Teen monitoring apps don't work, and drive a wedge between teens and parents
When I was coming up in the early 2000&#x27;s, I met a girl at a concert that I liked. We started talking online, and she told me at the beginning that her parents had a keystroke monitor on her computer. Being a little baby hacker, I went online to find the best ways to circumvent the software she had. I told her how to do it, and one saturday while I was still in bed I got a phone call from her dad about how she was no longer allowed to talk to me.<p>Turning from Dad into Big Brother probably didn&#x27;t help this girl develop proper social skills. She chaffed under the yoke of this monitoring, and seemed like she had an antagonistic relationship with her parents. They weren&#x27;t pushing her towards becoming an inherently good person, just towards hiding her bad behavior from them. Your goal as a parent should be to create and foster good behavior from your children, not teaching them to hide the choices they know you won&#x27;t agree with.<p>FWIW, my parents put 0 effort into monitoring my online behavior, I made TONS of mistakes&#x2F;did bad things online until my mid-20s, and I&#x27;m now happily married, well employed and generally well liked by people I know.