A few years ago, I gave a talk about raising kids in the digital age at a public high school in an affluent suburb on Chicago’s North Shore. During the Q&A session, a father stood up and spontaneously shared that he wasn’t taking any chances: He tracked his son’s and daughter’s locations on their phones. In fact, he still tracked his eldest, 19, who was away at college in another state. If the Find My Friends tracking app suggested she wasn’t in class—he also had her class schedule—he would text her, demanding an explanation. Some parents in the audience grimaced at the invasion of this young woman’s privacy, but seemingly just as many nodded their heads: They were tracking their kids too.
Casual surveillance has become a given of modern parenting. For the past five years, as I researched my new book, Growing Up in Public, I heard from teens about parents tracking their locations, reading their texts, and checking up on their grades multiple times a day. (I offered parents and their children anonymity while reporting my book, to protect their privacy.) Meanwhile, the “family locator” geo-tracking app Life360 has more than 50 million active monthly users. In a study from 2016, when the Pew Research Center most recently studied this phenomenon, 61 percent of parents admitted to monitoring their kids’ internet activity, and almost half said they looked through their kids’ messages or call logs.
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There are plenty of reasons parents might want to track their kids—safety, curiosity, a desire to connect—and plenty of ways to do it. Parents can surveil their kids, so they feel that they should: that doing so is simply good guardianship. It starts early, with apps like ClassDojo, which allow day-care and elementary-school teachers to document every moment of the school day. In the older grades, parents are encouraged to play an active role in their children’s education by monitoring grades and test scores. At open-house night at my son’s high school, we were told we should log in as an “observer” in Canvas, a schoolwork-management app, so we could see every assignment and quiz. And as adolescents become more autonomous—driving, spending more time with friends and less with parents—geo-tracking, looking over their shoulder into their assignment notebook, and reading their texts can all make parents feel like they are doing something to keep their children safe and close. The dad at my talk wasn’t an outlier: Location-tracking continues after kids become legal adults and leave the house, with almost 32 percent of college students reporting that their parents currently track their location in a soon-to-be-published University of North Carolina at Greensboro study.
But what can feel like good parenting in the short term might, paradoxically, threaten a kid’s ability to make safe choices in the long term. Tracking your teen’s location may be easier than having difficult conversations about what you expect from them when it comes to drinking, sex, drugs, and the various other challenges of life as a teenager. Reading their messages might be more straightforward than talking with them about how to be safe online. Monitoring our kids gives us a false sense of security, and leaves them poorly prepared for their future without us.
It can also do lasting damage to the parent-child relationship. I spoke with hundreds of teens for my book, and they repeatedly told me that they resent having their activity—especially their grades and their texts—monitored, to the degree that it can drive them away from their parents. All of this tracking turns the already delicate parent-teen relationship adversarial: One student shared that if she had a bad day at school, her stress was compounded, knowing that she would have to face her mother at the end of the day, and that she might greet her at the door demanding an explanation for a low grade.
A mom in a southern city told me she started tracking her son’s location on Life360 after he started driving. One day, he said he was at the movies but was actually at a house—where, the mom learned after some detective work, a girl about her son’s age, whom he’d been interested in, lived. She confronted him about being “evasive” and learned that he and the girl were in the early days of a relationship.
She presented this to me as something of a success story: Her child had lied to her; she caught him. But in the same conversation, she also described him as “a very private person.” To me, the story raises big questions about consent and respect. How did the son feel about the way his new relationship was revealed to his parents? And in the future, will he choose to tell his mother anything, knowing she can surveil it out of him whether he discloses it or not?
Adolescence is a time when teens begin to develop a sense of self that is independent from their parents. That’s a necessary, messy process, and one that’s probably best left less examined than constant monitoring allows for. One mother told me she was offended when her daughter criticized her cooking in a text to her boyfriend. A dad was hurt when he read his son’s texts complaining about a family vacation he had seemed to be enjoying.
While the words in a teenager’s texts may seem clear, their actual intent often isn’t. Maybe the girl doesn’t like her mom’s food and the boy wasn’t enjoying the family vacation. Or maybe she likes her mom’s cooking just fine but was showing off for her boyfriend. And maybe the boy enjoyed his vacation but thought he would look cooler if he said he was bored. Kids represent themselves differently to their friends—and that’s okay.
In fact, it’s crucial to their development that we don’t rob them of the opportunity to test their persona independent from their parents, and to share personal information when they are ready, in their own way. I remember walking home from junior high with my friend Rupa when she told me she hated her mother. I realized I sometimes felt that way too. Our mothers didn’t need to hear our conversation, and I’m glad they didn’t.
My parents and teachers had no access to my chats, my location, or the granular fluctuations of my grades. I skipped lunch in the cafeteria to hang out with my theater friends backstage. I told my parents I was sleeping at friends’ houses but didn’t mention that we were going to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, because I knew they would disapprove. I wasn’t doing hard drugs or getting into danger—I was testing the limits in small ways, learning to develop my own interiority outside what my parents expected from me. I’m very grateful I did.
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Parents who choose not to geo-track or read their teenagers’ texts are fostering two-way trust. They are allowing their kids to make their own mistakes, to know what to share with us, and to grow and change without being surveilled.
That’s the case with one high-school student I met while researching my book. His parents don’t use technology to track him. When he is out late, he texts them where he is and when he’s coming home. “As long as I do that,” he told me, “then we have mutual trust.”
Equipping our kids with good judgment—and letting them experience the consequences of messing up without trying to get in front of every mistake—is the only way to raise young adults who will be equipped to function on their own. And it’s also the best way to build strong relationships with our children, which is something we all want.
This essay was adapted from Devorah Heitner’s new book, Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World.
By
Devorah Heitner
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