Protecting Your Family Online with Circle

A growing problem in many families is learning how to monitor your children’s usage of mobile devices. Between cell phones, tablets, laptops, and gaming systems, it seems like our children are constantly being tempted to spend more and more time online. So as a parent, how can we monitor and protect our children? We need to ask ourselves if we are allowing them to become addicted to technology at the expense of real life relational connections.  As a parent and pastor, I have seen so many examples of children and teenagers who are exposed and even addicted to pornography at a young age. This is a serious issue, and I’m afraid we are underestimating the effects of unlimited and uncontrolled internet access for kids. For several years, we have used free internet filtering by OpenDNS in our home, and that is a good first step, but what if you want more control?

Meet Circle, a relatively new device designed to manage the internet usage in your family. It is a device that works with your router in your home to monitor your family. You can set time limits for individual apps, you can filter unsafe internet sites, and you can even pause the internet during meals or during the night. It allows you to customize the access for each member of your family by age and by device.

After you purchase Circle (here’s my Amazon affiliate link for Circle), it is easy to setup. It then monitors and controls all your devices that are connected to your home network. If your children have mobile phones, I highly recommend that you check out Circle Go. For a subscription fee of $9.99 a month, you can manage up to 10 devices anywhere, whether they are connected to your home network or not.  This is really a great solution to protecting your family.

Meet the new way for families to filter content, set time limits and even pause the internet across all your technology and devices… Meet Circle. It’s a tiny box. A simple phone app. Plus, a little magic.With Circle, you can control all the devices in your home with an easy to use app and keep up with what your kids are doing online.

Here are a few videos to show you how it works.

 

https://youtu.be/RZWXrqYTgk0

Let me know if you are using it and your thoughts. I think this is really helpful for parents with young children, pre-teens, and teenagers.

Mike

I am a former design engineer who now pastors Cornerstone Community Church in Galax, Virginia. I'm passionate about following Jesus and I love technology. I've been married to Jennifer for 28 years, and we have three adult children.

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2 Responses

  1. Chris Reeder says:

    Have you tried the Circle Go functionality? Wondering how it works when off Wifi.

    • Mike says:

      I haven’t used it personally, but I’ve heard good things about it. It works as a VPN connection on the phone, so it shouldn’t pose any problems. They have details on their site

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