To help parents guide, protect, and connect with their kids as they learn how to navigate the digital world.
Our approach
The digital lives of our children
Kids spend an average of 5.5 hours a day on digital devices. Most parents don’t know what their kids encounter during that time, but excessive device use is associated with behavioral and mental health issues. The risks are real, and they’re overwhelming.
As parents, we’ve grappled with the all-or-nothing approach. Do we block everything and prevent kids from using phones and tablets until they’re older? Do we trust our kids to go online without any restrictions and hope for the best? We landed on a middle path: a way to actively parent and teach our kids to navigate the internet safely and responsibly.
You know your child best
Parenting in the digital age doesn’t come with a one-size-fits-all solution. The amount of supervision an 8-year-old needs is different than that of a 16-year-old. We designed BrightCanary so families can use it based on what works best for them: more supervision for younger kids, and gradually allowing more independence for older, more mature kids — all under a parent’s guidance and support.
When your child is learning to drive, they don’t go from passengers to drivers overnight. There’s a learning curve, and it’s our job to guide them through it. At BrightCanary, it’s our mission to give you the tools you need to keep your child safe and engage with their digital lives.
A small team of parents
BrightCanary launched in 2022 to help parents keep their kids safe in the digital world.
My wife Tara and I have spent most of our careers working in technology. But when we became parents, we struggled to figure out how to weave technology into our children’s lives. The goal was to help parents find the right balance between protecting kids from the digital world and guiding and supporting them online. We taught our kids how to ride a bike and safely explore our neighborhood streets. As they begin to navigate the digital world, our goal is to stay present and engaged at every step. This was the inspiration for BrightCanary.
Our twins turned 11 during the pandemic, so our kids were independently using technology earlier than we would have liked — it was the only way to let them connect with their friends and “attend” school. But it was frustrating to have young kids sitting on screens for hours per day with concerns about what they were looking at. We tried other parental monitoring apps, but our clever kids could work their way around any solution that involved installing software on their devices, and they hated when those products slowed them down. So, Karl and I started working on a solution for parents to stay informed about what their kids were doing online. We wanted a monitoring app that matched our parenting approach of letting our kids be independent, with some guardrails.