The 4 Best First Phones for Kids 2025

Top pick

This Android smartphone comes with Bark’s parental controls built-in, monitoring the child’s texts, searches, and social media for potential problems. Kids can download any apps from the Google Play Store, pending parent or guardian approval.

Get this if: You’re looking for a smartphone that sends alerts about problematic usage, including on social media apps.

Monthly service fee: App monitoring and cellular service through Bark costs $50 and up; a talk-and-text-only “starter” plan costs $30. When you buy directly from Bark, the cost of the phone is included in the fee.

How the phone works: Bark is a parental controls company, offering software that flags mentions of drugs, porn, bullying, and other potential concerns in your child’s messages, posts, and searches.

The Bark Phone is a Samsung smartphone with Bark’s parental controls built in. You pay for a monthly subscription, which covers both cell phone service and monitoring.

Your child can request any of the millions of apps available from the Google Play store. Under Bark’s advanced plan, your child has the flexibility to pick the apps they want, which means they can potentially have access to a web browser, social media, and games—if you allow. You approve their app requests through Bark’s online parent portal (or via an iOS or Android app).

Bark’s software screens your child’s text messages, emails, and some social media. That includes Instagram posts, YouTube searches, and direct messages on Snapchat. You cannot see your child’s messages or posts in the parent portal or app unless they’re flagged. In our basic tests, it alerted us to a text expressing depression, a message that was bullying, and searches for alcohol and guns on Snapchat. For some social media, your child’s account needs to be connected to Bark to allow Bark to monitor certain actions (for instance, Instagram posts). This requires your child’s cooperation or for you to have your child’s social media account passwords.

You can set screen time limits for individual apps, track a kid’s location, and shut down the phone at bedtime. Once your child reaches the app’s daily time limit, they won’t be able to access it. You can also create multiple screen time routines, such as only allowing educational apps to be available during school hours.

Bark also separately offers an app that can be installed on any smartphone, which we review in our guide to parental controls. On a Bark phone, the parental controls are built in, so you don’t have to go through the hassle of installing it, and it includes features that are not available through Bark’s app, such as the ability to approve contacts and set daily screen time limits.

Warranty: Bark offers a limited one-year warranty.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The Bark phone is available only with Bark cell phone service and costs much more than other kid smartphone plans: The starter plan, with no app monitoring, costs $30 per month, while the advanced plan ranges from $50 to $90 per month depending on your data needs.

Your child may complain that it’s challenging to message friends. Because of general text messaging limitations between Android phones and iPhones, group texting between your child’s Bark phone and their friends’ iPhones can be challenging (for example, it can be annoying to start a new group chat in order to add new friends). Apple said it is fixing that, but it hasn’t happened yet.

There are complaints that Bark’s software inexplicably glitches. We’ve heard about instances of messages not going through, screen time rule changes taking a long time to kick in (or not activating at all), and other hiccups that required troubleshooting. When we tried to block Snapchat, for instance, it didn’t kick in the first time, though it did on our second try a few hours later.

Bark can’t monitor all social media use: While Bark promises to monitor popular social media, it’s important to note the fine print. For instance, Bark monitors direct messages but not searches on TikTok (we easily found unsuitable videos of near-naked girls, women, and men but did not receive any alerts). On Snapchat, it monitors direct messages and searches but not the stories your child sees (while we were alerted to strangers sending problematic messages, we were not alerted about finding and viewing influencers posting near-naked photos of themselves). In our rudimentary tests, Bark caught some problems, but it missed others: While it tracks web searches, for instance, it didn’t catch our searches for cutting (a form of self-harm), nearby gun stores, and places that sell marijuana and vapes when we used the phone’s Samsung browser. Bark can help keep an eye out for potential problems, but as with any gadget for a kid, its filters can’t substitute for frank conversations.