The Truth About Parental Monitoring

It may not do what you think it does. And other things matter more.

It’s 10pm. Do you know where your children are?

Parental monitoring has long been a thing, but it’s never been as easy to track and surveil kids as it is now, thanks to digital technology. The Life360 app, which tracks kids’ whereabouts and experiences online, was used by 66 million Americans in 2024 — more than one in nine U.S. families.

The rationale behind parental monitoring is simple: In order to keep our kids safe and healthy, we need to know what they are doing. The CDC even has a webpage dedicated to the benefits of parental monitoring, explaining that it “should start in early childhood and continue throughout the teen years” and “can reduce teens’ risks for injury, pregnancy, and drug, alcohol, and cigarette use.” According to the CDC, parental monitoring includes asking kids questions like where they will be and whom they’ll be with as well as setting clear rules and expectations around behavior.

Yet if you look closely at the research on parental monitoring, you’ll discover that the claims regarding its benefits rely on some unfortunate assumptions — assumptions that have been baked into our cultural beliefs about parenting and how to do it. And these assumptions have, in recent years, been questioned.

In fact, if you dig deep into the research, you uncover that the purported benefits of parental monitoring — its associations with various healthy outcomes for kids and teens — are not actually the result of parental monitoring, but of something else.

The Study that Changed Everything

To be fair, these aren’t exactly new revelations — they were first uncovered about 25 years ago — but for whatever reason, they haven’t yet permeated into our modern parenting culture. So even though the findings aren’t new, I think it’s well worth highlighting them and their implications, as well as what more recent research has suggested.