It’s all too easy to get caught up in the parent’s full view: The simple, sleek, and captivating interface is designed to make parents feel warm, fuzzy, and responsible for monitoring. continuous. A circular avatar of a child on a known map will alleviate the heart anxiety that comes with stepping out of your body that has been a part of parenting since time immemorial. When we check our kids online and find them safe, designs can make us think they’re safe because of we have checked.
It’s easy to fall into the category of a kid entering the world on his own for the first time — but should you do it for your 15-year-old? Your 20s? Three years after the text copying incident, my child, then a teenager, returned home one sad afternoon, terrified of himself. “Mom, my friend’s parents just SENDS HIM and chewed her up,” she yelled, “because we’re a block away from where she lives. We only went to another cafe after school because the first one was very crowded. They are watching her EVERY TIME. Also, a member of an online parenting group I joined recently confessed that she spied on her child at college without the adults knowing. It just felt good and eased the pain of remembering her newly independent baby. The group is uncomfortable, but distinguishes whether this is a violation or not. Where will it end? And why don’t we have an offframe?
Research shows that constant vigilance does the opposite of increasing teen safety. ONE University of Central Florida study of 200 teen/parent pairs found that parents using monitoring apps were more likely to be authoritarian, and that adolescents were supervised not only equally, but also than potentially exposed to unwanted pornography and being bullied. Another study, from the Netherlands, found that adolescents were supervised more secret and less likely to ask for help. It is not surprising that most teenagers, when you bother to ask them, feel that supervision poison a relationship. And there are very real situations, especially for gay and transgender youth, where their safety can depend on being able to discover without disclosing all the details to them. their family.
We need to move to a youth safety model that empowers children and set them up for the transition to Internet and IRL independence. We need an online equivalent of Free Range Kids, which encourages parents to let kids do things on their own in a physical space.
But we also need to reduce the expectation of parents that just being vigilant every minute of the day can protect their teens from online and offline disasters. The growing personal scrutiny of parents has become an easy competitor for tech companies. For instance, instead of fixing extreme diet content on Instagram, Instagram could ask parents to shoulder the responsibility of tracking what a teen sees on its platform. In a 2020 report titled Teenagers don’t see, Data and Society investigated how social media companies effectively avoid designing for the needs of teen users. We need better claims and not only for better community management, easier reporting, algorithms that don’t promote extremist content. Companies should respect teenagers as a separate group of customers, a group that deserves their own direct relationship, not just an attachment to their parents.
