Young People Are Helicopter-Parenting Themselves and Each Other
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This fall I’m teaching a college class on privacy and surveillance, and a few weeks ago I polled around 70 students about whether they use location trackers with family or friends. The majority said they do. During the discussion that followed, some of my students expressed surprise when I disclosed that I don’t track my sons’ locations. Others argued that I should start. “What happens if one of them doesn’t come home and it’s late?” one young woman asked. “Then I would worry,” I said. She did not seem satisfied by this answer.
After several decades of helicopter parenting, it would appear that young people have begun to helicopter parent themselves and each other. Just like their parents before them, their vigilance is suffused with anxiety. Meanwhile, it’s harder than ever for parents to resist the forms of caregiving that were once considered “overprotective.” Thanks to popular apps like Life360, and features on our devices like read receipts and Find My that we all but take for granted, being overprotective has come to be seen as a baseline condition of caring for each other.
For young people like my students, this is all they have ever known. Their sense of their own right to privacy is vague at best, and this influences their behavior. “Everyone has receipts now,” a young man in college told GQ last month. “I see surveillance culture leaking into non-digital interactions.”
In this view, location tracking among friends is cute and cozy; read receipts encourage accountability and keep lines of communication intact. But as the writer Kate Wagner wrote in Lux magazine a few months ago, social surveillance stifles intimacy and inhibits the very sorts of experimentation and freedom that makes adolescence so distinctive and important a period of our lives. “Our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public,” Wagner writes.
Many teens I know are wary about intimacy because of all the device-based accountability it would require. “I don’t want to have to always be answering right away,” one 15-year-old told me not long ago. When relationships are expected to be always on even when you’re rarely in the same place, your time is no longer your own.
Now controlling behavior among intimate partners resembles nothing so much as just another day with a helicopter parent, with an expectation that location sharing and read receipts are turned on. Surveillance keeps us all safe, after all. “It’s for your own good!” It’s easy to see how parents’ behavior has paved the way for demands like these to seem reasonable rather than invasive.
Since ambient surveillance has become an invisible fact of everyday life, it might be time to rethink a parent’s role. Maybe rather than take our places obediently within the phalanx of data trackers ready to interface with our kids, parents might consider taking on the role of defenders of their children’s privacy. This will be much easier said than done, though: Most young people today have barely any concept of what privacy might feel like, let alone why it might matter to them. We’ll have to describe what it feels like.
Overprotective parenting often starts as impression management around other people as new parents worry about seeming “neglectful” if they aren’t constantly vigilant, then calcifies into a way of living. “Where ya goin’, bud?” asks a well-intentioned mom toiling under the specter of “not doing enough” as her toddler staggers into another room. “Whatcha doin?” a dad checks in for the 12th time on a single Sunday morning in the earnest spirit of caregiving but with an anxious edge to his voice.
By the time kids are tweens, digital tracking is an entrenched part of their experience of adolescence. But does it have to be? Probably less often than we’d want to admit. Too often we worry that our children won’t have the kinds of experiences we had as kids — the looseness, the boredom — while actively limiting their access to those very experiences. In our eternal quest to make omelets without cracking a single egg, we’re denying our kids real life.
For me, privacy and independence are basically interchangeable. My whereabouts, my movements, my spontaneous decisions to go one place and not the other — why would I want anyone’s opinion on what I do when I’m alone? Why would I consent to being interrupted when I’m in my own head, experiencing the world and its mysteries on my own terms? And yes “the world and its mysteries” can be mundane or sublime, depending on the day. It’s none of your business! Feedback is not always welcome! Check-ins are not always helpful! It’s when I feel untethered from the demands of my friends and family — phone on DND, wandering along forest pathways or the aisles of a thrilling new-to-me grocery store — that I have the clearest signal open to the outside world. It’s part of how I reaffirm my own humanity!
Once they’re 11 or 12 years old — or old enough to want a little autonomy of their own — why should children be denied these same rights? Is it really about their safety — or is it about protecting our own peace of mind at their expense? According to FBI statistics, crime rates in both urban and rural areas have declined significantly since the ’90s, when we were off doing whatever without our parents’ obsessive monitoring. The Marshall Project reminds us that public perception about public safety hasn’t been aligned with actual data for many years.
What are we actually afraid of? Is it that our kids will commit petty crimes? Let them try! It’s harder to get away with than it used to be, and nothing will scare a teenager straight like the impeccably contoured face of a Sephora floor manager contorting with disapproval while demanding to check their bag.
Is it that they’ll get into risky social situations? That they’ll encounter squatters while on their little urbex adventures? That they’ll make out with their pals under some bleachers somewhere? Honestly — just like that book everyone read a few months ago — let them. Don’t let them because you can’t be bothered to enforce a rule, let them because they have a lot to learn, and being on their own is how they’ll start.
When your kids are exploring the world with your consent, the conversations you share get more interesting. How many years are you willing to endure interactions limited to, “Where’s the charger?” and “30 more minutes and then it’s time to get off, okay, sweetie?” Give yourselves the gift of something new to talk about. When my son and his friend snuck into a nearby football stadium and took a security guard’s unattended golf cart for a 30-second joyride, was I happy to hear about it? I was not, but it did make for a good talk about white privilege and adolescent stupidity.
Which brings me to perhaps the most compelling reason to let your kids out of the house by themselves, untracked. If you don’t give them privacy in the real world, they will seek it out in digital chats that are actually not private at all and from which they won’t learn the social lessons made possible by loitering, or wandering, or making out, or even shoplifting.
In danah boyd’s seminal 2014 book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, she concluded that when teens aren’t given access to freedom in their homes and neighborhoods, they look for it on social media. “Over and over again, and across the country,” wrote boyd, “teens complained to me that they never had enough time, freedom, or ability to meet up with friends when and where they wanted. To make up for this, they turned to social media to create and inhabit networked publics.”
Allowing our kids unfettered access to digital social worlds is not the kind of independence that they need to thrive. I am far more concerned about what my kids will encounter on social media than what they’ll see in a back alley. It should be obvious to parents by now that ideologies of hate and grievance that animate the manosphere thrive when they’re unthreatened by the nuance of the real world. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
The world we live in is not orderly, and the harder we try to create environments of control in which our children might “freely” circulate, the further away from independence our kids will be.
The marketplace has already begun responding to parents’ double-sided anxiety about getting their kids off screens while also keeping them safe IRL. In Utah, which is the sacred headwaters from which a lot of material culture currently flows, you can buy a home in Firefly, a newly planned “Active Family Community” designed to “get kids off their digital devices and provide meaningful ways for you and your family to connect.”
This community, with homes ranging from $300,000 to $500,000, is built around outdoor features like mountain-bike paths and a pump track “so that kids can grow up with the best stories to tell, outside.” An “activities director” named Aspyn is on site to engage kids with math, science, and art. From its promotional materials, Firefly offers an alternative to the enclosure of screen time: A much bigger, more expensive enclosure.
Last year, the Pew Research Center released new findings about young people transitioning to adulthood, and one data point in particular stood out to me: Most young adults reported that their parents are “very” involved in their lives, and the vast majority of those said that they were happy with those circumstances. Likewise, most parents reported being closer with their young-adult kids than they were with their own parents. There are plenty of wider structural or economic reasons why this might be true, but I prefer to think that maybe families are just staying closer, and that’s a nice development, something to feel good about.
But I also wonder at what cost this closeness comes, just as I wonder whether the closeness that is surely felt in Firefly, Utah, comes at a certain cost too — the experience of risk beyond the inherent risk of, say, riding a mountain bike. Isn’t there a way for us to stay close and to feel connected while each maintaining our own private worlds? A mom can dream.