What your kids are doing on their devices

Parents are navigating an ever-changing landscape to protect their children

CHICAGO— Jennea Bivens is one of “those moms,” she says. The type who walks into her daughter’s bedroom without knocking; the kind who tightly monitors her daughter’s phone. She makes no apology.

Nor should she, says a retired cybercrimes detective who spoke to her and other parents in early June at Nathan Hale Elementary School in Chicago.

“There is no such thing as privacy for children,” Rich Wistocki told them.

Other tech experts might disagree. But even they worry about the secret digital lives many teens are leading, and the dreadful consequences — including harassment and suicides — that can result.

Today’s kids are meeting strangers, some of them adults, on a variety of apps. They range from the seemingly innocuous Musical.ly — which lets users share lip-syncing videos — to WhatsApp and, more recently, Houseparty, a group video chat service. Teens are storing risqué photos in disguised vault apps, and then trading those photos like baseball cards.

Some even have secret “burner” phones to avoid parental monitoring, or share passwords with friends who can post on their accounts when privileges are taken away.

It’s difficult to say how many kids are pushing digital boundaries this way, not least because the whole point is to escape adult detection. Social media accounts are easy to establish and discard. Particular apps also rise and fall out of favour among teens with lightning speed, making them a moving target for researchers.

Parents, by contrast, are both overwhelmed and often naive about what kids can do with sophisticated devices, says Wistocki, whose packed schedule has him criss-crossing the country to speak to parents and young people.

He often holds up a mobile phone and tells wide-eyed parents that giving a kid this “ominous device” is like handing over the keys to a new Mercedes and saying,

“Sweetheart you can go to Vegas. You can drive to Texas, Florida, New York, wherever you want to go.”

And yet, Wistocki says, too often parents remain in denial with what he calls “NMK — not my kid.”

A 2016 Pew Research Center survey found that only about half of parents said they had ever checked their children’s phone calls and text messages or even friended their kids on social media. They were even less likely to use tech-based tools to monitor their teens or block certain apps.

Android phones now offer some parental restriction options via a service called Google Family Link. An upcoming update to iPhone system software, which already allows for parental approval of app and music purchases, will give parents more control over screen time, app usage and web surfing. Independent monitoring apps also have proliferated.

Other tech experts agree that monitoring makes sense for younger kids. But Pam Wisniewski, a computer-science professor at the University of Central Florida, is among those who suggest a gradual loosening of the strings as teens prove they can be trusted.

Rather than cutting off kids from social media, she encourages parents to look for teachable moments.

Sarita Schoenebeck, an assistant professor and director of the Living Online Lab at the University of Michigan, says her research also has found that shutting teens out of social media only tends to make them sneakier.

“No kid wants to be pulled over and told not to do this,” Schoenebeck says. “Try to figure out how to talk about it in an open-minded way.”

Even Wistocki, while hardcore on monitoring, tells parents to offer their children the “Golden Ticket” — no punishment when they come to them about mistakes they’ve made online or help they need with a social media problem.

“Try to figure out how to talk about (phone use) in an open-minded way.” SARITA SCHOENEBECK LIVING ONLINE LAB