Many parents keep an eye on their children's online activities, according to a recent survey by the Safer Internet Centre Netherlands. Understandable, of course, because as parents you are responsible for the development and well-being of your children. It is therefore important that you are involved in their ups and downs, also in the digital world, and assist them in word and deed when they encounter challenges or problems. However, there is a difference between being involved and keeping a constant eye on children, for example by demanding that you be allowed to read in on their friends' app conversations or by using special software to track their online and offline behavior. The latter can not only have a negative impact on children's development, but might also violate their privacy. Finding a healthy middle ground, however, is no easy task for parents.
In raising children, parents are challenged to balance the various responsibilities they have: protecting their children from harmful influences and encouraging their healthy development. Both are an extension of each other, but can also create tensions. By wanting to protect your child from harm, you can avoid adverse effects on his or her well-being. Protecting your child too much from - irrational - risks, however, can come at the expense of his or her freedom to develop to his or her full potential. A complicating factor is that the balance between the two - protection and freedom - shifts as children get older. Proportionally, children should have more and more freedom as they grow up. They are increasingly capable, or at least should be enabled, to make decisions independently, to enter into relationships outside the parental field of vision and to shape their identity in a context other than the family context.
Children - and not only they, of course - will behave differently in different contexts: in the proximity of your parents, you "are different" than in your group of friends. In this way you can play with your identity and try out different roles. To do so, however, it is important that those contexts do not merge seamlessly, or that your 'audience' does not start looking into contexts where it does not belong. Keeping the different contexts in your life separate is much more difficult in the digital world. Information spreads faster and more easily widely online, and on social media you often have "friends" or "followers" from different contexts at the same time, making guarding boundaries a challenge. (1) These kinds of features of the digital world make managing who has access to your digital identities, think of your profile on Instagram or your YouTube channel, quite a challenge. Also vis-à-vis parents, for whom this information is not always intended. So moving freely from your parents or playing unnoticed, even online, is important for children's development. This need to have and create their own spaces - and thus privacy - begins at a fairly young age. Think of the toddler who is in a quiet corner having a serious "conversation" with a doll and ceases that play when he or she realizes you are listening in. Or the eight-year-old who delicately reminds you that you are supposed to knock before you rush into his or her bedroom. Those kinds of expectations and needs of children are not suddenly different now that part of their doings take place in the digital world. As parents, you have to be aware of that and take it into account.
That said, parents may be concerned about the risks of the digital world, for example because of stories of cyberbullying, sexting and online challenges, or because their children have actually experienced something unpleasant. (2) Moreover, digital technology offers numerous opportunities to actually keep a closer eye on children. Because children - as we just saw - are posting more and more online, interactions with their friends on profile sites may be more visible to parents than if they were taking place primarily outside the home - at the bike shed at school, in the park or the mall. And when kids are out and about with peers, it's fairly easy to set up a smartphone to know where they are hanging out and contact them through the app. Should you be a worrier as a parent, it may be appealing to require your children to respond when you contact them, not turn location tracking off again by themselves and provide insight into all their social media activity, website visits, apps and other posts. There are also a growing number of dedicated devices (think Conncted Kids smart watch (3)) and services (e.g., T-mobile's FamilyWhere for Android phones (4)) that can monitor children's movements.
Again, you have to strike a good balance between using these supervisory tools and having faith in your child that he or she will be okay. Most children do not walk in seven locks at once, and an unpleasant experience can also be very instructive. In any case, it is important for parents not to secretly monitor their children, as this can be detrimental to the trust between child and parent. Moreover, it is good if children - especially teenagers - have a say in parents' watching into their lives. Some teens won't mind or even like sharing information or even their location with their parents, while others really don't want to. Then again, if you persist, children may find ways to get out from under parental supervision, and again, it can have negative effects on the trust relationship between parent and child. You can also make other arrangements to temper your concerns, or talk to your child regularly about his or her online experiences to stay involved. This assumes, however, that open communication is possible between parent and child. In problematic parent-child relationships for all sorts of reasons, this may be more difficult. There can also be good reasons why it is in the child's interest to supervise more strictly as a parent than a child might wish. Consider the case where an easily impressionable 14-year-old regularly engages in sexually oriented chats with older adults who insist on dating and the parent decides to monitor the teen's chat contacts from now on.
Finally, we return to the survey we started with. This indeed shows that about one in eight parents have taken precautions to monitor their children. This usually involves watching children online or monitoring cell phone and social media. However, relatively few parents (20%) track their children with location tracking techniques, and half would not even consider doing so. So there is a clear boundary there for many parents. In all cases, however, it is not clear whether the precautions were taken with the children's consent or whether there were special reasons for doing so. On the positive side, the majority of parents, especially mothers, talk to their children about their online experiences at least once a week. At the same time, this could be done more often, because this conversation is such an important part of the relationship between parent and child and offers all kinds of starting points for giving advice or help should this be necessary. Sincere interest creates connection and trust so that both beautiful and unpleasant experiences can be shared.
(1) American researcher danah boyd talks about "collapsing contexts," see, among others, danah boyd. (2014). It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven: Yale University Press.
(2) By the way, a recent survey by the American Family Online Safety Institute parents of 6-17-year-olds shows that many parents also see the positive aspects of digital technology.
(3) This smart watch lets you know where your child is and allows you to set so-called safe zones within which the child must stay or else a notification will follow.
(4) This app allows family members to stay up to date on each other's location.
This article can also be found in the Youth and Education file
