Education Trends: The ‘Kid Surveillance Complex’ Locks Parents in a Trap

Edition: December 31st, 2021
Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS

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• With excerpts from article by Cyd Harrell, published on wired.com

From smartphones to school work to entertainment, today parents can track their children’s lives with ease – through their online activity and digital footprint. Parents’ motive for doing this is understandable, but is it the right thing to do?

• Cyd Harrell writes – Several years ago, I got a text from a parent friend. “It’s so sweet,” she wrote, “your daughter is sad about her project and mine is being so great comforting her.” Both 11-year-olds were in their respective after-school programs at different schools at the time, so I was puzzled.
• When I asked how she knew this, she said, “Oh, I clone my daughter’s texts to my iPad and I read them all.” As if this was a perfectly ordinary thing to do. My child hadn’t consented to have a third party read her private texts (although she knew that her school monitored her school-based email and messaging accounts), and I wasn’t sure if her friend had consented either.

How much daily energy are parents spending worrying about their child, and how much of that worry was created just because we now have technology that constant monitoring possible? Intrusive surveillance is a mark of paranoia and distrust.

Tracking apps are collecting your child’s data

• Share Location features come out of the box with any smartphone, and extremely popular apps like Life360 offer “enhanced” features such as driving monitoring and camera roll scanning for a small price.
• Unsurprisingly, the companies behind these apps collect an enormous amount of data about millions of teenagers and children
• Life360 recently came under fire for selling it to data brokers.

Will 24×7 monitoring ensure their safety?

• Schools increasingly offer daily tracking of kids’ grades and assignment completion as well, via learning management systems with parent web interfaces. (The ClassDojo behaviour monitoring system claims to be in use in 95 percent of US elementary schools.)
• Not only are these systems burdensome to teachers, they also create an expectation that parents will intensively monitor classroom performance.
• Responses to the harms of social media often suggest greater parental monitoring as a fix for algorithmic amplification of dangerous content to minors.
• It’s all too frictionless to get sucked into the parental surveillance.
• The simple, slick, and seductive interfaces are designed to make parents feel warm, fuzzy, and responsible about constant monitoring.
• A child’s circular avatar on the known map eases the heart-walking-outside-your-body anxiety that has been a part of parenting since time immemorial.
• When we check on our kids online and see that they’re safe, the designs can make us think they’re safe because we checked.
• It’s easy to fall into when a child is first going into the world on their own—but should you be doing it for your 15-year-old? Your 20-year-old?

Constant vigilance is harmful, indicate studies

• Constant vigilance, research suggests, does the opposite of increasing teen safety.
• A University of Central Florida study of 200 teen/parent pairs found that parents who used monitoring apps were more likely to be authoritarian, and that teens who were monitored were not just equally but more likely to be exposed to unwanted explicit content and to bullying.
• Another study, from the Netherlands, found that monitored teens were more secretive and less likely to ask for help.
• It’s no surprise that most teens, when you bother to ask them, feel that monitoring poisons a relationship.
• We need to switch to a paradigm of teen safety that empowers kids and sets them up to transition to internet and IRL independence.

Need to demand greater accountability from social media companies

• Parents need to be relieved of the expectation that only their minute by minute vigilance can protect their teens from online and offline disasters.
• Ever-increasing individual parent monitoring has become an easy cop out for tech companies. Rather than fix extreme diet content on Instagram, say, Instagram can ask parents to take on the burden of monitoring what a teen sees on its platform.
• In a 2020 report called The Unseen Teen, Data and Society investigated how social media companies effectively avoid designing for the needs of teen users.
• We need to demand better community management, easier reporting, algorithms that don’t push toward extreme content.
• Companies should treat teens with respect as a separate customer group, one that deserves their own direct relationship.

Also, perhaps, schools should treat teenagers, not parents, as their main client, and set up their systems accordingly. The parent should be a secondary user, with the focus on supporting the connection between teachers and students and allowing students to take responsibility for their due dates and work.

We need to stop accepting the sales job that tells us constant digital surveillance is just what we have to do. That means listening to teens, directly rather than surreptitiously.

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(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)

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