Parents should not spy on their children.

For the past couple of years, Mandy Snyder, an accountant from Spokane , Washington, has been “watching” her daughter. With the help of a convenient high-tech tool mSpy, Snider can view all text messages, photos, videos, downloadable applications and browser history of a 13-year-old daughter.

She does not think to apologize for this. She says she was able to intervene last summer, discovering how her daughter is chatting with her boyfriend, planning a meeting for sex. “I know that my daughter is not so naive as I was at her age, and that in the modern world there are plenty of ways of social communication,” says Snyder. “But as a teenager's parent, this age of technology is scary.”

But, although technology may be the reason for the emergence of new ways for children to get into trouble, it can also provide new ways to follow their every step.



With tracking technologies such as mSpy, Teen Safe, Family Tracker, etc., parents can follow calls, text messages, chat rooms, posts on the social network. They can study maps of all the places their child and his phone have visited. The Mama Bear app even sends warnings to parents, in case their child exceeds the speed, sitting behind the wheel.

But between defense and obsession, the line is very thin. New tools for digital tracking put parents in a quandary. Youth is such a critical period in the life of a child when they need privacy and a sense of personal space in order to develop their own personality. Parents can be unbearable to watch as their child moves away from them. But, no matter how tempting it is for parents to infiltrate the dark corners of their children's personal lives, there is strong evidence that peeping behind them would entail more bad than good.

In the long term, the goal of the parent is to create a healthy, self-sufficient adult. The process of developing a healthy autonomy begins from the moment when the child is able to crawl away from you, says Nancy Darling, a specialist in developmental psychology at Oberlin College. “The parent’s share is difficult because of the need to balance the child’s desire for autonomy and security considerations,” she says.

Privacy - the key moment of self-sufficiency. “The opportunity to experience solitude is probably a basic human need that exceeds culture,” says Skyler Hawke, a social psychologist studying youth development at China University of Hong Kong. In adolescence, the brain, body and social life of children change rapidly. While experimenting with their identity and self-expression, they need personal space to deal with all of this, Hawk says.

Retirement is not just important for young people, says Sandra Petronio, a professor of communications and director of the Communications Privacy Management Center at Indiana University. It is their duty. “The main concern of an adult is to develop an individuality, to move away from parental control. One of the understandable ways to do this is to demand a private space, ”she says.

There is strong evidence that the invasion of the child’s privacy violates the parent-child relationship, Petronio says. “A parent shows distrust with her peering,” she says. “The overwhelming need to control the child really harms the relationship.”

Hidden peeping, Hawk adds, is unlikely to remain hidden for long. Most children are better than their parents in technology. There are chances that they will find these tracking applications and figure out how to hack the system - they will leave the monitored phone in the locker at school when they skip lessons, or start a second, secret Instagram account.

It is not surprising that when children feel that they cannot trust their parents, they become even more secretive. Hawk observed this effect in a sample of students in the Netherlands, where attitudes toward individualism and autonomy are similar to attitudes toward them in the United States. The researchers asked the children if their parents respect their personal space. A year later, the children of the spying parents showed more secretive behavior, and their parents reported that they knew less about the activities, friends, and whereabouts of the children, compared to other parents.

“We can trace the path from a feeling of invasion of privacy to increasing the level of children's secrecy and reducing parents' knowledge about their children,” says Hawke. “If parents too much intrude into the lives of children, it will eventually respond to them.”



In the absence of personal space in a child, not only parent-child relationships are affected. When children feel an invasion, it can lead to psychological problems that experts call “internalized” behavior — anxiety, depression, and distance. “There are many studies that say that children growing up with annoying parents are more exposed to these psychological problems, in particular because it undermines a child’s confidence in their ability to act independently,” says Lawrence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Temple and the author of the book “The Age of Opportunities: Lessons from the Science of Youth” [Age of Opportunity: Lessons From the New Science of Adolescence].

When parents do not give children the opportunity to make decisions on their own, children do not have a chance to draw conclusions from these decisions. Although parents have a duty to direct their children and protect them from harm, youth still remains time to identify limits, says Judith Smetana, a psychology professor who studies the relationship between young people and their parents at the University of Rochester.

Take alcohol. Children who have experimented with alcohol in their youth, and have not become alcoholics, are psychologically healthier than those who have never tried it, Smetana says. “I don’t want to condone children's alcohol craze, but we know that this time is a time of experimentation,” she says. “That is the nature of youth.”

But even when parents are aware of the importance of solitude, it can be difficult to understand where to draw the line. This trait will be different for each family, even in a single socio-economic layer or in the same locality, says Dalton Conley, a sociologist from Princeton University, the author of the 2014 book “Science to be a parent” [Parentology]. Conley says he was shocked to learn that his colleague was spying on his teenage children with the help of a baby monitor, while away from home, at a conference. At the same time, he is not embarrassed by the practice of checking bank card expenses from his own children, in order to find out where they were and what they bought. “The technology of parental tracking is developing so rapidly that there are no clear rules on what is considered acceptable,” he says.

Darling was also tempted to push the line between independence and solitude. Despite the fact that she is in favor of providing children with personal space so that they develop healthy autonomy, she is also a parent who is anxious about them. She asked her youngest son to turn on the Find My iPhone feature so that she could find it if she could not get through. And when her eldest son, who was at home on vacation during a break in college, did not return home one evening, “I stuck my nose in his mobile contacts to call his girlfriend,” she admits. “It angered him, but it was 3 am and I was worried.”

According to Darling, children are more likely to sense an invasion of privacy if parents intervene in their personal affairs — for example, eavesdrop on their conversations or spy on correspondence. But most children admit that parents have the legal right to safety - to set rules for using drugs or to know where children go after school. “Parents need to know where their children are,” she says.

But security issues are not so straightforward. In most places [USA] it is now safe to be a child. According to FBI statistics, the number of violent crimes fell by 48% from 1993 to 2011. Infant mortality is falling. Children lose a record little.

Nevertheless, some experts say that never before has society demanded to monitor their children so closely, this is evident from the frequent cases when parents are arrested for their children going to school alone or playing in the park without supervision. .

Many experts blame modern media for these changes, constantly providing daunting headlines regarding dangers and abductions. "The media increases fear, and fear turns into restrictions for children, teenagers and even young people," says Petronio. “He has the opportunity to undermine the development of a set of skills in young people who are necessary for them to become independent adults.”

And indeed, some children live in dangerous areas. And these children, apparently, it is better to live under the strict supervision of their parents. The research of the University of Virginia experts found that children from the places of residence of the middle class, characterized by a lack of risk, relationships with mothers and social adaptation turn out worse if their parents undermine their independence. On the contrary, among low-income and high-risk families, relationships with mothers were better when they were more authoritarian.

But in many places, the desire of a parent to spy on children can be dictated not so much by concern for their safety as by the desire to reduce their own anxiety. “In the end, it turns out that you are trying to quench your thirst for knowledge, because you do not tolerate uncertainty, you do not give your child the opportunity to learn how to make the right decisions,” says Petronio.

Hawke's research shows that parents who spy on children are less confident in their abilities, more worried about their relationship with children, and more worried - often unreasonably - about the behavior of their child. “Based on my research, I believe that peeping can characterize both the child’s adaptation and that of the parent — perhaps the latter even to a greater degree,” he says.

When it comes to establishing healthy boundaries, then, as psychologists say, good communication is better than peeping, and children who actively share with their parents better adapt to life. “In the end, the best way to find out what is happening with your children is to hear what they tell themselves,” Hawk says.

Some parents say that tracking improves communication with children. Snyder says using her daughter's phone tracking application has become a launching pad for discussions on topics such as sex, drugs, suicide, and friends. “Since I read her correspondence with friends, we can communicate without any preparation about what is happening in her life,” says Snyder. “I don’t think that we would have the same open relationship, built on respect, without the help of mSpy.”

And yet, it can probably be argued that most parents who download spyware applications do not do this in order to have pleasant conversations with children. Obviously, privacy and space are important for children in order to help them become healthy adults. Now that it's easier to invade privacy than ever, parents will have to ask themselves uncomfortable questions every time they are about to cross this line.