Cyberparenting and the Risk of T.M.I.
It may be a timeless curse of parenthood to know simultaneously too much about one’s teenager and yet never access the information one actually wants. But the unruly morass of today’s social media and cellphone-infested landscape seems to have made both aspects of the curse worse. Nowadays, if you are the parent of a 14-year-old, you can see him guzzle beer, flirt with a girl who squeezes her bosom in every “selfie” she posts on Instagram, and describe a fellow ninth grader in language saltier than any you ever used at that age. Of course, your parents never even heard you swear. They had no idea where you went after you slammed the front door behind you. They couldn’t begin to fathom what you were really up to on a Saturday night.Today, parents are just one click away: buddied up on Facebook, logging on to Tumblr, peering over cryptic text messages and trying to get a glimpse of
Snapchat images before they dissolve into the ether.
Parents who wouldn’t be caught dead reading their teenage daughter’s diary are stuck in a bind. Who really wants to be privy to all this? Karen Sanders, a 49-year-old mother of two in Scarsdale, N.Y., finds herself reading comments made on her 15-year-old daughter’s page. “She’ll post something about someone else, and I find myself stalking her friends — not even mine! By then, even I’m creeped out — by myself.”Sandra Tsing Loh, 51, a writer, radio personality and the mother of two tween daughters in the Los Angeles area, said: “All the boundaries have broken down. Facebook is constantly sending alerts of what they’re up to: liking and commenting and posting and sharing, like squirrels pecking away. But when their mothers are reading, it’s way too much information.” For many adults, the Internet poses a vast array of potential privacy infringements, not all of which are readily defined or understood. But for teenagers the threat is clear: Big Mother. And Big Father. The author Dan Savage refers to it as “the burden of knowing.” He and his husband are what he calls “very heavy-duty monitors”(“kind of the fascist parents”) of their 15-year-old son. “Children leave a digital trail, and you feel like a negligent parent if you’re not monitoring,” Mr. Savage said. “What we’re trying to balance is not knowing everything we can know, which is everything, and giving our son some leeway to make mistakes without dying in the process. It’s horrifying.”Yes, we know contemporary parents are hyperinvolved in their children’s lives. But the term “helicopter parent,” with its menacing tones of parental omniscience, has nothing on the intimate reach of the cyberparent. A helicopter hovers above, at a safe distance, with lots of insulating air between. Cyberparents, on the other hand, are squished right up next to their offspring.Some parents use the “fly on the wall” approach, monitoring regularly or checking in periodically, without comment either online or off. Others prefer the “pick your battles” method, reserving action for moments when a sister says, “Hmm, I saw that picture your daughter posted” or an impolitic slang phrase is flung online in an iffy manner. Then there are the polar extreme tactics of “head in the sand” and “not until you’re 18.” Schools across the country constantly run workshops, often with a range of perspectives, to help straggling parents. A growing number of companies have also popped up to assist parents in navigating the landscape, whether it is supervising their children’s online behavior or maximizing their privacy settings. The home page of one of these “parental intelligence” firms, uKnow.com, states its role as: “Helping mom and dad understand their child’s use of technology, and protect their safety, privacy and reputation.” Such programs are not about digital spying, said Tim Woda, a founder of uKnow.com and its senior vice president for strategic growth. “That would just teach children that being sneaky and underhanded is O.K. as long as it’s for a good reason,” he said.Instead, children see the app installed on their devices, which helps them self-censor. “Our customers just want to understand what’s happening in their kids’ world,” he said, “and so much of it is online that unless they get inside, they’re in the dark.”A majority of parents of teenagers have at least tried to maintain some degree of control. According to a 2012 study of 802 parents of teenagers by the Pew Internet Project, 59 percent of parents of teenagers on social-networking sites have talked to their child because they were concerned about something posted to their profile or account, and 42 percent have searched for their child’s name online to see what information is out there.Most parents recognize the hypocrisy in their roving curiosity. “When I was a 15-year-old seminarian in Chicago, I was sneaking into gay bars, which were not nice places back then,” Mr. Savage said. “If I’d had that on my Instagram and e-mails, my parents would have murdered me.”“Flaming mean 6th graders on Facebook,” began a furious post Ms. Tsing Loh wrote on Facebook last spring, which continued, “One of the most notable features of Facebook, I find, is that now a mother can see, in real time, festivals of ‘Lord of the Flies’ meanness and piling up upon say one’s cool and sweet 11-year-old child.” Ms. Tsing Loh described the anguish of watching children she had shepherded to the Cheesecake Factory since kindergarten post unkind things about her child. (Among them: her daughter is “Facebook friends with Mommy.”)Parents describe finding out things they had rather not have known. One quick glance at Instagram, and they may not want that lovely girl they welcomed at their weekend house several times last summer to return. You wouldn’t believe what that boy, the one who is a lifeguard at the town pool, said about a 12-year-old in her bikini. And who is rolling a spliff on the 14-year-old neighbor’s Tumblr? No established guidelines exist for what parents do with this material. Should they riposte? Comment? Call another child’s parent? In the Pew study, half of parents who use social media themselves have responded to comments or posts on a child’s profile.Kuae Kelch Mattox, national president of Mocha Moms Inc., and the mother of three children (two of whom use social media), is careful to ask her children if it’s all right to tag them in the “proud parent” photos she posts on her own profile page. “If I set a tone for mutual respect, I think it will be reciprocated,” she said. According to a 2011 Pew survey, children expressed a decided ambivalence about having their parents friend them on social networks. “I don’t want to friend her but she like friended me,” a 13-year-old girl told an interviewer.For some children, having Mom or Aunt Jessie comment is just plain embarrassing. “Someone will change their status update to ‘going to the park’ and then you’ll see 80 family members saying, ‘Have fun at the park,’ ” complained another 13-year-old. Who invited Mom and Dad to the party anyway?For parents, embarrassing their children is generally the least of it. Many are already in an outright panic over what their children do online. The worst-case scenarios involve predators and others who would inflict serious harm. According to the 2012 Pew poll, 72 percent of parents are very or somewhat concerned about their children’s interactions with strangers online. Then there are the twin teenage boogeymen of the Internet age: cyberbullying and sexting. One voguish form of torment among kids online is setting up fake accounts (identity-theft light, since no money is involved) for other children, and posting photographs and comments in their names. When Anna Berry’s 13-year-old daughter was in fifth grade, the family learned that a classmate was impersonating the child online. The doppelgänger put her birthday, address and photos taken at their daughter’s school in Littleton, Colo., onto Facebook, with no security settings, and began to friend other children. Ms. Berry watched in horror as her daughter, who wasn’t even on the site then, saw posts in her name go online. “You could see the tears rolling down her cheeks, the sense of violation,” she recalled. Two years later, Ms. Berry’s daughter is allowed on Facebook, but not to friend children from school. “I don’t want the drama,” she said.Then there is the typical teenage bad behavior offline that the Internet broadcasts to the world and codifies for the ages. Even low-lying infractions like suggestive posing and graphic language gain potency when addressed to hundreds of thousands of viewers. “I don’t like the cursing,” Ms. Mattox said. “I’ve said to them, ‘Did you really have to say that?’ and it’s: ‘Oh, Mom, you don’t have to be there. You don’t have to read it.’ ” On another occasion, she saw her daughter posting updates from her phone well after bedtime. For a while, she and husband took the phone away at night. But no matter how much today’s lurking parents may find out, there is a great deal else going on in cyberspace that they aren’t aware of. Teenagers (though not all parents) realize they can dictate who sees what on Facebook. And a good number of tweens and teenagers have already migrated from “their parent’s Facebook” to zippier sites like Snapchat, Instagram and Tumblr, all of which feel less welcoming to the 20th reunion crowd. “What I’ve found out is, they know how to shut you out,” Ms. Sanders said. “I don’t have the access codes to my daughter’s Tumblr account, so unless she leaves them open, I know nothing about her Tumblr life.” Occasionally, Ms. Sanders has asked her daughter for the codes, but her daughter then changes them. Like most savvy parents, Ms. Sanders has installed parental controls on the family computers, but has found the phrase “how to take parental controls off” in their search history.Parents also say that while they may be subjected to too much information online, insight into the offline world of their children has become spotty and opaque. The family phone is no longer the gateway to communication. Parents no longer know who is calling their children, nor can they glean insight from overheard snippets of conversation, tearful exchanges and slammed receivers. “Sometimes I think we know less,” said Wendy Weinstein Karp, a mother of two children in Larchmont, N.Y. “A friend will be sleeping over, and suddenly someone is rushing down to the door because they’re all in touch with each other on their gadgets. People come and go from the house, and you have no idea what’s going on. We’re less in control of the information.” It may be small consolation, but often, the feelings of shock, intrusion and disapproval are mutual. June Jewell, 51, a small-business owner from Vienna, Va., said her daughter will see a photo of her mother on Facebook and complain, “Why did you post that?” Ms. Jewell will put up evidence of herself singing karaoke and her daughter will respond, “You’re embarrassing me!” Ms. Jewell, who has three children active on social media, said nobody wants to think their parents are cool. “What’s funny is that her friends follow me on Twitter and they’re not critical at all.” As far as she knows.