photos, chat, and video call only who you choose to connect with.

Host a Watch Party

If your kids are dying to connect over a distance, hosting a Netflix watch party may be the answer you’ve been looking for! Download the free Chrome extension and have a distanced date with cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and friends.

The extension offers an option to synchronize videos, allowing real-time viewing, as well as a friend-chat option. Slumber parties may be on the back-burner for now, but a watch party is the next best thing to being there.

MARO

Just as Virgil Maro guided the intrepid Dante through the Inferno in The Divine Comedy, so does MARO intend to guide families through the complexities of the conversations behind growing up.

MARO covers topics like reproductive health, hygiene, mental health, diversity, identity, and empathy for children from Kindergarten to young adult. These conversations have been tough to navigate since the dawn of parenthood as we know it, but “as we know it” is a constantly changing landscape. Children are growing up in a world far different from the one our parents were raised in, and in many ways, that’s a great thing!

In other ways, we have to be aware that our children are hungry for information, and as easy as it is to gain access to it, it’s also easy to fall into predatory and misleading information. That makes initiating these talks early imperative to your child’s ability to disseminate information, to separate facts and fear, and to know that they can come to you for an open, honest, and mature conversation.

MARO uses both Parent-facing and Child-facing content, customized to create a helpful and accessible conversation from both sides. The app utilizes a team of experts in children’s physical, emotional, and psychological health to provide tools for your whole family to navigate growing up, together.

Children are smart, empathetic, and powerful, and MARO meets them where they are with respect and dignity.

We are always trying our very best to stay ahead of our children’s needs, and we are so grateful to be parenting in a time when technology is on our side! We will keep doing our best to test drive, troubleshoot, and tinker with apps that help us, and you, connect with your family. Thank you for letting Wonder Bunch Media earn your trust in the digital age!