A few years ago I found myself in a conversation with another parent at school pickup that I have thought about many times since. She had installed monitoring software on her fifteen-year-old’s phone without telling him. She could see every message, every app, every search. She told me she felt much better knowing what was happening. Then she mentioned, almost in passing, that he had recently started leaving his phone at a friend’s house whenever they wanted to talk about anything serious. He had figured out what she was doing, and he had simply routed around it. She was still paying for the software. She no longer had any idea what he was actually doing.
What the Research Says About Surveillance
Danah Boyd spent years interviewing teenagers about their digital lives for her book It’s Complicated, and one of her clearest findings was that teenagers do not stop having private conversations when they are monitored. They move them. Secondary accounts, disappearing message apps, coded language that parents cannot parse, asking a friend to relay messages through a platform the parent is not watching: these are not the strategies of children doing something genuinely dangerous. They are the strategies of normal adolescents protecting a private life from adults who have decided that privacy itself is the problem. The monitoring does not reduce the behavior. It reduces the parent’s visibility into it.
The developmental picture behind this matters. Adolescence is the period in which children are supposed to be building a self that is separate from their parents. That process requires some space that is genuinely theirs, including digital space. When every message is potentially read, teenagers learn to perform for the observer rather than to express themselves authentically. The conversations they have with peers about things that genuinely worry them, the questions they ask about topics they are not ready to raise with a parent, the awkward and uncertain exchanges that are part of figuring out who they are: these move somewhere else. The monitoring removes exactly the content a concerned parent most wants to see.
Research on teenage digital behavior consistently shows that surveillance does not reduce private communication. It redirects it. Teenagers whose phones are monitored develop workarounds as a matter of course. The parent loses visibility; the teenager loses trust in the relationship as a safe place to bring problems.
The Fear Behind the Monitoring
It is worth being honest about what we are actually afraid of when we reach for the monitoring app. We are afraid of predators. We are afraid of cyberbullying we cannot see. We are afraid our teenager is in a relationship or a conversation that is harming them, and we will only find out too late. These are not irrational fears. Some of them are grounded in real risks that teenagers genuinely face online. The question is whether covert monitoring is an effective response to those specific risks, or whether it trades one set of problems for another.
The research is not encouraging for monitoring as a safety tool. Teenagers who discover they are being surveilled, and most eventually do, report significantly lower levels of trust in their parents. More critically, they become less likely to go to a parent when something actually goes wrong. The teenager who knows her phone is monitored and encounters a genuinely threatening situation is precisely the teenager who will handle it alone rather than risk the conversation that might follow. Devorah Heitner, who works with schools and families on digital citizenship, makes this point directly in Screenwise: the goal is to raise a teenager who comes to you when something frightening happens online, and covert monitoring works against that goal.
Teenagers who discover covert phone monitoring report lower trust in parents and are less likely to seek parental help when a genuine online threat arises. The monitoring intended to protect them from danger makes them more likely to handle danger alone. This is the core problem with surveillance as a safety strategy.
What Transparent Agreements Actually Do
There is a meaningful difference between covert surveillance and a transparent agreement. A parent who says to a thirteen-year-old, openly and at the start: I will occasionally check your phone, not to spy on your friendships but because I want to understand the world you are navigating and make sure you are safe, and I will always tell you when I do, is having a very different conversation than the parent who installs software without disclosure. The first conversation is about the relationship. The second is about control, and teenagers are exquisitely sensitive to the difference.
Julie Lythcott-Haims, whose book How to Raise an Adult examines what overprotective parenting costs teenagers in the long run, describes a pattern she calls preparing the road for the child instead of preparing the child for the road. Monitoring software is a version of this: it removes uncertainty for the parent without teaching the teenager anything about how to navigate the uncertain terrain. A teenager who grows up surveilled does not develop judgment about online risk. They develop skill at avoiding detection.
What to Do Instead
The lagom version of this, the approach that holds up across the research, is neither total surveillance nor total hands-off. It is ongoing, low-pressure conversation about digital life that is genuinely curious rather than interrogative. Not: show me your phone. But: what are people at school actually using right now? Has anything weird happened online lately? What do you do when someone sends you something that makes you uncomfortable? These questions invite the teenager into the conversation rather than extracting information from outside it.
The goal is not to know everything your teenager does online. The goal is to be the person they come to when something goes wrong. Those two things require very different approaches, and only one of them is achievable. A teenager who trusts that a parent will respond to a problem with support rather than punishment is a teenager who brings the problem to the parent. That is the actual safety mechanism we are looking for, and it cannot be installed as an app.
Ongoing, openly curious conversation about digital life correlates with teenagers being more likely to disclose problems to parents. Covert monitoring correlates with discovery, damaged trust, and teenagers handling online risks alone. The research consistently points toward relationship as the protective factor, not visibility.
Parenting is the longest experiment any of us will ever run. I am still reading the results.
Lila Sjoberg
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