Parents tracking kids’ internet activities met with mixed reactions

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In the span of little more than a decade, smartphones and laptops have become widely accessible to the world’s population, allowing a far-reaching bank of information to be ready for disposal, especially among teenagers and children.

With this increase in youth exposure to the internet, parents have grown increasingly concerned about their children's safety and well-being. In order to monitor their kids’ online activities, some have begun to review their children’s online history while others have implemented programs specifically designed to limit digital freedom on a day-to-day basis.

As just one example, sophomore Malika Ahuja’s mother controls her daily allotted screen time — and she is one of many students across campus in the same situation.

In a campus-wide survey of 130 people, 41.1 percent of students say their internet activities are monitored by their parents. Twenty-four percent of students’ locations are tracked, 9.3 percent of students’ screen times are limited and 7 percent have had their history checked.

Ahuja’s mother, Devina Grover, decided that monitoring her two teenagers’ activities was crucial, especially after numerous studies emerged proving that excessive technological exposure to social media can lead to depression and other health ailments.

Therefore, she wanted to cut back on the time that Malika and her older brother, senior Pranav Ahuja, were using their digital devices and instructed them to download OurPact, a program that limits a device’s allotted screen time to a set amount each day.

“A big part of parenting in today’s world is raising your kids as more responsible users of social media,” Grover said. “Children are children and they need direction from parents.”

All apps on Ahuja’s phone are disabled except OurPact, and if she wants to use any of them she has to pause the pause button on OurPact, allowing her daily time limit of two and a half hours to run.

Initially, Malika and Pranav were opposed to this new program, but she said she has been able to adjust to the change over time and even finds that she now uses her phone less because of the app. With her two and a half hour daily limit, Malika said she only uses her phone for about half an hour.

“It’s definitely made me focus more on what’s actually happening in the world rather than just looking down at my screen,” Malika said.

While OurPact causes some inconveniences for her, including faster battery loss and slower app performance, Malika said the overall benefits outweigh the slower functionality.

In addition to OurPact, her mother uses an app called Life360 to pinpoint Malika’s phone’s location at any given time, alongside an indication of her phone’s battery percentage.

In contrast, junior Zoyah Shah’s parents give her relative technological freedom — she has no such tracking programs installed on her phone.

If her parents were to do this, Shah said that it would violate the trust between both parties.

“Teenagers should not have tracking devices because it's nice to have a sense of independence from parents, and I feel that parents should trust their child to do the right thing,” Shah said.

She also said that such restrictions might lead students to lie to their parents if they are planning on going somewhere they're not supposed to, creating suspicion and distancing parent and child.

Dr. Danah Boyd, visiting professor at New York University and founder of Data and Society, a non-profit organization that studies social and cultural implications of technological development, told  The New York Times, “The game changes when we’re talking about a 16-year-old who feels ‘stalked’ by their parents. This is because the sharing of information isn’t a mutual sign of trust and respect but a process of surveillance.”

On the contrary, an article written by Thomas J. Dishion and Robert J. McMahon in a 1998 issue of the journal Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, discusses studies showing a consensus that increased parental supervision of adolescent activities was correlated with less criminal activities and more healthy behaviors.

From her experience as a parent, Grover thinks parents should at least hold some degree of control over their children’s technology whether it be through reading texts or simply occasional checks on history instead of having their “heads in the sand.”

“As a parent you would be almost not parenting to the fullest extent if you’re not taking some sort of action to monitor or have some kind of influence on your child’s usage of social media,” Grover said.

While some teenagers find the watchful prying eyes of parents to be a disruption to their privacy and expression, others, like Malika, have learned to adapt.

“When I tell people [about the monitoring] they all say ‘Woah, that’s crazy,’ and I always say ‘Oh, this is just how I live now,’” Ahuja said.