Parents, Teens and Digital Monitoring

The widespread adoption of various digital technologies by today’s teenagers has added a modern wrinkle to a universal challenge of parenthood – specifically, striking a balance between allowing independent exploration and providing an appropriate level of parental oversight. Digital connectivity offers many potential benefits from connecting with peers to accessing educational content. But parents have also voiced concerns about the behaviors teens engage in online, the people with whom they interact and the personal information they make available. Indeed, these concerns are not limited to parents.

Lawmakers and advocates have raised concerns about issues such as online safety, cyberbullying and privacy issues affecting teens. A Pew Research Center survey of parents of 13- to 17-year-olds finds that today’s parents1 take a wide range of actions to monitor their teen’s online lives and to encourage their child to use technology in an appropriate and responsible manner. Moreover, digital technology has become so central to teens’ lives that a significant share of parents now employ a new tool to enforce family rules: “digitally grounding” misbehaving kids. Some 65% of parents have taken their teen’s cellphone or internet privileges away as a punishment. But restrictions to screen time are not always consequences of bad behavior, parents often have rules in place about how often and when their teen can go online. Some 55% of parents say they limit the amount of time or times of day their teen can be online.