Should Parents Monitor Their Kids’ Texts?

When I got my first cell phone, the only texting worry my parents had was the bill. Back then, most carriers charged per text (if I remember right, my plan cost 10 cents per message sent, and 2 cents per message received). Despite the hassle of T9 multi-touch texting, wild tales of teens sending thousands of messages and racking up outrageous bills were spreading through parenting circles. 

Things have changed a bit since the early 2000s. 

For starters, it’s hard to find a plan that doesn’t offer unlimited texting. More importantly, texting isn’t a novelty for teens today like it was for me. Many kids think of it like oxygen or Vitamin C. Take texting from them and they would “literally die.” Despite the melodrama, there is something to their argument. In some situations, if you take texting away, you effectively take friendships away.

Texting today is also a lot more than just text. Unlimited character counts, photos, videos, memes, stickers, and a vast library of emojis that is essentially its own dialect have radically transformed how kids today communicate with each other. It’s kinda awesome. But obviously there are some concerns.

With so much flowing to/from our kids via messaging apps, many parents wonder if they need to be monitoring texts to keep their kids safe. If you’ve asked that question, I have the answer for you: 

It depends. 

Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave it at that. There’s plenty to discuss when it comes to what this important decision should depend on. And thoroughly considering all the factors will allow you to make the right call for your family.

First, What’s at Stake: Safety, Trust, and Privacy

If texting was guaranteed 100% safe then there would be no good reason to monitor your kid’s texts. But it isn’t. So let’s start by making it clear exactly what dangers your child is exposed to through texting. 

Most experts will group all the big messaging-related risks into one of three categories: drugs, mental health, and sex. Let’s take them one by one.

Drugs

Problematic drug use isn’t a new concern for parents, obviously. But digital communication has introduced some new wrinkles.

• Via smartphones, kids can now access — and be accessed by — exponentially more people than kids in the pre-smartphone era. This, of course, includes those selling drugs.
• Drug use often begins with curiosity and curiosity can be piqued by trends that now spread online almost instantaneously.
• Multimedia (MMS) messaging can make it easier for kids to hide drug-related jokes, conversations, and transactions through texting. We created a full drug emoji guide (at the request of parents) for this very reason.

Mental Health

My guess is anyone reading an article like this has already heard the news about declining adolescent mental health — and tech’s specific role in that decline. Most of that conversation has focused on social media, but texting plays a part in a couple ways. 

First, many kids use social media platforms to message each other — essentially using these platform’s direct messaging features the way you might use your phone’s standard texting app. So it’s difficult to completely separate social media from texting.

Second, messaging apps can easily facilitate cyberbullying and one of the uniquely heinous aspects of cyberbullying is there is no place to hide from it. If I had a bully in middle school, I at least knew I was safe at home. But the permanent, always-on nature of the internet means the abuse can follow kids anywhere/everywhere. That takes a psychological toll.

Sex

Sexting — the sharing of sexual texts, images, or videos — has become a relatively common behavior for teens today. In a meta-analysis of 39 studies and 110,280 adolescents, researchers found that “14.8% of youth were sending and 27.4% were receiving sexts, whereas 12.0% had forwarded sexts without consent.”

There are varying opinions on how problematic consensual sharing of sexual texts is, but there is no debate about how problematic sextortion is. This is a topic every parent needs to be informed about. Anytime anyone shares a sexual image of themselves online, they have opened the door to that image being used against them. 

The evolution of generative AI hasn’t helped matters either. Convincing deepfakes are now relatively easy to create so fake nude images can be shared that are nearly indistinguishable from the real person. Legislation has been signed to criminalize revenge deepfake porn, but when it comes to keeping kids safe online, prevention is always better than damage control.

Second, What’s to Gain: Trust, Autonomy, Connection

The dangers discussed above are real but I don’t think parents should approach this topic purely on the defensive. When it comes to texting (and digital communication in general), there is plenty of good that is worth seeking out. Giving your kid a device capable of texting can lead to stronger trust between you, increased autonomy and maturity, and enhanced connection with friends and family.

Trust

I’ve heard more than one parent compare text monitoring to sneaking a look at a child’s diary. Put this way, it’s easy to see why some parents are uneasy with the idea. Trust between a parent and child is critical for a lot of reasons. I’d go so far as to suggest that trust and openness between parent and child are the most effective tech guardrails that exist.

It’s definitely possible that your approach to text monitoring could damage trust but I’d suggest looking at this as an opportunity to enhance it. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, so you’ll need to consider your child’s current level of maturity, their specific social needs and pressures, and the technology available to you.

What your rules are, and what tools you give them access to, do matter. We’ll look at that in a second. But when it comes to trust, the single most important thing you can do is communicate early and often. If you and your child are on the same page about what amount of monitoring you’ll be doing — and why — then you’ve set a foundation capable of sustaining growth in the trust between you.

Make the boundaries clear, simple, and subject to change as you and your child work together to avoid dangers while enjoying a growing measure of autonomy.

Autonomy

It is normal and healthy for kids to strive for more freedom as they mature. It is good parenting to facilitate it. But the perfect rate at which to give our kids this freedom is not an exact science, not even close. There are a lot of variables. 

What works in one household, won’t always work in another. As one oft-cited study researching autonomy and adolescent social functioning concludes, “Across all environments, parental responses to adolescent autonomy strivings require balancing the need to set limits on behavior and the need to provide adolescents with sufficient freedom to try out new behaviors and learn from mistakes.”

This balancing act takes consistent effort from parent and child so consider owning that right up front. Tell your kid the approach you start with is not the approach you’ll be stuck on forever and together you’ll figure out the right balance. Helping them understand the need for balance is crucial. 

One parent I talked to found it helpful to explain it to her teen using driving as an analogy: What would happen if we let 8-year-olds drive? 12-year-olds? What would happen if we didn’t let people drive until they were 21? 

Obviously, you don’t have to use that analogy yourself, but most parents find that discussions work better than decrees. You’ll have the final say (especially for younger children), but introducing the topic as a discussion can prevent it from becoming us vs. them — which can be hard to reverse.

Connection

To be clear, in-person socializing is critical to healthy adolescent development. I’m not suggesting anyone benefits by replacing all face-to-face interaction with digital communication. But digital communication will eventually become part of your child’s life just as it’s become part of yours. Part of today’s parenting project is to teach our kids how to make these digital tools beneficial in their lives. The goal is to use them to augment human relationships, not replace or detach us from them.

One peer-reviewed study of how adolescents use text messaging through their high school years suggested, “Adolescents have embraced texting as a way to stay connected with their friends and romantic partners, communicate with their parents, and engage in microsocial planning (i.e., communicating details about where and when to meet, homework, schedules, and other logistics).”

As adults, we probably use texting to do everything in that list. We have the opportunity to show our kids how to use texting to accentuate connections to people that matter to them, facilitate planning around extracurricular activities, and other healthy behaviors.

The Tools We Use To Monitor Texts

So far we’ve covered the general principles, but how those principles are applied will depend on the devices you give your kids and tools you use. Fortunately there are options today. That wasn’t true when Gabb started in 2018 (that’s why Gabb started). 

The conversation around safe-tech for kids has grown dramatically in recent years and a pretty good list of products have spun out of that conversation. That list ranges from software you can use to manage adult devices, like iPhones and Google Pixels, all the way to actual physical devices built specifically for kids and teens.

I know it’s impossible for me to say any of this without bias, but I do think the best of the bunch is Gabb Messenger. I believe that because it was designed in direct response to parent requests and built on the principles we’ve discussed so far. It’s based on our ‘tech in steps‘ philosophy, which helps parents avoid the all-or-nothing dilemma many other options create. In essence, it was designed to help families find that balance between freedom and safety we talked about earlier.

But what have you found? What tools are working for you? What have you learned along the way? If you haven’t tried any yet, what questions do you still have? Join the conversation by commenting below.