Monitoring apps promise to keep young people safer online, but looking in on kids\u2019 phones can backfire. Online safety experts say there\u2019s a better way.<\/p>\n
Pam Wisniewski\u2019s digital adolescence showed her the best and the worst of the internet. At 14, she left an abusive home, where she\u2019d been isolated in a fifth-wheel trailer at the end of a seven-\u00admile dirt road. She moved in with her older sister and taught herself to type on AOL Instant Messenger. Online, she sought out the support and the community she\u2019d lacked at home. She also discovered how thin the ice can be. \u201cI sent my address to some guy in New Mexico to send me a mug with my name on it,\u201d she recalls. \u201cAnd then I found a news story like five, 10 years later that he killed somebody.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those experiences set the course of her career. Wisniewski\u2014now a principal research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, a nonprofit affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley\u2014has spent well over a decade asking what safety should look like for families navigating an evolving tech landscape, and how to achieve it without sacrificing trust. \u201cI really see the internet as this double-edged sword,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Digital harms have become the defining fear of American parenthood. In the University of Michigan\u2019s 2025 National Poll on Children\u2019s Health, parents\u2019 top three worries had to do with social media, screen time, and internet safety. Nearly half of American teenagers say they have been bullied or harassed online, according to the Pew Research Center. From there, the dangers escalate. Online drug dealers sell counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl. In the first half of 2025, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children fielded more than 23,000 reports of financial sextortion, in which a predator posing as a peer extracts a sexual image from a child and threatens to publish it unless paid. Chatbots are the newest danger, with companies like OpenAI facing lawsuits for allegedly coaching children toward suicide.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Most parents\u2019 first defense is conversation. In Pew surveys, more than nine in 10 say they\u2019ve talked with their teens about what\u2019s appropriate to share online and how to treat peers. They get an assist in limiting exposure from tools that come preinstalled on phones: Apple\u2019s Screen Time and Google\u2019s Family Link let parents cap screen time, block or approve apps, filter web content, and track devices. There are also apps that let family members share locations; Life360, the largest, has nearly 98 million monthly users.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But a growing number of adults are opting for tools that go further. Rather than simply restrict or locate, content-monitoring apps scan a child\u2019s texts, photos, emails, and chats and alert parents whenever an algorithm flags something it deems dangerous. Business is booming, and the next wave of growth is already being marketed around AI, with companies positioning themselves as foils to chatbot companions and other risks. The broader market for parental control software, encompassing dozens of apps, was worth an estimated $1.57 billion in 2025 and is expected to nearly triple in value by 2034. Bark Technologies, the current leader among content-monitoring apps, says it scanned 11 billion messages to or from 7.5 million children in the US in 2025. Its free school program is in more than 3,700 districts, covering about one in 10 kids in the US. While Bark aims to flag only content that trips its filters, some competitors, like FlashGet Kids, include features like screen mirroring and camera access.\u00a0<\/p>\n
These apps have had genuine successes: They\u2019ve prevented suicide attempts, intercepted predators, averted school shootings. But they can also cause harm themselves. To get a read on how digital surveillance affects young people, I scraped more than 600,000 reviews of the leading apps and talked to kids, parents, and people who were monitored as children and are now grown. Some kids were grateful for their parents\u2019 protection. Others described false alarms that got them punished, secrets revealed before they were ready, breakdowns of trust, and anxiety they carried into adulthood. (To protect their privacy, we\u2019re not using their full names.)<\/p>\n
None of this is easily fixed. But child-safety researchers and advocates say better approaches exist. One is to make the platforms themselves safer, forcing social media companies to build guardrails instead of leaving families to find their own. This \u201cduty of care\u201d approach is now advancing in the UK, Australia, and a number of US states. Another is to spend less effort watching kids and more effort helping them recognize risk, cope with it, and turn to a trusted adult when something goes wrong. This approach is called resilience.<\/p>\n
Wisniewski and others are developing tools that don\u2019t aggressively monitor kids but train them in resilience and build trust with parents. \u201cIf we define safety as the absence of risk, the way you keep them safe is by keeping them off the platforms entirely,\u201d she says. \u201cBut if we define safety as the ability to protect oneself and engage without engaging a risk, the solutions look very different.\u201d It is the difference between abstinence lectures and sex ed.<\/p>\n
Content-monitoring apps typically involve two pieces of software\u2014one on the child\u2019s device, one on the parent\u2019s. A parent installs the kid-side app, connects the kid\u2019s accounts, and chooses what to surveil: messages, social apps, browsing, location, screen time. The kid-side software forwards activity to the company\u2019s algorithmic classifiers, which scan for content related to sex, drugs, bullying, and self-harm, among other categories, and push alerts to a parent-facing dashboard. The same type of software can be loaded into school-issued accounts and devices.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sometimes the safety net works. Titania Jordan, Bark\u2019s chief marketing officer, told me the FBI has thanked the company on multiple occasions for bringing credible school-shooting threats to its attention. \u201cI hate that we have to exist,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I\u2019m so thankful that we do.\u201d According to Bark\u2019s annual report, its classifiers alerted hundreds of thousands of families to severe self-harm risks in 2025. Gaggle, a school-monitoring competitor, makes a similar claim in its own annual report, crediting its software with saving over 1,000 lives in the 2024\u2013\u201925 school year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nearly one in five kids noted feeling watched or stripped of privacy. About one in 10 said monitoring broke their trust in their parents; one in 12 described anxiety or distress.<\/p>\n
Real-world efficacy across the market is harder to measure, though there are hundreds of anecdotes in the reviews\u2014predominantly about how location-sharing apps like Life360 have helped parents find lost kids. Dozens of reviewers also praise content-monitoring apps for averting major crises like potential suicide or self-harm. Of the reviews I scraped (reviews, it\u2019s worth noting, represent a self-\u00adselected sample that\u2019s skewed toward strong feelings), over 200,000 had some indication of whether they were written by a parent or a kid. Parents liked whatever worked. On average, screen-time limiters and location trackers drew four- or five-star reviews 74% to 78% of the time. OS-level controls and content-scanning apps fared worse (44% and 48% positive reviews, respectively), with parents\u2019 top grievance being that the apps were unreliable: They disconnected, missed genuinely troubling content, and raised alarms over nothing.<\/p>\n
The kids being watched had different concerns. Of the reviews I could attribute to either a parent or a kid, about 14,000 came from kids being monitored now or from adults looking back at being monitored in their youth. Roughly one in seven were, on balance, grateful. (Gavin, a teen I messaged with, said that monitoring \u201ctaught me self-accountability and integrity.\u201d) But nearly one in five noted feeling watched or stripped of privacy. About one in 10 said it broke their trust in their parents; one in 12 described anxiety or distress. That\u2019s not surprising, given that child-development experts have long said testing boundaries and building autonomy are what adolescence is for. A 2019 meta-analysis in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology, which pooled 31 long-term studies on how parent-child communication changes, found that children naturally disclose less to their parents as they age\u2014the work of building an independent self.<\/p>\n
Making matters harder for kids, a lot gets caught in the dragnet unnecessarily. S., an 11-year-old on the autism spectrum, recalls messaging her best friend at school about whether a service dog might help with her meltdowns or keep her from harming herself. The school used Bark, which alerted the principal, S.\u2019s parents, and her friend\u2019s parents, citing content involving \u201cself-harm.\u201d Perhaps frightened by the alert, the friend\u2019s parents cut off contact between the girls. \u201cMy first thought was, why?\u201d S. told me. \u201cIt\u2019s not like I\u2019m hiding anything. But I\u2019d rather people who weren\u2019t in the situation not see it.\u201d Over a year later, the girls still don\u2019t speak.<\/p>\n