What Constant Surveillance Is Doing to Children
But while it’s hard to argue that newborns are suffering from overattentive parenting, developmental psychology does suggest that constant monitoring eventually becomes unhealthy.
- (Skechers now makes shoes with a dedicated compartment in the sole.) For kids old enough to have their own smartwatch or phone, the GPS is built right in—and so parents keep tracking them into adolescence and even beyond.
- [ From the April 2014 issue: Hanna Rosin on the overprotected kid ] Even among college students, one-third were being tracked by their parents, according to another study, conducted in 2021 by Michaeline Jensen, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
- In her own lab, she’s learned that even her graduate students continue to be tracked; she told me about one student, 29, who recently defended her dissertation but whose mom still checks—and calls about—her location.
Parents with children older than mine tell me they obsess over grades, which are updated instantly with each new assignment or quiz.
Illustrations by Miguel Porlan No one warned me, when I became a parent, about all the apps that would colonize my phone: the app for the baby monitor where I could gaze at my daughter, even when my husband and I finally had a night out.
- “If you have this metaphorical umbilical cord,” she asked, “is that sense of independence going to be adequately developed?” [ From the May 2020 issue: Kate Julian on childhood in an anxious age ] The….
- I mean, I didn’t buy the $299 Owlet smart sock, which would send her pulse rate and oxygen saturation directly to my phone, or the $290 Nanit monitor, which would track her every breath.
- Five years later, Jensen says, that number is even higher: More than half of college students are being tracked, per her unpublished data.
- “It’s funny,” Kaitlyn Burnell, a psychologist at UNC Chapel Hill who has studied digital tracking, remarked when I asked her the question.
- They scrutinize daily photos from sleepaway camp—once a time of complete disconnection—for evidence of sunburns or social ostracism.
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