Should Parents Monitor Kids Online? A Question of Safety Strategy

The internet is a scary place, especially for kids. There’s all sorts of dangers for young people online. They could end up being manipulated, getting their account taken over, or having their identity stolen . They could be groomed by a child predator or convinced to meet up with a stranger who could then harm or kidnap them. Poorly judged posts could result in lasting consequences – or even unintentionally be a crime. And kids may not realize they’re in a dangerous situation until there’s no longer an easy way out. As a parent, you want to protect your kids online. Companies, tech experts, and even other parents often recommend different parental control or monitoring software to help you do that. But there’s always the question of whether parents should monitor their kids online. Will it actually help protect them, or could it end up doing more harm than good? In this article, we address the complex question of monitoring and controlling kids’ online experience and look at different strategies parents can take to really protect their kids online. You as the parent are responsible for your child and their safety. The internet has the kind of dangers that make the news, like predators , blackmailers , and child traffickers , as well as the more everyday dangers of cyberbullies and inappropriate content. If you’re not monitoring your child’s online behavior, someone with more malicious intent might be. Monitoring your child’s online activities keeps them safe. Children’s technological abilities and curiosity often far outpace their judgment and awareness of danger. This is normal. Anyone raised with technology will be good at using it, but kids’ brains are still growing. We can’t expect them to be as prepared as an adult to deal with online threats. And bad judgment calls online can have huge consequences. You may not know as much about the technology as your kid. But you have more life experience and know more about the potential dangers and what to look for. If you’re monitoring your child’s online activity, you will be better able to spot red flags and identify risks. Then you can intervene before it becomes a real threat to your child’s safety. Tech is everywhere these days. Schools use it to teach. Our kids use us to socialize. And predators use it to find, groom, and exploit their victims. If we’re going to protect our kids from tech-based dangers, it makes sense to use tech-based tools. Parental control software is an easy way to keep track of what your kids are doing without being intrusive or inconvenient for them. You don’t have to make them hand over their phone regularly or spend a bunch of time figuring out what their apps are for. You don’t even have to be near the devices themselves or constantly reading your kids’ messages. Most of these software tools will filter the messages your child is sending and receiving and send you an alert if a concerning topic comes up. In addition, most parental control software will also let you protect your child from other negative aspects of devices, such as screen addition, lowered attention spans, distraction at school, and poor quality sleep. Depending on what features you enable, you can block them from downloading distracting or dangerous apps, set usage limits, and even disable games and social media during school hours or after bedtime. Technology has done a lot of things to make our lives easier and better. We should let our kids have those benefits, too. But there also needs to be safeguards so that parents can protect our kids from people using tech to target them. In the end, that’s what using these tools to monitor kids online is – just another piece of tech to make the rest of our technology safer. You as a parent are responsible for your child and their safety. And we all know that there are a lot of dangers on the internet. But as much as we worry about what our kids are doing on their screens, it’s often just parental anxiety. If kids are educated about the dangers and willing to talk to you about it, most of them can handle tech responsibly on their own. And recent CDC data has found that kids today are taking many fewer risks and engaging in fewer dangerous behaviors than in the past. They probably don’t need as much monitoring as you think. Older children especially resent being monitored. Part of normal teen development is wanting privacy for the sake of privacy. Insisting on invading won’t help anything. And think about it: You wouldn’t want someone monitoring every move you made online. In fact, there’s a whole privacy industry geared towards helping you avoid exactly that! Your kids don’t want someone looking over their shoulder all the time any more than you do. Besides, constant monitoring isn’t good for parents, either. Awareness is beneficial, but having too much data can make you worry more than is necessary or healthy. It’s not a good use of time, either. Most kids’ online activities are mundane but frequent. Trying to monitor all of it could suck hours out of a parent’s day. And there may even be legal ramifications. Sure, you have the legal right to monitor your kids online. But you don’t have the right to monitor adults or other people’s kids. By monitoring your child’s messages, you’re also somewhat monitoring everyone they interact with. If someone decides they don’t like that, depending on the laws in your area it could be a tricky legal situation. Kids consider their online activities private and personal. Having mom or dad looking through their chats and social media accounts can feel like an invasion of their privacy. If your child feels like you don’t respect their privacy, they’re going to take measures to circumvent your monitoring and hide what they’re doing. The end result is the opposite of what you wanted. Your child is upset with you, they’re still unsupervised online, and if something does happen, they’ll do everything in their power to keep you from finding out and protecting them. Monitoring also loses sight of the goal of parenting: Raising kids into adults who can function on their own. Obviously we want to protect them from danger and long-lasting consequences. But by constantly intervening and never giving them a chance to learn or handle situations by themselves, we raise kids who don’t actually know what to do in uncomfortable online situations. When parental control eventually disappears, they don’t have the knowledge and experience to make decisions and spot dangers for themselves. We’ve protected them from danger as children, but left them vulnerable to huge mistakes as adults. In the end, parents shouldn’t monitor kids online because it’s not the most effective method to protect them. It’s much better to have relationship-building conversations about their online activities, teach them what they should be watching out for, and guide them through dealing with any problems that do arise. If a child trusts their parents to help them with online situations, they will come to you with anything concerning, uncomfortable, or dangerous. You don’t need to be spying on their every text – you just need trust and a willingness to work together to keep them safe. There are reasonable, compelling, well-thought-out reasons for both sides of the question of whether or not parents should monitor their kids online. In the end, it comes down to methods. The pro-monitoring arguments say that it’s best to fight tech with tech. Children and their growing brains don’t always have the best judgment when it comes to technological dangers, so parents should use tech tools to monitor them online to spot red flags they may have missed. The anti-monitoring arguments say that the best safety comes from a relationship of teaching and trust. Savvy kids can always get around a tech tool, but if you teach them what to look out for and have a trusting relationship where they feel comfortable coming to you with anything, you can keep them protected anyway. Which argument you find most compelling depends on a lot of factors. But it’s important to realize that keeping kids safe online isn’t a question of monitor or don’t monitor. There are tools and tactics you can use both with and without monitoring to keep your kids safer. Some parents choose to use parental control apps and software to monitor their kids online, and some don’t. Those that do use different strategies in applying those software. And you can use relationship-based strategies whether or not you get software involved. Most experts recommend a combination of monitoring and relationships to keep kids safest. Start with strictest monitoring and blocking on younger kids, and relax the restrictions as they get older so they can build skills. The whole time, focus on a strong relationship and teaching them what to watch for and how to be a good online citizen. Also remember that every kid is different. The rules-following, risk-avoidant child who mostly uses their phone to text their best friend and look at Pinterest will probably be fine without much monitoring. The impulsive risk-taker who sees rules as challenges and loves Snapchat and anonymous forums might benefit from some more oversight. And the same methods that work well for one child may fail to protect another and make a third feel restricted and rebellious. Treat each child as an individual. Don’t worry if one particular strategy doesn’t work – figure out their individual needs and what works for them. However you feel about parents monitoring their kids online, there are some strategies that just won’t work. Many concerned parents try these methods because they want their children to be as safe as possible. But these backfire terribly. If you want to protect your child from online dangers, trying any of these methods will do the exact opposite. Demanding passwords for phones and laptops; forcing your child to “friend” you on Facebook; unexpectedly snatching their phone and examining what they’re doing; insisting they hand over the passwords for their social media accounts – these are all examples of “crackdowns.” They make many parents feel safer because they know what their kids are up to. But kids resist. They feel oppressed, constantly under threat, and like you are the enemy determined to sabotage their online life. Even if you’re tech-savvy, there’s a good chance your child knows more about the devices they use every day than you. They will find a way around any crackdown. This leads to several consequences that are the exact opposite of what you hope to do. Your kids will find a way around your monitoring and will still be unsupervised online. Since what they’re doing is explicitly against what you want, they will avoid telling you about potential danger because they don’t want to get in trouble. And crackdowns make kids feel like you don’t have their best interests at heart, which can make them more susceptible to groomers trying to convince them not to trust you. Some parents want to go the most extreme possible route – they think they can protect their kids from internet dangers by keeping them off the internet. But unfortunately, that’s just not feasible in the modern world. The internet is part of everything. Kids need internet access to do their homework. They need to be online to get crucial information about their sports or extracurricular activities. Especially for older kids and teens, not being online can actually harm their social development. A lot of teenage socialization is done at least in part on social media. If your child can’t get online, they’ll be left out of much of their peers’ social bonding. It will be harder for them to make new friends, and their existing friendships will be weak or even start to disappear. And kids are good at finding their way around bans. Computers at school or the library could let them get online without your supervision. And if you ban them from having a phone or only let them get a “dumb” phone, they may get their own or have a friend get them one. They can then hide it from you or have a friend hold onto it. Not only are they unsupervised now, you’ve lost the opportunity to teach them how to get online responsibly. Snooping is one of the biggest pitfalls that parents fall into when trying to protect their kids online. It’s because many parents don’t understand the difference between snooping and monitoring. Snooping isn’t just a more negative word for monitoring – there’s actually a big difference. If you’re monitoring your kids online, you’ve set up a system to see what they’re doing. But you’ve also talked to them about it. Ideally you’ve explained the dangers on the internet, shown them what you’ll be able to see, and told them what you’ll be doing to keep them safe. But at the very least, you’ve told them you’re watching to protect them. If you’re snooping, though, you’ve set up a system to see what they’re doing online, but you haven’t told them you did it. They have no idea you’re watching their online activity. There are two problems with this. One is that today’s kids are tech-savvy. Chances are good that they’ll be able to figure out that you’re snooping and how you’re doing it. Then they can find ways around it. It gives you a false sense of security that you know what your kid is doing, but in reality they’re two steps ahead and already defeating your snooping mechanism. The other problem happens when you find something concerning. How do you bring it up to your child? First you have to tell them that you found out. Whether or not you say you were snooping, they’ll figure it out pretty quickly. That starts the conversation at the wrong foot. Your kid feels hurt, angry, and betrayed. Now they don’t want to listen to anything you have to say, and may do the opposite of what you suggest. It’s counterproductive and makes hard conversations so much harder. If you fall on the “shouldn’t” side of the “should parents monitor kids online?” question, or if you aren’t quite sure that a parental control software is the best fit for you or your child, there are options to keep your child safe. These are some strategies you can use, with our without monitoring their online activities, to help protect your child. Different families find different boundaries useful. One common choice is that devices are only used in certain places. For instance, phones aren’t allowed in bedrooms, or all computers stay in the family area. That way you can immediately see your child’s reaction if something happens and can intervene. Keeping phones out of bedrooms is a popular one so that you’re not metaphorically letting strangers be alone in your child’s bedroom with them. Another common device boundary is limits on when they can be used. Maybe you require your child to keep their phone in your bedroom for charging at night. Or maybe they’re not allowed to use their tablet for anything but homework before dinner. This can be enforced by physically taking the devices away, but many parental control apps allow you to limit when the device can be used and for what. As a bonus, setting clear boundaries around device use doesn’t just protect your child from online dangers. It also limits the risk of screen addition and reduces the harm devices can do to a kid’s attention span, sleep, and physical and mental health. Talk to your child about what they do online! Show an interest in their interests. Ask how the game they play works, what websites they like to visit, or if they’ve seen any good memes lately. It creates emotional engagement with your child, and showing an interest makes your child more open to talking about online stuff with you. You can also ask them how their internet use makes them feel. If they mention a particular site upsets them, try and find out why they keep visiting. By asking them to think about it, you may help them realize that they don’t enjoy some of their online habits and adjust them accordingly. And if they bring up something you find concerning, you can help them work through it. Also discuss internet safety. Talk to them about the habits of a good citizen online and what kind of dangers are out there on the internet. Depending on their age, they may not fully understand all the risks. But at least they’ll know they’re out there. And tell them what they should do if they spot a warning sign or run into something or someone that makes them feel uncomfortable – even if that’s as simple as telling you about it. Whether or not you think parents should monitor kids online, it’s important to remember that safety requires trust. If your child is afraid you’ll yell at them, punish them, ground them, take away their phone, or say it’s their fault if they tell you what happened to them online, they won’t tell you and they’ll resist your attempts to help. They need to feel that if they tell you, you’ll help them, not punish them. If your child tells you about something that happened, your natural reaction will be scared or angry (or both). But if you react with an emotional outburst – even if you’re not upset at your child – or make them feel in danger of hurt or punishment, it will shut down the communication and ensure they won’t tell you about online dangers in the future. On the other hand, if you react calmly and lovingly and make them feel like you support them and are here to help, it opens communication and makes your child more willing to share potentially dangerous situations with you. Remember that it’s not your child’s fault. They are still learning and growing. Understand that they’re probably feeling extremely upset and scared, and help them manage their feelings and solve the problem. Don’t punish legitimate mistakes. Developing brains make mistakes, and it’s part of the learning process. Punishing mistakes just means they’ll hide future mistakes. Chances are good that having to deal with the consequences of the mistake is punishment enough. Whether consciously or unconsciously, kids look to their parents to figure out how to behave. It’s part of growing up. So as a parent, you can help keep your child safe online by modeling good online behaviors for them. Research indicates that when parents are always online, their teens are more likely to become addicted to the internet. How you act online affects how your child will act online. If you want your child to keep screen time to a minimum, keep your own screen time to a minimum. If you want them to avoid talking to strangers online, avoid talking to strangers online. And if you want them to talk to someone else whenever they see something concerning online, let them see you talking to someone – even if it’s just the child’s other parent – when you find something concerning online. If you’ve decided some form of monitoring is the way to go, a parental control app or software is your best option. Every app has its own suite of features. They generally include some combination of monitoring incoming and outgoing messages, alerts for particular warning signs within those messages, and controls to limit what apps your child can use and when. Choosing the best solution to monitor your kids online is a decision unique to the child involved and the parent who will be monitoring them. But WhatIsMyIPAddress.com has done some of the hard work in evaluating some of the more popular options and their features. Our research can be a starting point on your journey to keep your child safe. Or you can make the choice even easier. We recommend Bark – “parental controls that build trust.” It provides a robust set of features to monitor texts, browsing data, emails, and social media, safety alerts for over 45 categories of online danger, block websites and manage screen time, and more. They even offer a phone with Bark built right in for additional protection. Nearly 7 million children are already protected by Bark – they can protect your child and give you peace of mind.