Listen to any of the current top ten songs and you’ll find all sorts of content that may not be considered appropriate for children. Profanity, sexual content, violence, and suicidal ideation abound in today’s popular music. How can we, as parents, keep an eye on what our children are listening to without having to go through and read lyrics for every song on every playlist? Bark is offering a pretty good solution with their latest update. The AI-based message monitoring system now monitors lyrics on Spotify.
Connecting your accounts to Bark is pretty simple with the Android app but demands a bit more tech expertise to connect to iOS (due to Apple’s strict anti-monitoring policies.) You have to download Bark’s software to your computer and then set your child’s iPad or iPhone to back up to that same computer in order for Bark to monitor the device. Spotify, however, connects on the account level which means set up is a simple as logging in to Spotify and giving Bark permission to access data in the app. That does mean that shared accounts will be monitored as one so your listening habits will be monitored as well and then reported to you as if your kids listened. We raised our Spotify subscription to the 14.99 price in order to set up separate accounts for our kids. This means they can be monitored separately giving us more accurate reports.
Reports from Bark are notifications about specific songs with the lyrics listed along with recommendations for discussing the songs with your children. We saw immediately that some of the songs our son was listening to had some lyrics that were a bit more violent than we would approve of. We were able to discuss this with him and he removed them from one of his playlists immediately. The songs were in no way “explicit” since we have turned off access to explicit content on his Spotify app but the Bark system allows you to set the sensitivity so that it will report songs that even hint at innuendo, violence, or other adult content. Our approach is to always err on the side of caution so we have sensitivity turned all the way up.
Bark’s message monitoring has also resulted in quality conversations with our children, even within just a few days of activating the software. We were notified that our daughter had been “bullied.” It turned out she was just telling her brother to stop texting her over and over again. The AI noticed that she was asking him to stop and he was continuing to message her and it flagged it. That is EXACTLY the kind of thing we want to be notified of. Her brother was just being annoying but if that was some older boy asking for pictures or a friend telling her something inappropriate or mean, we want to be notified. For us, a false alarm is evidence that the software is working and we are happy to weed through false reports so that we’ll be sure to get the one that could save us and our children from a lot of trouble.
Song lyrics, videos, messages, and social media posts are helping shape our kids’ worldviews. We should be on guard against the kinds of content that don’t meet our family’s standards. Bark allows you to do that without your kids’ privacy being interfered with. You don’t see all their messages, just the ones that Bark flags as potential dangers. This means they can have their phone or tablet, message their friends, watch their shows, and listen to their music without you always asking what they’re doing. You won’t have to ask because you’ll be alerted if they do something you don’t approve of. Just remember that we never recommend spying on our kids without their knowledge. Talk with them about Bark and any other software you use to report content. Let them know why you are using the software and talk with them about any reports you receive. This is how we help them build a healthy attitude towards tech.
You can get Bark by clicking THIS LINK, using the promo code: BF56WBD, or clicking the banner near the top of this article. We are an affiliate of Bark and will receive a small donation when you pay Bark for your subscription. Thank you for protecting your kids and for supporting this blog and our ministry.
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