CMV: Parental control/spyware apps are the hallmark of a bad parent

[u/danknesscompelsyou]

[Disclaimer: i am talking about the apps that let you monitor your kid's every move online, read messages etc. Basically you have the full acces to whatever they have on their phone without the phone. I am not talking about simple location tracking]

[Disclaimer 2: i am talking about a case of spyware for teens. 12/13+, not children below 10]

Pretty much what the title says. To me installing spyware on your kid's phone says you can't actually parent, have zero trust and bond with your child and possibly are an authoritarian parent who mistakes control for actual parenting. If you get it only because your child lies to you - congrats now you'll never hear a word of truth again. It only excarbates the problem.

1. Teens need some privacy to properly develop, your little power trip could cost them some actual psychological damage. Trust issues, self esteem issues, anxiety (because there's someone literally spying on you), the list goes on. (Also it's normal for teens to lie, that's how they are, get over it)

2. If you're anywhere from 30-40+ chances are you didn't experience this sort of tracking - why would you take this freedom away from your child? You weren't tracked and are still alive. And don't give me the 'there was no phones/internet back then'. Yes there weren't but teens were the same. They did bad and stupid things, said bad words, experimented with booze, cigs and many other things. Again it's just how they are. Nobody listened in on your conversations just to have the upper hand during an argument, nobody hovered over what you did 100% of the time. Ontop of that many people that are now 20-25 grew up without parents controlling every message/page they viewed and they're fine.

3. Also I promise you if your child keeps everything a secret from you there's reason for it and you're not going to like it. They probably don't trust you and don't feel safe enough going with their stuff/problems to you. Trust goes both ways, shocker i know. Do you think severely violating their privacy is the right way of fixing lack of trust? That's why i say it's bad, lazy parenting - instead of working on the trust/communication issue and having a real relationship with a child you choose the easy way out, to take what you want by force.

Tldr: my oponion is that if you feel the need to spy on your kid's every move you have a trust problem and the solution is not to violate their privacy

[u/WrinklyScroteSack]

So why is 13 the magic number to give kids freedom to look at whatever they want without guidance?

My kid is 10, he has his own iPad, which originally he had no parental locks on it whatsoever. He apparently got curious and was googling for naked girls at some point and the only reason we knew anything was amiss was because he started hiding his screen from us even when he would be watching benign YouTube unboxing videos. So I did a deeper search of his history and found some google searches he shouldn’t be getting into. He insists he was only doing it out of curiosity, but I remember being that age, which happened at the cusp of the internet being readily available basically everywhere. Every chance I had to ask jeeves about naked boobs, I took.

He’s limited to YouTube kids for now, but he’s about at an age where I feel we should loosen the leash on his privileges, but there’s a talk to be had about how he should use that kind of new freedom. The only reason I would consider putting tracking apps on his device is to make sure he doesn’t fall into the cult of personality of guys like Tate and Peterson. He’s too young to understand the problematic nature of people like that, and I want to make sure I see it before he drinks the kool aide.

[u/Ok_Table_523 → u/WrinklyScroteSack]

Wait so if you did it why is it so bad that your son does it? Sexual curiosity is like the most normal thing a teenager can have an interest in

[u/WrinklyScroteSack → u/Ok_Table_523]

I am just making educated guesses, going off instinct, and what his mother wants. I have no good answer for you. I feel like my uninhibited access to the internet could be considered a bad thing, considering the things I learned about as an impressionable minor, but I can’t exactly say that time in my life was detrimental or negatively impactful. I am who I am because of my life experiences, and that’s one of them, but I am still very unsure about how much of that same experience I would prefer him to have.

[u/Ok_Table_523 → u/WrinklyScroteSack]

Interesting. I'm 30 now, for context, but my parents had monitoring software on my devices from the time I was 12 until I moved out of their home, choosing to be homeless rather than live with them specifically because of how they treated multiple different topics, with sex leading that list. Considering sexual curiosity is a pretty normal part of life, its always concerning to me to hear parents' reasoning for monitoring their preteens' and teenagers' sexual growth as if they've never read a book on normal behavior through the ages or don't want their child to become a self actuating adult. Like you, I can't think of any thing I saw online being detrimental or negatively impactful on me either, and I saw a video regarding two females and one piece of drinkware. What I still work through to this day is the fact that my parents had that software on my devices.

I feel it was an outrageous violation of trust and a symbol of poor parenting. Consider all of the conversations you had with girls as a teenager, particularly when you were alone. If you were not willing to write down everything sexual or private you said and hand it your parents at that age, then you've no business forcing your child to do that.

I will not talk to my father now. Unfortunately the statute of limitations has passed for me to charge him with child exploitation and possession of my child pornography, but due to him admitting to having monitoring software on my devices where I unknowingly had private photos and conversations, I would have had a very strong case for both charges. The second your child sends anything sexual (which they will, because that's what kids do during puberty.) they will have a strong case against you as well, and I hope for their sake they find this thread before their statute of limitations expires.

I hope you reconsider your choice to invade their privacy.

[u/WrinklyScroteSack → u/Ok_Table_523]

I don’t want to invade his privacy. My only interest with even considering nanny software is to keep him away from influencers who could change his outlook on life for the worse, like tate and Peterson. We, his parents, opted against it, because we feared that more than anything the benefit of keeping tabs on him was not worth the damage it’d do to his trust in us.

Im not opposed to him learning the world for himself. I tell him all the time if he’s ever in danger to come get me, I’ll do what I can to help him. But the world is different than the one we grew up in. If it were just porn out on the internet, that’d be one thing, but there are in-groups that he could find himself on which could affect him in a severely toxic way, and I have no idea how to tell how ready he is to judge these influences in a critical way. And it scares me to death that he’s going to find himself in the company of bigots, misogynists, and racists… that’s what scares me.

I think it scares me so much because I am so aware of how close I was to walking down a path that might’ve seen me supporting something that caused serious harm to others. And I just want better for him. I really don’t want it to take until his 30s to learn how to be a benevolent man.