How Can I Monitor My Child’s Text Messages on iPhone and Android Without Them Knowing?

Children are much easier to monitor when they are young. The older they become, the less they listen to you. This could hurt, right? Especially if you’re trying to protect them from the danger, they could be exposed to online. Refusing to monitor kids’ texts, you leave them vulnerable to online predators, cyberbullying, and inappropriate content.

Wouldn’t it be much easier if you could just track kids’ text messages? And what about staying updated with their conversations without them knowing? What if I told you that you could do these in a few simple steps unnoticed without risking damaging your relations?

With this short guide, you would get to know how to see your child’s text messages.

How to Get Your Child’s Text Messages on iPhone?

While there might be a few ways to manipulate iPhone settings to monitor a child’s phone, they are insufficient. To track kids’ text messages on iPhones using settings, you will technically need your child’s permission. You need to get their Apple ID and Password, and with the kids being so smart nowadays, you risk getting caught by just manipulating settings.

Now, you must be asking yourself, ‘How can I monitor my child’s text messages on the iPhone?’ You can unobtrusively do this and, in fact, monitor all their activities online without them knowing using parental control apps. It is your best bet if you want to do it discreetly.

Using Apps to See What Your Child Is Texting About

Parental control software is an app for parents to monitor the text messages of their kids. It lets you track their text messages, social media texts, and check call logs. Some of these apps also give you the GPS location of their phones.

The good thing about parental control apps? You can track and see everything without the child getting a clue. They are automatically hidden in the background once set up. Using these apps to see what your child is texting lets you give them the right mentorship and quickly intervene when they might be heading towards danger.

As a father, I am particularly familiar with one app that has helped me monitor my child’s texts, mSpy.

With mSpy you can:

• Read SMS, iMessage, and Emails. mSpy lets you read all received, sent, and even deleted texts on your child’s device. The texts are labeled by timestamps and divided into received and sent messages.
• See Conversations in Instant Messengers. Monitor every text and multimedia sent and received by your child in WhatsApp and Skype, as well as social media apps such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.

Beyond the highlighted features for parental text monitoring, mSpy has many other functions: location tracking, phone calls monitoring, browser activities tracking, and much more.

mSpy is simply the best app for parents to monitor the text messages of their kids without giving them a clue.

How to Install Parental Control App on Child’s Phone?

• Determine your approach. Is the target mobile device jailbroken/rooted or not? A jailbroken device allows mSpy to run at full capacity to make advanced features available.

• Get the mSpy app. Having chosen a subscription package that suits you, you then need to select the iOS platform (with or without jailbreak).

In most cases, you will need physical access to your child’s mobile device. However, you can link mSpy remotely to your child’s iPhone, provided you know their device iCloud credentials, and 2-step verification is not enabled on the device.

• Receive installation guide. Instructions on how to complete mSpy installation will be sent to your email. You are also always welcome to contact 24/7 Support for more details. Make sure that regular automatic iCloud backups are enabled on your target device. Then enter the creds in your account and wait for confirmation.

• Start monitoring: That is it. You can now check on your child’s device on your Control Panel on any device.

It is your best bet to implement parental text monitoring on iPhone. Be mindful of the update intervals as you cannot adjust them for iPhones/iPads. The updates you will be receiving sync with iCloud.

How to Get Child’s Text Messages on iPhone for Free?

You can monitor kids’ texts on iPhone for free through phone settings. To do this, you will need your child’s iCloud ID and password.

Once you have the details, follow the simple steps in either of the two methods below to start getting their texts on your device, without the kids knowing (well, maybe not exactly).

Using iCloud Message Sync

Step 1: Grab your child’s phone and go to ‘Settings.’ Click on the device Username to access the child’s Apple ID account. Select iCloud.

Step 2: Move the slider for ‘Messages’ to turn on the message sync to iCloud. This will upload sent and received messages to the iCloud storage.

Step 3: Sign in to the same iCloud account in Step 1 on your own Apple device (iPhone, iPad, or Mac) and wait for synced messages to load.

Using Text Message Auto-Forwarding

Step 1: Go to ‘Settings’ on your child’s phone. Select ‘Messages.’

Step 2: Turn on ‘Send and Receive’ under ‘Messages.’

Step 3: Sign in to an Apple ID account you would like the messages to be forwarded in this case.

Step 4: Go back to ‘Messages’ and tap ‘text Message Forwarding’ to enable text auto-forwarding feature.

Step 5: Choose the device to receive the forwarded texts on. A verification code will immediately be sent to the selected device.

Step 6: Enter the verification code.

These approaches discussed above on how to get your child’s text messages on the iPhone for free come with certain limitations. These include:

• Only iMessage texts can be monitored, leaving out social media app texts such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

• It always requires physical access to the child’s phone to set up.

• You need your child’s Apple ID and password.

Aside from these limitations, these free approaches are like locking up a door and leaving the keys hanging right there. I mean, it is just a couple of settings manipulations that can easily be detected by your smart kids who are likely to be typing ‘Can my parents read my texts?’ on Google right now. 

How Can I Monitor My Child’s Text Messages on Android?

Unlike the iPhone, Android does not allow you to track your kids’ text messages by merely playing with the settings. However, installing parental control apps like mSpy on a child’s phone also works well. You will track not only their texts but also the location and all Internet activities.

mSpy gives you access to all the messages, SMS, WhatsApp chats, and messages from social media apps like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, etc.

However, social media messages are only accessible through the Keylogger option until the target phone is rooted. Otherwise, you will be limited to the outgoing texts and keyboard entries made for the media.

To monitor kids’ texts on an Android phone with mSpy, you will need physical access to the target phone for about 10-15 minutes. You must also ensure the target Android phone’s setting allow the installation of apps from unknown sources (apps not from Google Play Store).

Follow these simple steps to install mSpy on an Android device:

Step 1: Download mSpy. Open Chrome and download mSpy using the direct link you will find in your account after choosing the platform. You will see a captcha you need to trace to verify you are not a robot.

Note that the direct link does not open a web page. It allows you to download mSpy directly and discreetly in the background. You will get a little pop-up message that notifies you that the download is complete.

Step 2: Launch the downloaded file to start the installation. Follow the prompts to adjust Google Play Protect and Keylogger settings. Then give the app all the permissions it requires.

Step 3: Check the license agreement box to complete installation and then set up mSpy on the Android device.

Step 4: After you see congratulations on successful installation, delete the mSpy bt.apk file and clear the browser history on the target phone.

Step 5: You can now check your mSpy Control Panel on any device to track your kids’ text messages.

Monitor Kids Text Messages via Telecom Providers’ Parental Controls: Verizon & Sprint

Many telecom providers have special services on their platforms that allow a certain extent of parental control. For example, Verizon Wireless and Sprint both have functions like a content filter, calls/SMS blocking, usage, and account controls.

However, to read the outgoing and incoming texts, you might need to call the provider and file a request. More often than not, these telecom providers will not hand you the texts to protect their users’ privacy.

Another viable approach is to log into the user’s telecom account. To use it to monitor kid’s texts, you will need their account login details.

Here is how it works in Verizon account, for example:

Step 1: Sign in and go to Account >>> Texts online. Accept terms and conditions.

Step 2: Click on the conversation to see the detailed messages.

Why Should Parents Monitor a Child’s Text Messages Without Them Knowing?

The Internet is a repository of both healthy and unhealthy information. Kids’ and teens’ sense of judgment is still at a questionable stage, yet they spend a lot of their time online chatting with friends (and strangers too) and binge-watching goofy YouTube videos.

The major problem lies in the fact that parents are entirely shut out of these online activities. It is now very different from the past when our parents could hear us loud on the telephone.

These kids can be molested by malevolent adults disguising as their peers. They might share personal info that could endanger them. They can say things to and about each other that can lead to cyberbullying, toxic gossip, and ultimately destroyed reputation and self-esteem. All these can go on without the parent catching a breeze.

Kids can get crafty to beat the system put in place to monitor them because they do not understand the grave consequences of their exposure to these ugly sides of the Internet. Hence, the need to monitor kids’ texts without them knowing. So, we can step in to provide proper guidance and salvage situations before they go awry.