I love to use technology and now that my kids have a new car, because the old one had been totaled, I felt that I needed to have a little better oversight on their driving habits.
I have triplet 18 year olds who are all three brand new drivers. They love the freedom and so do I, but I worry about their safety. With a new car, I felt that there should be some accountability on being a safe driver so there’s be no more wrecks. And no speeding tickets as the new car has much more power and coolness factor.
I have searched high and low for a smartphone app that would allow me to know how fast they were driving right when they were driving. I found MamaBear. This is one of the few apps for parents that is for Android (that’s me) and iPhone (that’s them).
It is easy to set up and although you can get very stalkerish with your kids on this app – monitoring them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, I opted to only know where they were and to get an alert if they were driving over 55 mph.
In the app you can add multiple kids and multiple guardians. You can set what speed you want to get warned about. Where we live 55 mph was good. You can even set safe zones. For example I set up home and school as safe zones so I can be notified when they come home and when they are at school.
I don’t want to get too crazy about monitoring, and so am really only using this app for safe driving accountability, but I can see for some parents it may have way more uses.
So far so good. My kids can even see on a map where all family members are including Mom and Dad – that’s kind of cool. In fact that’s one of the things they liked.
You may want to check MamaBear out too. Oh, by the way, it is free. You can move to a paid version to get reports and more tracking and it is not too expensive if you felt you needed that. For me free is fine.
Get it at the following places:
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geowaggle.mamabear
IPhone App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/ke/app/mamabear/id542203931?mt=8
P.S. I am not being paid for this review, I just found the app, am using it and wanted to share it with other parents of teen drivers who may be just like me.