Pros and Cons of Monitoring Children’s Online Activity

[Dr. Ine Beyens]: Parental control is just one type of monitoring, one way for parents to keep track of their children’s media use. So it’s part of a broader landscape that also involves parental surveillance, where parents check their adolescent’s smartphone and social media, for example. For example, inspecting their kid’s text messages, checking their social media contacts, tracking their kid’s smartphone use, and so on. And this may, of course, be a very convenient way for parents to obtain information about what their kids are doing online. It’s beneficial for catching risky situations early, but there are also potential downsides to this. It can be an intrusive form of monitoring that violates adolescents’ privacy, undermines teens’ trust, and it may encourage secrecy so that your child does not want to share anymore. And it may also cause conflicts among parents and their children in the end.