In the new Jason Reitman flick “Men, Women & Children,” a prying mom (Jennifer Garner) monitors every email and text message sent by her teenage daughter.
“You’ve read through every solitary interaction I’ve had on every single website, Mom,” says the indignant teen.
To which her mother responds, “Honey, you know I just do this to keep you safe. OK, let me see your phone.”
This might seem like a far-fetched scene, played up for laughs.
But in this particular case, art imitates real life.
Intense parental scrutiny of phones and other technology — which can include anything from knowing the exact location of a child at all times to having records of a child’s emails, texts and social media activity sent straight to a parent’s own phone — is on the rise.
“People say, ‘I don’t want to spy on my kids,’ but all parents want their kids protected online, and as more and more people get it that they have to take precautions, the industry is growing rapidly,” says Josh Gabel, COO of Qustodio.
His company produces an app that parents can install on their kids’ devices to restrict their Internet browsing and to “monitor for signs of cyberbullying and online predators.”
According to Gabel, at least 60 percent of parents believe they should have control over exactly what their kids do on their phones and other technology, which has translated to nearly $1 billion in annual sales for products like his. And the numbers continue to grow.
And while these parents might seem like the ultimate control freaks, recent news suggests they might have good reason.
In Georgia, an appellate court has revived a negligence lawsuit against the parents of a boy who allegedly created a false Facebook profile of a female classmate. The court said a reasonable jury could very well conclude that the parents are liable for having “failed to exercise due care in supervising and controlling” their son’s activity.
Though Qustodio is an app that can be identified by kids once placed on their phone, other technologies, like TeenSafe, are invisible, allowing parents to pry unannounced if they choose.
One Westchester dad installed TeenSafe on his 14-year-old daughter’s phone to track texting and group chats (“areas of potential danger”) once a week. (He declined to give his name because he hasn’t told her he’s monitoring her.)
Though he has yet to find anything worrisome in the texts he scans (“looking at every single letter and every single word might be overstepping,” he explains), he learns enough to have “productive conversations” with his teen, who he feels is particularly socially vulnerable.
Rawdon Messenger, CEO of TeenSafe, a monitoring tool which has had more than 500,000 sign-ups since it launched in 2013 and growth of 10 percent per month, says anecdotal evidence shows more than half of kids know that they’re being watched, and the company encourages parents to come clean about it.
But Messenger adds, “We have no way of enforcing that.”
Tina Sustaeta, a licensed professional counselor with Carousel Pediatrics in Texas, is a big proponent of TeenSafe — both for clients and her own four kids.
“I made the assumption that my kids at private school wouldn’t hear about drugs, but it doesn’t matter the school, the neighborhood, how much money you have. They have access to so much more now, and these tools allow me to know what I need to know at every developmental stage, and to bring it up in a subtle way,” she says.
But not everyone is onboard with this strange new world of constant monitoring.
“You create greater danger than what’s out there online when you try to control every single aspect of a teenager’s life, to track where they are and take their phones and read their texts,” says Yalda Uhls, a developmental psychologist and media researcher for UCLA.
“It doesn’t build an honest, trustful relationship between the parent and child, and like with any extreme parenting, children will rebel like Jennifer Garner’s daughter does in the movie.”
Understandably, she says, “People are terrified, and they don’t know what to do now that technology is so pervasive in their kids’ lives.”
But much of the fear, she says, is overreaction.
“The truth is that very few children actually get attacked by sexual predators, and of the 25 prosecuted cases a year [nationally] of children who met up for sex with someone they met online, they had all exhibited problems in their offline behavior.”
Still, many parents want to stay highly involved in their children’s technology, openly if not on the sly, to help educate kids on how to behave in the online world. And some of them come clean about their monitoring from the beginning.
People are terrified, and they don’t know what to do now that technology is so pervasive in their kids’ lives.
- Developmental psychologist Yalda Uhls
Kathryn Koegel is well aware of what lurks on social media, especially targeted advertising.
As a result, the digital consultant regularly looks at the emails of her 11-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son, and unapologetically logs on with their passwords to see posts on Instagram and Snapchat.
Though she says she “could definitely see snooping going south,” she believes she “started [early] enough that there is no expectation of privacy.”
Is privacy a thing of the past with this generation?
Recently, Koegel was given greater reason to look more closely at posts when she got a call from a fellow Park Slope parent saying her son was on a date with a girl, and everyone but her knew it from Instagram.
“It wasn’t even really a date, but he had posted online who he was going to the movies with so when he got home, it gave me a great reason to say, ‘Please understand that what you post is public.’ Now that Park Slope is talking about his ‘date,’ he is keenly aware of that.”
Jim Beeghley, Ed.D, instructional technology coordinator for Lancaster Country Day School outside of Harrisburg, Pa., says that openly monitoring the phones of his four kids — a 17-year-old daughter and sons 13, 12 and 9 — is simply a matter of preparing them for the working world.
“All their accounts come in to our phones, and my philosophy is, ‘We pay for the phone, it’s not really yours, and if I want to look at the text messages, I can,’ ” he says.
“It’s not a discipline thing, it’s a responsibility thing. If you get into the work world, your boss owns your email.”
But some say the whole “I own the phone, I make the rules” logic is a weak excuse.
“If you have to spy on your kids, something’s wrong,” says Michael Brody, a child psychiatrist and head of the media committee for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
The whole business of overzealously monitoring kids is ridiculous and completely infantilizes your child.
- Child psychiatrist Michael Brody
“What works to get kids on the right track is the bond between the parent and the child, and that’s much stronger than any punishment or anything else. If there is a bond, and the parent expresses disappointment, that’s very important.
“The whole business of overzealously monitoring kids is ridiculous and completely infantilizes your child,” he adds.
As for online dangers, he says there are far fewer predators than the media would make us believe, and what parents need to do is discuss real issues, like, “Don’t get drunk in a fraternity house.”
“Kids have to learn to be their own best parent, and parents have to give up control, otherwise kids become helpless,” he says.
Todd Michael Cohan agrees. Cohan — president of the MobileGuard monitoring service for corporate compliance — created ControlMobile for parents after a friend’s autistic daughter started communicating online with a 25-year-old pedophile.
Still, he says, he’s not the kind of parent to use the technology.
“I would feel terrible using this service on my 9-year-old, who trusts me with her diary. Dealing with sex or drugs, you’re not going to stop them,” he says. “Our job as parents is to raise them to be good adults with good advice that fits the times. ”