
Before I even knew that this was possible I heard a story from a friend which blew me away and really made me nervous if I am exactly like him without even knowing it. For two years his parents were reading everything he read, they saw what he was texting, writing, and with whom he did this. My friend never suspected anything like that for two years, but eventually he did find out by a mistake of his parents talking about it. It was like a blow to the face, and the worst part is he then started to suspect everyone, even close friends like me. A couple of days later he confronted his parents with his findings, they were shocked and it caused quite some problems. Eventually he recovered from it, most important though he recovered on the psychological level, on the trust level. Having such experience in your early childhood or as a young adult can have a big impact on the way you see the world, see the people and how you interact with them. Parents or educators have to be very careful with this, because they might influence the kids in an extremely negative way. Very interesting to mention here are the findings of the psychiatrist David Charney who found that “the decision to spy is based on an intolerable sense of personal failure, as privately defined by that person.” (Charney, 2014). These findings indicate that trust issues do not necessarily have to arise from previous trust issues, there are many sources. The reason for mentioning is to show the extend of the problem. People, and especially parents, are looking for solutions for their trust problems to calm themselves down, and unfortunately they see the solution in monitoring apps.  We are human beings, human beings are very social and need contact, close contact and trust to some few people especially. Through spying parents could harm their kids and take away this ability to trust, which is necessary to live a healthy life. Because spying and monitoring your kids has bad influence on them when it comes to trust and social interactions, parents should avoid it.

John Keilman is a journalist for the Chicago Tribune who put himself in the situation of a parent who tracks his kid. For this he worked together with an expert on this field, Stephen Balkam, CEO of the Washington-based Family Online Safety Institute. When Keilman’s son attended soccer camp he and his wife were unable to drive him there, so he had to go there on his own with his bike. Of course Keilman gave his kid a cellphone in case of an emergency. Very soon though Keilman wanted to know more, wanted to have more information on where his son is, so he installed a tracking app called “Find My iPhone”. Now suddenly he knew all the time where exactly his son is, he described the feeling as “a big God-like” (Keilman, 2014). Very soon though he realized the power he actually had, and how much he was in control. “Technology has changed parenting in too many ways to count, but electronic surveillance must be at the top of the list” (Keilman, 2014). To finish the story of Keilman spying on his son, after the soccer camp was over he told his son that he was tracking him with this app and the reaction from him was exactly the right one, "That's kind of creepy," he said. 

Of course it is important to say that this tracking process can be useful for parents and finally for the kids too. For example if parents monitor the Facebook page of their son/daughter and find out about potential cyber bullying. An unfortunate response to this is often the death of a child because he/she cannot take the pressure of it. This could be prevented by monitoring. Another example here could be the news. We hear a couple of stories each year on the news about pedophiles texting with kids, wanting to meet and it ends up in rape and/or death. But those are very extreme cases, and do not justify parents to just buy and install spy-apps on their kids phones and computers. There should be a clear suspicion about that.

 While spying on your child there is a lot that has to be done, which is completely underestimated by parents. An aspect that every parent who considers spying on their kid forgets is that “there's the sheer volume of information you have to check, (from texts to tweets to browser histories to instant messages swapped within video games.) Not even the most obsessive parent could follow it all” (Keilmann, 2014). That means getting all the information you want about your kid would consume literally your entire free-time, and this is probably the last thing you want to do, going through hundreds of text messages, phone calls, and browser histories. And what do you do if you actually discover something? "The very first question a teenager will have is “How did you know that?”. “The problem with that is that trust just breaks down between parent and child.” (Keilmann, 2014). Spying on them is one thing, but eventually you have to confront them with the situation. That is the moment when things get very difficult, for the parents, but especially the child. Understandably every child is different, and the reaction to this situation varies. Other factors play a very important role as well, for example how the relationship to the parents was before the confrontation or the kids experiences with trust in their life so far. But that will cause problems no matter what, the kid will at least doubt the parents and carry this experience around in their everyday life, where it can cause big damage with friends or an authority person like a teacher. Suddenly the kid is going to doubt or at least question almost everything people do, and this state can easily escalate into depression, because eventually with that attitude you will find yourself being alone. To sum it up: “This sends the message (to children) that nothing and no one is to be trusted: not them, not us (parents), and especially not the rest of the world. This is no way to live, but it is a way to destroy the bonds of mutual toleration that our children will need” (Keilman, 2014). 

The media definitely plays a big part in the problem of causing mistrust. Often parents get the idea of mistrusting their children from TV, like discussions or news, even though there are numbers which prove that it is completely unnecessary to react like they do. Parents literally get trained, while watching, to be paranoid about the safety of their kids and that they have to do something. Michelle Obama for instance said in “The Today Show” that her two daughters do not even have Facebook, because they are the children of the President of the United States, but that is somewhat understandable and different. Now the media delivers this message in a way that parents are convinced that it is necessary for their own kids, even though comparing themselves to the family of the president is obviously overexaggerated. One example how the media influences this is shown in a video on YouTube, where a debate is going on, because a police chief from New Jersey says that it is necessary and the parents responsibility to have the passwords to their children’s Facebook and any other online platform (McCready, 2013). Also mentionable is the fact that they have two other guests in the show, Amy McCready, the Founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, and Jeffrey Nadal, the president of national youth rights association. In the debate though these two guests get treated completely different, and there you can see how biased the entire discussion is. Amy McCready is getting almost all the time she wants, does not get interrupted by the newscaster, and has all the time in the world, because she agrees to what the chief says, while Jeffrey Nadal actually names facts and numbers, and does not just point out his opinion (he is against it). He gets interrupted immediately and does not get the chance to explain himself. You can clearly see here how biased the newscaster is, and how much he fights against other opinions. Obviously concerned parents are going to watch again tomorrow or on another day to hear more about this topic, and how important it is to monitor your kids, because concerning people is what makes a discussion or a documentary interesting. No parent would watch it again if they would have said that monitoring should not be done and is wrong. Most of the discussion is based on pure emotion and opinions, and that cannot be the base of reliable information. Things like: “We buy them the computer, so we have the right to look into it” (McCready, 2013) or “My house, my rules” (McCready, 2013). And more such comments are listed at the bottom of the screen, all the time. And exactly that is where the problem is. Parents get trained to enforce their will and mistrust their children. What is totally missed here are some very important and interesting facts named by Jeffrey Nadal. “Only 4 percent of young people online ever encounter any sort of solicitation, and of that number 92% know exactly what to do, to reject it, to ignore it” (McCready, 2013). He then adds that “42% of young people will go to their parents if they encounter any sort of distracted situation” (McCready, 2013). Those numbers are totally eliminated by the way the newscaster hosts the show, and that should not be the way to do it. In those discussions it is your responsibility to be the neutral connection between the two parties. That is how you make parents paranoid about this topic, which eventually leads to all that trouble of monitoring and spying. It is very ironic that Jeffrey Nadal eliminates the entire discussion with the numbers he names. These numbers clearly show that children almost always know what to do, and many of them actually share their experiences with their parents (42%). Many trust their parents when they encounter strange things on the internet, but unfortunately many parents do not trust their children being on the internet. Often parents then start using those monitoring apps, which gives the child a wrong signal. The children now think they get punished for being honest and trusting. 

The availability of monitoring apps make it very easy for parents to mistrust their children. Parents, who want to monitor their children, have it very easy now to get access to these apps or programs. The fact that even “police are warning that while the threat to children from online predators is real, spy apps allowing parents to track their children's smartphone usage are not a 'silver bullet' and could breach trust” (Duffy, 2015) should give parents a clear signal, but they often do not consider the warning because it “allows parents to monitor their children's location, social media activity, text messages and call log” (Grisham, 2014), in other words total control. The extend of these apps is enormous. They can literally see and read everything their children are doing, no matter how private it is. This will cause extreme disappointment of the kid when he/she finds out. To secure the kids trust “open communication between parent and child about how the child is using the smartphone” (Grisham, 2014) is necessary. 

Studies of child psychology show that parental monitoring increases anxiety and delinquency. There was a project by Pettit, Bates & Dodge called “Child Development Project” (Barber, p. 104), where parents and their children were interviewed over many years. The children were, when the project started, in a very young age, so throughout their development it was possible to ask the parents questions and the children questions about psychological control and monitoring, in this case the focus lays on the monitoring part. The results about this were obvious, “lower level of monitoring tended to be associated modestly with lower levels of anxiety and with fewer delinquent behavior” (Barber, p.113). Often it is the case that parents who have harsh discipline on their kids tend to include some way of monitoring. But those specific actions actually enhance the feeling of rebellion against the parents, mistrusting them or simply the feeling of wanting to be a “Bad Boy” and being against the system. Families from a lower class are usually not able to have the knowledge or the equipment to do so. Another result from this project was that “monitoring being associated somewhat more strongly with delinquent behavior” (Barber, p. 113). This result comes back to the thesis that monitoring makes children eventually incapable of doing normal social interactions, which then often ends up in criminal behavior. They get the feeling of always being and never learn how to help themselves, because they never had to. And that is the point of this argument. Parents follow their responsibility of being a parent, being protective and supporting the kid. But on the other hand by exaggerating this process they destroy the development of something which is also the responsibility of the parents and even more important, the independence of the child. The child should be able help himself/herself when it is in a tough situation. And to extend this idea, sometimes you also need outside help, and that is the point where trust comes into play. Coming back to the example of the YouTube video, where 92% of the children know exactly what to do in dangerous situations on the internet. The child will now solve the problem by himself/herself, or ask friends for help. But the child is dealing with the problem by its own. This enhances confidence, because the child solved a problem without the parents, and improves the trust to others like friends, because they worked together and trusted each other. Monitoring would have prohibited this process. 

All of this together, from personal experience, from the experience of another person or a scientific experiment, spying and monitoring your children is simply the wrong way of parenting and can seriously damage your child in its later life, especially in a social way. And if you think, and ask yourself the question: If I spy on somebody, what are the consequences? At the beginning there are just good sides of it, you get the information you want, and you know everything you need to know about that person, but what happens when the person finds out? The relationship between them will never be the same again, the trust is broken, and every human eventually has an experience like that where the trust breaks between himself/herself and somebody else, and to restore that is in most cases impossible. Though to blame the parents entirely is also not the right thing to do. As shown in the paragraph about the discussion on TV, parents have to watch reports like that more often than you think, and a basic level of doubt is obviously created by that. But in that age and especially as a parent you should be able to decide rationally and know that monitoring and spying is not the way to raise children, who are ready to leave home and live their life independently. You have to give them the freedom to make mistakes, learn from them and later be a grown up adult, who can solve problems by himself. Monitoring can seriously harm that development, therefore it simply is the wrong thing to do.
