Cellphone Spyware for Parents: The Good Parenting Debate

Welcome to the Information Age, now you can keep tabs on your kids 24/7. There are endless computer and mobile applications that allow you to monitor the online activities of your child, no matter which gadget they are using. However, there are two schools of thought when it comes to spying on your kids.

Some parents feel tracking your kids with an sms tracker is just part of good parenting and keeping them safe should be a top priority. Other parents feel it can create mistrust between them and their kids, and this decision should be carefully thought out.

Children Should Be Monitored
Parents who belong to the former school of thought feel that being unaware of their children’s digital world is quite disconcerting. Knowing their location, social media activity, call logs and messages helps them maintain their peace of mind. Quite a large number of teens own smartphones that are provided by their parents. It only makes sense that the technology you provided should be monitored by you as well. All smartphones have a GPS option, so at the least you should know their location at all times.

The monitoring applications that are available nowadays allow parents to “spy” on their kids from the comfort of their phone or computer. All they need to do is log on to the application and see the activities of their children’s iPhone and Android devices. With such apps, parents have successfully prevented their children from being victims of cyber bullies and sexual predators, and also kept them away from being a cyber bully.

Children Should Not Be Monitored
Without being aware of your children’s activities, it can be hard to keep them safe or help them make good decisions. However, on the other hand, you risk destroying your relationship with your children.

Constantly prying on them and invading their privacy will make them more rebellious. They feel they cannot be trusted, so in turn they stop trusting their parents as well. They might stop sharing whatever details of their life they shared before. And as with all relationships, when communication breaks down, it’s only headed for disaster.

Also, since you are constantly keeping your child sheltered, they may develop a lack of confidence and social anxiety. Mistakes are a part of life and that’s how we learn things, but if your child never makes a mistake, you are depriving them of the “real world” experience. Keeping your child safe is good parenting, no doubt, but excellent parenting is when you teach your child to stay safe. Once you help them understand the good and the bad, they won’t be making those mistakes in the first place.

The best way to teach your kids about how to stay safe on the internet is with open communication.
Instead of tracking them, just get your kids to give you their passwords to all of their social media accounts and let them know you will be keeping tabs on them from time to time. Instead of tracking them on a GPS, just ask your kids where they are going. If they are going to friend’s place, make sure there is adult supervision. If they are going elsewhere, find about the people they are going with.

This also solves the cyber bullying and sexual predator problems. Open communication means your children should be comfortable enough to share with you they are being bullied or a stranger is trying to interact with them.

Moreover, these tracking devices have access to all the data on your child’s phone. If you have access to everything, so does the company that’s operating the tracking and monitoring application. Although all companies are required to keep their customer’s information confidential, you still have no control over what they might do with that data.