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
![\"""\"](\"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/MIT-Teh-Review-Illu1-FINAL-send.jpg?w=840\")
<\/p>\nFRANZISKA BARCZYK<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\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
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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<\/p><\/div>\n
#Childmonitoring #apps #reboot<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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