How Much Should I Track My Kid?

Surveillance and Growing Up In Public with Devorah Heitner

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For someone who doesn’t have kids, I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about what happens when we track and surveil them. It probably has something to do with how much time I’ve spent thinking about who I was as a teen, and how the time and place (and parenting style) of the ‘90s shaped who I’ve become. I had to develop a sense of self strong enough to negotiate all of the freedoms available to me. How did that happen?

Like a lot of you reading, teen me had a lot of latitude in where I could go without parental supervision. My parents ostensibly knew where I was, but they didn’t know exactly where I was — and my transportation to and from a place involved pay phones and rides from friends’ parents. When I turned 15, we all started getting our licenses which meant driving around (in hindsight, pretty safely) in each other’s beat up passed down cars.

I was able to do so because of a tautological understanding: my parents trusted me because I had earned their trust. Sometimes I stretched that trust, but I was constantly figuring out what felt too risky, what felt right or wrong, who I didn’t want to get in a car with. Maybe that sounds like a lot of discernment for a teen. But how else do we figure out who we are? My parents could’ve lectured me about “making good decisions” all they wanted; I only knew how to make them by finding myself in situations far from them where I had to.

The same principle applied to my grades, to my online use, to how I talked to boys and figured out friendships. In high school, I would see my exact grade around twice during the quarter, when a teacher would distribute printouts that included all graded assignments and your current percentage. I talked for long hours on the phone far from their ears. I wrote letters and daily streams of notes, folded and passed to friends in the hallway. I would’ve been mortified and furious if my parents had access to them.

So maybe that’s why I think about this so much: I’m mapping my mortification and fury onto teens who are currently surveilled by their parents. But I also know the realities of the internet — and the new standards of high school, not to mention “good parenting” — and absolutely understand why so many parents surveil their kids, and why so many of those kids don’t even think to resist it. It’s just the way things are.

There’s so much anxiety and so little trust. I get why. But I also wanted someone to have a conversation with someone who’s been talking to parents and teens for years about how they actually think about these things: about what works and what doesn’t, about what facilitates confidence and what demolishes it. I wanted to talk to someone with a lot of compassion and openness — someone who understands what fuels anxieties but doesn’t thoughtlessly amplify them.

I wanted, in other words, to talk to Devorah Heitner — author of Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in the Digital World.

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You’ve been doing this work — trying to help caregivers understand how their kids navigate the online world — for over a decade. As a way of introducing readers to your work, I want to talk about what still seems to be at the core of caregivers’ anxiety. How much of it has to do with the fact that this generation is the first to experience technology this way, so it’s harder to say, for instance, “I watched a ton of TV and came out fine” when it comes to the internet? How much of it is a reflection of our own insecurities and anxieties about our OWN experiences of the internet? 

That is a great question. And just to start with that TV analogy:  even YouTube or TikTok is NOT like watching TV. When I was a kid, there was no chance I was going to run into a beheading or pornography on the few TV channels we had in my house in the 1970s or 1980s. 

I mean, when I ask adults my age what they weren’t allowed to watch, they often mention shows like Three’s Company, presumably because of unmarried adults cohabitating. Which seems…. quaint, right? Younger parents in my audiences at schools mention The Simpsons or MTV. When I ask the room how many would love for The Simpsons to be the most outrageous thing your child could watch, they all raise their hands! 

And of course we’re not just watching. So much of the media we — and our kids — interact with is, to be obvious, social. Our own images and stories are part of the media we are taking in. This can suck us into a hall of mirrors. 

Which, as you say, can be a complicated, anxiety-provoking experience for us as adults. 

Who hasn’t experienced their own sense of loneliness, distraction, or feeling less-than when scrolling other people’s posts? And if we haven’t personally succumbed to the roller-coaster of getting sucked into conflict that unexpectedly escalates, we’ve all seen it and thought, “There but for the good luck that I didn’t see this until now.” And that’s before mentioning the fact that actual trolls exist. So we can imagine how compelling – and potentially risky – social apps can be for teens, given adolescents’ developmental need to be connected to peers. 

These apps get us where we are the most human. Humans want to be seen, regarded and “liked.” The SnapMap feature on SnapChat where participants can see where all their friends are is hard to resist, but can be devastating. Surely SnapChat is aware of this and designed these app features  intentionally to make it hard to opt out. For adults, watching kids go through this is painful because we know how we would have felt, and likely still feel. Those moments of exclusion from our own childhood and adolescence are etched into our brains. Kids don’t want to opt out of things like SnapMaps because no one wants to be invisible. We all want to be on the social map. Especially teenagers.

But our own experience with social media — and as former teenagers — means we’ve got something to offer. When I first used Facebook in the early days it forced people back into my day-to day-consciousness, people from my past that wouldn’t have otherwise been on my mind. Scrolling brought envy, comparison or even second-hand trauma. Facebook bought me a front row seat to horrific loss in the life of someone I’d barely known, many years earlier. So, like pretty much everybody else I know, I’ve had to develop my own toolkit for navigating those spaces and my own emotions; like everybody else’s toolkit, mine is a work in progress, but I’ve been working on it a good long time now, and that’s the point. Our own experiences with presenting ourselves and interacting on different apps with social media can offer useful perspectives as we mentor young people as they navigate these spaces.

A few years ago I asked parents and caregivers and relatives to interview a kid in their lives about how they think about their video games. The results were pretty wonderful — and the feedback I got from the adults on the other end of these interviews was wow, it was really great to actually hear my kid talk about why they like the games they play, how they know when to stop, and how they feel about adults’ anxiety about games. 

In other words, it was really useful to actually talk to kids about the thing they were doing that made you worried! Why do you think it’s important to hear from kids about their own navigation of these issues? 

I love this! For sure, asking kids HOW they use an app can clear up a lot of anxiety. Tons of kids are using social apps predominantly to message. They aren’t posting much or at all to a “grid” or a “feed.” And when they reveal things about themselves, like their sexual orientation, or mental health issues, they are likely thinking about it more than we imagine.  Kids have so much to say about how they navigate everything from explicit DMs from strangers to when/whether to post about where they got accepted into colleges.

Adolescents are so much more thoughtful and discerning than we might imagine. Many of the teens I interviewed for Growing Up in Public curated their feeds to see things they felt were more affirming. I also love hearing from young people about novel uses for app, like chatting within a shared google doc and then erasing the conversation as they go as a way of ensuring privacy. Brilliant! Intentionally setting tracking applications like Life 360 or SnapMaps to the wrong location or even a place that doesn’t exist is fun. Changing your name and avatar on Discord is likewise a way to exert control and individuate in a space and resist what can feel like forced conformity within each app's aesthetic world.

Playing with the algorithm is fun, too. Even though teens shared with me how they are curating their feeds (for example: to follow more body-positive influencers). I don’t want to overstate a rosy outlook and say that companies like Meta and Snap and TikTok couldn’t do better–they can, they should, and we should absolutely keep pushing them to! Many kids know that looking at social can make them feel bad at times, but like adults, they don’t always feel they can overcome the pull. Again, for all humans — and teens especially — peer connection is vital to well-being, so the allure of social media is hard to resist, even if you know it isn’t making you feel great under some circumstances. It is important not to talk to kids like they are dupes for wanting likes (we want them too!) and to help them recognize how the apps are designed to keep us hooked.

You talk a lot about tracking and monitoring. Tracking kids’ location, monitoring their social media, checking their texts — parenting surveillance, for lack of a better term. You admit that there are some circumstances where it absolutely makes sense to do this sort of tracking — but are pretty bullish on how it can undermine trust in so many ways. 

I think this is one of those things that is really easy to get on board when you read it ... .but so much harder to implement, when concerns for safety trump larger philosophy. (It especially makes sense to me when parents are overburdened for whatever reason — trust is hard; monitoring is “easy”) 

Can you talk a little more about this tension, what you think is driving it, and effective strategies if you’re a caregiver who WANTS to have this sort of attitude but struggle to implement it? 

As an anxious parent, I get why people might want to track their children out there in the world. But just because we can surveil their kids does not mean we should. Reading their texts is a huge breach of trust for many kids. Especially covertly. It's one thing to let a tween know you are going to look at their texts with them once a week for mentorship purposes their first few months as a new phone user, or to remind a middle schooler that even if YOU aren’t looking, someone’s mom is likely reading that group text! It’s another thing to relive 7th grade by reading everything — covertly. Ultimately, if you choose covert spying you are painting yourself into a corner. What will you do if you see something concerning. Plus, you may never see their friends the same way again! 

Parents are being pushed to monitor location and that monitoring is being sold to us as “good parenting.” Location tracking via casual surveillance has become a normalized part of parenting in some communities. In a soon-to-be-published study from researchers at the University of North Carolina, almost 32 percent of college students report that their parents currently track their location.

And just to share a story about how that can backfire: one mother I spoke to for Growing Up in Public found out her 17-year-old son had a girlfriend by location-tracking him and spotting him regularly at the same house. After looking up the address, she was able to figure out who lived there. In other words, she sleuthed her way into his love life before he could tell her about it… and then confronted him, demanding to know why he hadn’t told her he had a girlfriend, calling it a breach of trust. His response: Her snooping was itself a bigger breach of trust — and good luck getting him to tell her anything personal after that!

Without making a judgment about how much privacy a teenager is entitled to as a philosophical question, what we’re talking about here are practical repercussions — because the whole incident created a breach in the relationship. That means less trust, and less communication — at least until that breach gets repaired. 

I actually wouldn’t say that trust and some kinds of monitoring can’t go together. The healthiest use of tracking that parents shared with me when free ranging young adults with house keys suddenly returned to the family nest in March 2020. Some parents shared with me that they tracked their young adult children’s whereabouts so they knew when they had privacy at home (for sex, etc.). 

But for sure, trust is hard: it has to be negotiated and re-negotiated. And even “consent” needs to be considered carefully. If we tell our kids that “opting in” to a tracking app is a condition of having a phone, or driving, our power in the negotiation blurs the line between our kids’ consent and their capitulation. 

Meanwhile, as collective anxiety increases, some young people say they want to be tracked (as this Wall Street Journal article documents) and they are also surveilling their parents. I would accommodate such a request carefully, but in a way that is self limiting and still encourages them to go off on their own–because as I’ve learned from anxiety experts, the more we accommodate anxiety through avoidance (as opposed to exposure) the more it can limit us. 

For example, you could make a plan that you will use Life 360 while your child is on their first out of state road trip with friends to visit colleges — but agree that you will turn it off when they are back in town. Of course, that’s just tracking locations in the physical world. Some of the same guidelines apply with tracking where kids go — and what they do — digitally. Overt rules and negotiation are always better than covert surveillance. If you have a child who is struggling with safe choices, or is engaging in digital self harm, they may need to check in their phone at night or have other rules and boundaries. All kids who are years from leaving home should be putting phones away at night! Sleep is important for physical and mental health. Some kids are getting phones as young as 9 or 10, and I’m not suggesting that mentoring over-monitoring means one should hand off this powerful search and communication device to a 4th or 5th grader and hope for the best.

I want to talk forever about Classroom Apps and online grade surveillance. My friend and I were talking the other day about how they would have exacerbated our own anxiety and perfectionism in deeply unhealthy ways. And as you note, they’re supposed to “empower” kids and parents with more information about performance, but actually often have the exact opposite effect. For people who are unfamiliar with these systems, can you first briefly explain what they are and what’s driven their proliferation…but what I really want to talk about is the long-term effects of these programs on kids especially.

Online grading apps and “learning management systems' like PowerSchool and Canvas are the hub where students can check what their assignments are, and check their grades. Think Slack for high school. With lots of reminders, etc.. And they’re definitely everywhere. Our kid’s high school constantly reminds us to check their grading portal, and I know they are saying the same things to students.

What’s driven their proliferation? They are super profitable, and companies are gobbling up other companies — PowerSchool acquired Naviance, for example. Growing Up in Public takes a deep dive into Naviance, the college application software, but the short version is: reducing any of us to a dot on a graph summarizing our stats  and plotting them on a graph comparing it to others can make students feel terrible.

They’re also a big problem. Students around the country shared with me how their stress at school is exacerbated by overchecking — and comparing with friends — and by knowing their parents can see everything.  The feedback loop these portals facilitate can be terrible for kids’ relationships with their parents: parents can turn into nagging machines, which undermines kids’ ability to learn executive function and makes kids feel like their parents are the enemy instead of their mentors and supporters. Not to mention, when parents text their teens during the school day about a quiz or project grade — and this definitely happens — it is incredibly distracting. Sometimes, a zero is also a placeholder while a student makes a plan to make up a missed grade. Seeing it there can panic parents and instigate unnecessary family conflicts. These systems can also get in the way of sleep: Students shouldn't be able to check their grades in the middle of the night. But they can, and do.

It doesn’t stop in high school, either. One college student tweeted about being at a party and having exam grades come into her phone. The ease and rapidness of communication means that a student might thumb out a hastily-composed, angry, drunk email to the professor from that party. Situations like this are why ideally we keep work and social life a bit more digitally separated, but our phones bring it all together. I advise students and parents  to resist over-checking by taking the app off of their phones and only checking on the computer as needed (for parents that should be very seldom!)

We also need to press our schools to adopt appropriate policies. The Stanford-based research group Challenge Success recommends that schools turn off access for students and parents to the grading portion during the school day so that it doesn't become a distraction: for instance, if you are in the middle of one class and a test grade gets posted from  another class. Personally I might go further — turn off access entirely after 9pm, etc. 

What new challenges of “growing up in public” do you see on the horizon and how are you beginning to think and talk about them?  

AI threatens to create new challenges faster than any of us can keep pace. I’ve been talking with parents for years about how to help teens manage a world where a nude they sent to somebody can end up getting out in the wild. Now, deepfakes can mean images we never even made — let alone shared — can get out there. So we need to lean even harder into making sure kids understand the implications of non-consensual sharing, or doing something online that seems funny or outrageous but is incredibly harmful.

We’re already in a situation where everyone has recording devices with them, so it is easy to catch or peer on camera saying or doing something problematic. The public shaming that often follows can be devastating and deeply isolating. A thoughtlessly and hastily posted meme on social media can lead to friends unfollowing them, to being canceled by their larger cohort of peers, to receiving school disciplinary actions, and to being judged by the whole town or community.

These consequences are in stark contrast to how our mistakes were treated when we were growing up. I’ve been arguing that we need to radically rethink how we deal with digital transgressions — when kids really mess up — and find ways to move forward in communities with support for the targeted communities or individual targets of disparagement or slurs, for example, as opposed to only focusing on shaming and punishing the perpetrator. We need to recognize these photographs or videos didn’t occur in a vacuum. Despite our disappointment and even disgust with a young person who uses the internet to post something cruel or hateful, we need to get curious about why this happens and figure out how to help kids reckon with the results.

We need to bring all of our empathy to mentoring the next generation on growing up so connected and public. And we can take some notes from them, as well. So many of the kids I spoke to were extremely thoughtful about who could see what they post and how it might make them feel. During college application season, several seniors in high school shared that they plan with friends how and when to post about acceptances, with sensitivity to friends applying to the same schools, etc.

The more we listen to young people about their experiences online, the more we can both mentor them and collaboratively design apps that facilitate a more positive experience. Looking at our own experiences with social media and noticing what we’re modeling is a good first step. ●

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You find more about Devorah Heitner’s work here, follow her Substack here, and buy Growing Up in Public here.