Parental Monitoring of Electronic Communications

Technology Thursday

Would you read your child's email as a matter of course?  Moms at Work at the Orlando Sentinel poses a variant of this question wondering about text messages and whether parents should monitor their children's conversations online.  With communications technologies increasingly pervasive and, more importantly, globally-accessible, such questions loom larger and larger for parents.  I know a woman whose son was an adolescent before wireless was common, and she engineered her house so that the ethernet cable ran down the hall from his room so that she could tell whenever he was online or not.  I have another friend who gets a copy of every email his daughter sends and receives (or so he thinks - teenagers are clever with technology, after all.)

There are many reasons for close monitoring of digital communications.

If the child knows his conversations could be seen by his parents at any time, it may help her understand that she is accountable for her behavior online.  Close monitoring may provide teaching opportunities about any number of types of interactions.  Younger children are less sophisticated at interpreting and understanding questionable or suspicious behavior online.  When children are on the Internet (and not in a walled-garden environment that carefully screens who has access) it means that almost anyone who wants to has a communications channel open to them.  And, ultimately, parents are responsible for their children's behavior.  As a commenter at Moms at Work noted, some states won't allow your child to drive alone until they've had a year of practice with you in the car with them.

But, there are also reasons to be cautious about such super-vigilance. 

Depending on how it's done, monitoring your child's conversations and communications could undermine trust.  I think it could also stand in the way of the child developing an appropriate and mature sense of autonomy and privacy.  One way to think about privacy is that it enables the freedom to think unfettered and uncoerced, to explore ideas and engage intellectually with the world on one's own terms.  Excessive monitoring of a young person's electronic communications may be just a digital variant on obsessive helicopter parenting.

So, I've gone back and forth on this one over the years -- in a theoretical and academic sense until my son was born -- and I still hope I can raise him such that I won't have to explicitly monitor every tidbit of his electronic communications.  That is, I hope to lay the groundwork regarding expectations of behavior and for him to feel free to ask me or his father about anything that strikes him as strange, confusing, or uncomfortable in his life - online or off.  I can remember even as a very young child feeling that my dignity and independence were being undermined by certain parental behaviors - although I didn't have the vocabulary to express it that way at the time.  And I've long believed that children live up or down to your expectations. If they expect you to be monitoring or 'spying on' them, they'll behave less responsibly than if your expectation all along has been that they behave responsibly and maturely.  My son is 8 months old and this is obviously all still very theoretical for me.  But a world where Mom can hear and see everything he does -- and provide a constant backstop -- is not the world he'll eventually live in. 

At the same time,  it's impossible to predict what technologies will be available and what associated risks there will be when this eventually becomes an issue for us,.  One clearly privacy-reducing technology that I do expect we'll use with him is geo-location. At the appropriate time he'll have a phone that, assuming the phone is with him, will let us know where he is at any point. I am hopeful that I can say to him that I want him to keep me informed enough of his whereabouts that I should never have to look for him. And, to be fair, I'll let him have access to my location at all times, too. 

I asked his father his thoughts on monitoring electronic communications and his current model is to begin by monitoring everything and decrease over time until, as with anything else in life, we tell him: until you prove otherwise, we're going to assume you can handle this privilege without us looking over your shoulder anymore.

We'll see how that works out when the time comes, of course.

Comments

[Katherine]

My reaction to this question is like the whole "stranger danger" issue. Instead of monitoring every communication (or telling kids never to talk to strangers) I will try to give my kids the tools to protect themselves, while also letting them know I'm watching. I don't think it's possible to read everything, and it's better to have access so they know you CAN read anything if you want.