No, Parents Should Not Use Tech to Spy on Their Teens
Generation Z is working overtime to outsmart increasingly tech-savvy parents, but who is winning this technological turf war? Parents would like to think they have the upper hand. Armed with an arsenal of teen tracking services – like My Mobile Watchdog, Mamabear, and Life360, to name a few – adults of today are equipped to monitor their child’s every online footstep. But teens are two steps ahead with self-deleting photos, software to fake GPS locations, decoy social media accounts, and more.
In truth, this is a battle neither side can win, fought at the cost of parents’ relationships with their children. While snooping on technology may catch a teen in the act of breaking a rule, adolescents will have improved relationships with their families when they instead approach their parents with problems – offline.
A 2013 survey by an internet security firm revealed that 6 out of 10 parents admit to combing through their child’s private texts, emails, and messages. Today’s world has equipped adults to monitor their children in a myriad of ways, but should they? After all, parents ten years ago weren’t able to intercept notes passed between teenagers in class or monitor their whereabouts before curfew on a Saturday night. Mothers and fathers frequently lament a disconnect between children and their families that wasn’t present in the previous generation. The ways children use and misuse technology are often heralded as the culprit when, in fact, it’s the adults’ abuse of tech that’s to blame.
Dr. Larry Rosen, an international expert in the “psychology of technology,” believes that parents who install monitoring software send a clear message to their children: distrust. This often leads to a breakdown in the parent-child relationship where the child feels an increasing pressure to sneak around their parents’ regulations. In the absence of trust and respect between parent and teen, young adults view their parents’ efforts to keep them safe as an obstacle to overcome or a puzzle to be solved. Parents attempting to keep tabs on their adolescent’s location and interactions may really be achieving just the opposite: they know even less about their teen’s life than they imagined.
Further, many parents focus on the immediate benefits of technological snooping without considering issues that may appear later in life. What happens when children inevitably fly the nest and leave their parents – and their online espionage – behind? Adolescence is intended to be the halfway point between childhood and adulthood, in which teens are given limited freedoms and begin to experiment with self-sufficiency while still under adult supervision. Thus, teens denied freedom in adolescence will inevitably find themselves ill-prepared for college and beyond when the parental barriers they’ve spent so much time trying to evade are suddenly removed.
There’s no question that new technology has thrust parenting philosophy into uncharted territory. But perhaps there is hope for a cease-fire in the technological war, a new kind of parent-child relationship based on mutual trust and open communication. Otherwise, the greatest casualty may be the already tenuous bond between parents and their teens.