What is a geofence?
A geofence is a virtual circle you draw on the map around a real place — your home, the school gate, the soccer field. When a family member's phone crosses that boundary, MyParental sends you an automatic notification: Emma arrived at school, 8:02 am. Liam left practice, 5:47 pm. That's the whole idea, and it's quietly transformative: the question "did they get there?" answers itself before you think to ask.
Parents consistently tell us geofencing is the feature that changes their daily rhythm most. The live map is reassuring, but it asks you to look. Geofences flip the relationship — the app watches the places, and you only hear about the moments that matter.
How geofencing works in MyParental
When you save a place, you choose a center point and a radius — typically 100 to 300 meters. Your child's phone monitors its own position against your saved zones using a power-efficient mix of GPS, Wi-Fi and cell signals, and reports a crossing the moment it happens. Because boundary detection runs on the device, alerts arrive within seconds of an arrival or departure, and battery impact stays low: the phone doesn't stream constant GPS, it just watches for the crossing.
Each alert includes who, where and when, and every crossing is also logged in location history, so you can review the day's comings and goings later even if you missed a notification at the time.
What you can do with geofencing alerts
- School arrivals and departures. The classic. One alert at drop-off time, one at dismissal — and silence in between is good news.
- Home alone after school. Know the moment your child walks in the door while you're still at work, without a check-in call they'll forget to make.
- Practice, lessons and clubs. Get a departure alert from the soccer field and time your pickup drive perfectly.
- Grandparents' house, the sitter, a friend's place. Any place you save becomes a place that reports in.
- Places to know about. You can also set an alert for a zone your family has agreed is off-limits — and because your child can see every zone you've saved, the boundary itself becomes part of the agreement, not a tripwire.
Tips for geofences that actually work
- Size the radius generously. 150–250 m is the sweet spot for most places. A zone drawn too tightly around a single building can trigger late or bounce when GPS drifts indoors.
- Name zones the way your family talks. "School", "Nana's", "The field" — alerts read like messages from your own life, not coordinates.
- Mind overlapping zones. If home and the bus stop are 100 m apart, two large circles can overlap and fire together. Shrink one or merge the concept into a single zone.
- Review each school year. New school, new practice schedule, new freedoms — five minutes in September keeps the alerts relevant.
Free vs Premium
The Free plan includes two saved places with full arrival and departure alerts — enough for home and school, which covers most of the daily worry. Premium makes saved places unlimited and adds smart place alerts, so the rest of your family's map — practice, lessons, friends' houses, the part-time job — can report in too.
📲 How to set up Geofencing Alerts
- Download MyParental from the App Store or Google Play and create your free parent account.
- Install the app on your child's phone and link it with the one-time pairing code.
- Switch on Geofencing Alerts from the parent dashboard — the app guides you through any permissions.