First, a story: Megan (not her real name) was receiving her first smartphone as a birthday gift. She was about to turn 13 and had waited– in her view– agonizingly long to receive her first phone. Her parents were concerned about the impact of a child having such a high-powered tool when their daughter was already prone to anxiety.
Megan’s parents did what they thought was best– they read as much as they could about phones and children, they talked to her about the risks and dangers, and they hired me to consult with them first, and then as a family, about smartphone ownership.
On the day of our family meeting, Megan and her parents arrived in my office. Megan held a shiny new smartphone in her hand. As they settled in, Megan’s phone suddenly burst to life– ringing loudly– and Megan, new to this experience, glanced down at the caller ID. It was a number she did not recognize.
“Wait! Who is this person? I don’t know anyone in that city! How did they get my number?” she said, panic-stricken.
The irony was not lost on me: here were Megan and her parents, in my office, to talk about what impact owning a personal smartphone might have on her life, and we were watching in real time the spiraling anxiety that came from simply an unrecognizable phone number.
Oh– one more important detail to share: this was in 2015. Ten years ago.
A lot has changed in the past decade, technologically-speaking, of course. Smartphones today are, well, much smarter than they were ten years ago.
But what I want to focus on today is not how the device itself has changed– but how the device has changed the humans using them.
In 2015, it was Megan whose panic about the unknown number sent her into an anxious spiral; her parents were more bemused by her reaction than concerned. They reassured her that it was normal to get calls like this, that it was probably spam or a wrong number, that she didn’t have to answer.
But it was Megan, the child, who had panicked.
Today, in 2025, this scenario above would look very different. (First of all, parents aren’t hiring consultants to make decisions about when to give them their first smart devices. They’re just…giving them.)
And secondly, the reasons for giving phones to children have changed in the past decade. Ten years ago, it was to ease communication and increase convenience.
Today, it’s more often out of fear. A very misguided fear.
Today, parents give their children smart devices in the name of safety and protection against fears of real-world dangers.
And in doing so, parents are inadvertently making their children less safe in the digital one.
Over the past ten years in my work with families, I am increasingly told by parents that they gave their child a smart device (watch or phone) to “keep them safe.”
This sounds like a good thing, of course, and as a parent myself, I can understand the sentiment. We’re told that our job as parents is to “keep kids safe.” But safe from what? Is “safety” the ultimate goal? And what does “keeping children safe” really mean in 2025?
According to Pew Research, these are the top three parental fears in America:
Bullying
Youth Mental Health
Kidnapping
Here’s the problem: “Kidnapping” is one reason parents offer when they give their kids smart devices– so they can track their child via GPS, so their child could contact them if “something bad happens,” and so they can easily reach them.
But kidnapping is so rare that it is statistically nil. In fact, as Lenore Skenazy writes, if you wanted your child to be kidnapped, they would have to stand outside, every day, for 750,000 years.
Years. Not days. Not minutes.
So why is kidnapping one of the top three parental fears in America?
Because our own parental consumption of click-bait, fear-mongering headlines confirms our fears about the “dangers” of the real world. We are targets of the Big Tech business model too, after all, and just because we (ostensibly) have fully-formed pre-frontal cortexes, we are still susceptible to thinking that the world is far scarier and more full of kidnappers than is actually the case. And then, our social media algorithms push us content and target our fears and anxieties, because the persuasively designed tool ensures that we will click on it and we will continue to watch and consume it and – by design – these companies will make money off the time we spend in the app.
But this vicious self-fulfilling prophecy is confirmation of confirmation bias, and it is wreaking havoc on our children.
Because here’s the thing: We do not have a kidnapping crisis in this country; we have a youth mental health crisis:
Among US high school students in 2023, 40% of teens reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year and one in three teenage girls has seriously contemplated suicide.
When we give our children phones or watches in the name of “keeping them safe” we are actually increasing their risk of experiencing bullying and worsening their mental health.
Children are not getting kidnapped by a person; they are getting hijacked by an algorithm that makes them think the world is more dangerous than it is.
Just like their parents are duped into thinking the real world is far scarier than it is.
And because children’s brains are not fully formed and they lack critical thinking and judgment skills (again, because they are children), they cannot discern what is truly a risk, what is fact, what is real, what is worth worrying about.
It reminds me of my time working at an after-school program in Brooklyn, NY in the weeks after 9-11, a tragedy that affected many of my students. I remember one child in particular kept talking about “all the planes hitting all the buildings” and I was confused.
Then I realized that he had been watching the video replay on television (this was in 2001, pre-social media and smartphones), and because he saw the videos multiple times, he thought there were multiple planes hitting multiple buildings. This child– like many children– lacked the ability to understand that a video on repeat meant the same scene playing over and over again, not a new scene each time.
Another reason I hear for why parents give their children smart devices is in case of a school shooting. This is deserving of its own essay, but I will just echo what has been said before: school shootings are also extremely rare; having a smart device could actually alert a shooter to your hiding place; and that in such a rare emergency, first responders would need children paying attention to the adults in charge, not calling their parents.
But it doesn’t matter that this argument– or the argument to not give children phones in the first place– is cogent and logical and rooted in facts. When it comes to parental fear, our amygdalas are hijacked and we can only see the worst-case scenario unfolding, without recognizing all the real-world risks that come from providing our child a device in the first place.
I posted a reel on Instagram last week about how tracking our children via GPS 24/7 is actually unhealthy for children. I wrote:
If you grew up without GPS tracking, imagine if your parents had known your every move, 24/7. Would it have made you feel safe—or suffocated? Today, we justify tracking our kids as “peace of mind,” but what’s lost in the process?
The opportunity to build skills critical to future adulthood: Trust. Independence. Self-reliance. The ability to navigate the world without a digital safety net.
Our kids deserve the chance to build confidence, make decisions, and yes—sometimes even get lost. Because knowing they *can* find their way back is just as important as knowing where they are in the first place.
Apparently, this is an extremely controversial point to be making.
I was immediately told I am a “groomer” and that this is “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.” I was told that unless I’ve been with a crying parent whose “child has been trafficked,” I couldn’t possibly suggest this. “We’re dealing with sexual trafficking of our daughters” online now, one parent commented, so “let’s keep tracking them.”
Unfortunately, these responses are not uncommon and they are very much rooted in parental fear, which, as I stated earlier, is rooted in our own overconsumption of fear-inducing, click-bait headlines.
The propaganda machine is working. Parents are afraid.
But the irony here is that even while trafficking does occur in rare instances, the solution then isn’t “we should track our children to prevent trafficking” but rather “we shouldn’t allow children online” in the first place. Or at the very least, we should be educating themselves and ourselves about what to do to identify, prevent, and report any threats.
That’s not what is happening.
Instead, parents’ fear is so heightened they assume every interaction is nefarious; any stranger is a threat; and any time away from that parent is full of danger and risk that must be guarded against.
So parents seek out ways to track and monitor and supervise their children when they are not together. I’ve been asked questions like “What’s the best watch to track my first grader when he rides the bus to school?”
The technology industry is paying attention to these fears and a secondary technology market called “surveillance technology” has popped up– products like Bark and apps like Securly and GoGuardian– that purport to keep children safe by notifying parents of anything that seems concerning about a child’s time online.
But these companies and their fear-mongering marketing prey on parent fears and stress in the name of “safety” and, as the ACLU’s Digital Dystopia report found, “The EdTech Surveillance industry aggressively promotes its products as a highly effective intervention to keep students safe; however, there is no independent, unbiased, data driven evidence that they do so…. Education surveillance technology is a multibillion- dollar industry that has seemingly unlimited resources to push biased and inaccurate marketing claims to increase their profits.”
If that sounds familiar, it’s because surveillance technology’s business model is the same as Big Tech’s and EdTech’s. Your fear, your time on device, your attention– those are monetized for profit at the expense of your sense of safety.
Unfortunately, there will be parents reading this essay who will see nothing wrong with surveilling their children– that the handful of “saves” that might be captured by these tools outweighs the myriad harms caused by handing out internet-connected smart devices to children in the first place.
Attempting to use surveillance tools is like taking medicine to treat the side effects of drinking arsenic-laced water, rather than, as Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath says, asking “Why we are drinking arsenic in the first place?”
I understand that it’s one thing to say “keep kids offline” and quite another to do it. And schools are complicit in making this problem much worse, and we should fight that as well.
But the message of this essay is for parents:
I know you care deeply about your children. Your intentions are good.
But surveilling your children does not make them safer…. in the real world or the digital one. Surveillance erodes trust – parent to child, friend to friend, coworker to coworker– and trust is fundamental to relationships and a healthy society.
When we parent from fear, we prevent our children from practicing the skills they need to navigate the dangers that do exist in the real world.
More bluntly, when we opt for surveillance, we are putting our fear ahead of our child’s mental health and cognitive development.
It is time to put facts before fear. It is time to own how our own doom-scrolling affects our worldview and step into our authority as a parent. Child development is built in stages– surveilling children when they are young teaches them not to trust themselves. A teenager who cannot trust herself is a young person who will struggle to make decisions, think critically, and build confidence. And a young adult whose inability to function in real world situations will lack the resilience to persevere through hard– and very normal– moments.
Lenore Skenazy has been having this fight since she was dubbed “America's worst mom” for letting her son ride the subway alone at age 9 in NYC in broad daylight on a weekday…in 2008. This isn’t a new battle, but the stakes have never been higher.
Refusing to give in to our fear is an incredibly difficult thing to do. And choosing to do so is also the most protective thing we could offer our children.
This isn’t a kid problem– it is an adult problem that is affecting children.
The power is in our hands.