Most parents\u2019 first defense is conversation. In Pew surveys<\/a>, 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<\/a> 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<\/a> 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 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 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<\/a>, crediting its software with saving over 1,000 lives in the 2024\u2013\u201925 school year.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nearly one in five kids noted feeling watched or stripped of privacy. About one in 10 said monitoring broke their trust in their parents; one in 12 described anxiety or distress.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Real-world efficacy across the market is harder to measure, though there are hundreds of anecdotes in the reviews\u2014predominantly about how location-sharing apps like Life360 have helped parents find lost kids. Dozens of reviewers also praise content-monitoring apps for averting major crises like potential suicide or self-harm. Of the reviews I scraped (reviews, it\u2019s worth noting, represent a self-\u00adselected sample that\u2019s skewed toward strong feelings), over 200,000 had some indication of whether they were written by a parent or a kid. Parents liked whatever worked. On average, screen-time limiters and location trackers drew four- or five-star reviews 74% to 78% of the time. OS-level controls and content-scanning apps fared worse (44% and 48% positive reviews, respectively), with parents\u2019 top grievance being that the apps were unreliable: They disconnected, missed genuinely troubling content, and raised alarms over nothing.<\/p>\n The kids being watched had different concerns. Of the reviews I could attribute to either a parent or a kid, about 14,000 came from kids being monitored now or from adults looking back at being monitored in their youth. Roughly one in seven were, on balance, grateful. (Gavin, a teen I messaged with, said that monitoring \u201ctaught me self-accountability and integrity.\u201d) But nearly one in five noted feeling watched or stripped of privacy. About one in 10 said it broke their trust in their parents; one in 12 described anxiety or distress. That\u2019s not surprising, given that child-development experts have long said testing boundaries and building autonomy are what adolescence is for. A 2019 meta-analysis<\/a> in the European Journal of Developmental Psychology,<\/em> which pooled 31 long-term studies on how parent-child communication changes, found that children naturally disclose less to their parents as they age\u2014the work of building an independent self.<\/p>\n Making matters harder for kids, a lot gets caught in the dragnet unnecessarily. S., an 11-year-old on the autism spectrum, recalls messaging her best friend at school about whether a service dog might help with her meltdowns or keep her from harming herself. The school used Bark, which alerted the principal, S.\u2019s parents, and her friend\u2019s parents, citing content involving \u201cself-harm.\u201d Perhaps frightened by the alert, the friend\u2019s parents cut off contact between the girls. \u201cMy first thought was, why?\u201d S. told me. \u201cIt\u2019s not like I\u2019m hiding anything. But I\u2019d rather people who weren\u2019t in the situation not see it.\u201d Over a year later, the girls still don\u2019t speak.<\/p>\n While apps aren\u2019t in charge of parents\u2019 reactions, false flags do seem to be more the rule than the exception. \u201cNinety-nine percent of the alerts are garbage,\u201d says Grant Callaghan, an Australian dad who tried several monitoring apps with his 13-year-old son before deciding to build his own. \u201cIt flagged two kids calling a third one annoying as bullying. It flagged a kid complaining of a headache as \u2018medically concerning content.\u2019\u201d When I ran Bark on a test phone set up as a 10-year-old\u2019s, it manufactured a grooming scenario out of a random password I saved in the Notes app.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bark\u2019s Jordan doesn\u2019t dispute that false alarms happen, volunteering an example of a soccer player whose photo of a net-scraped wrist was marked as potential self-harm. She says that over-flagging is safer than under-flagging, though: \u201cYou\u2019d rather know that than not know that.\u201d In a 2021 study with Bark<\/a>, CDC researchers found that students who tripped multiple risk flags were far likelier to trigger an alert for severe self-harm later\u2014indicating that flags aren\u2019t necessarily noise.<\/p>\n Another problem is that Bark and similar monitoring apps surface things kids may not be ready to share. In a national survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology<\/a>, nearly a third of LGBTQ+ students said they or someone they knew had been outed by school monitoring software. Jordan said Bark does not flag sexual orientation, but discussions about it could be captured when it screens chats for sexual content. Again, what adults do with such alerts, she added, is beyond any app\u2019s control. \u201cIf a parent responds to a child\u2019s identity with rejection,\u201d she told me, \u201cthat is a parenting failure, not a child safety feature working as intended.\u201d<\/p>\n Damage caused by monitoring tools can follow kids into adulthood. One in eight reviews left by adults looking back on their years of being monitored describes lasting harm. Only one of the people I contacted agreed to go on the record at all, the others citing privacy worries and anxiety that continues to haunt them.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s so many ways for teens to get around [controls]. And at the end of the day, the biggest thing that most of these apps are telling kids is that we don\u2019t trust you.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Pam Wisniewski<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n That woman, M., is now 19. She got her first smartphone at 13 and says her mother installed a monitoring app before handing it over. Though she\u2019d been abused from a young age, the first serious beating, M. tells me, came shortly after she texted a friend about her depression. \u201cShe didn\u2019t want me to be able to talk to people about the things that she was doing to me,\u201d M. speculates. She eventually got a secret second phone and ultimately ended contact with her mother. Today, M. won\u2019t let even her fianc\u00e9 touch her phone. \u201cI have been watched my whole life,\u201d she says. \u201cI deserve this sense of privacy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n M.\u2019s case represents the extreme end of a spectrum: an app enabling abusive behavior. But it could reflect a broader issue, particularly with tools downloaded outside official app stores\u2014aka, ones that are sideloaded. A 2025 audit<\/a> led by researchers at St. P\u00f6lten University of Applied Sciences and University College London found that nearly half the sideloaded monitoring apps they looked at are functionally indistinguishable from stalkerware.\u00a0<\/p>\n Above all else, it\u2019s not clear how well these apps fulfill their core promise of keeping kids safer. No commercial monitoring app has produced a controlled trial that I was able to find showing that it reduces harm.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kids swap tips online on how to bypass the surveillance. About 7% of the app reviews left by children describe a concrete workaround. \u201cIf you red-team them at all,\u201d Wisniewski says, \u201cthere\u2019s so many ways for teens to get around them. And at the end of the day, the biggest thing that most of these apps are telling kids is that we don\u2019t trust you.\u201d In a 2018 survey, her team found that use of parental controls was associated with an increase<\/em> in the online risk kids encountered, including exposure to harassment. Causality, though, is hard to pin down, because monitoring may follow trouble rather than cause it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Risks may also migrate out of view, as potential predators actively seek out unmonitored spaces. According to Bark\u2019s 2025 annual report, alerts about predators and grooming behavior have fallen in recent years as conversations move into blind spots. Thorn, a child-safety nonprofit, has found<\/a> that offenders routinely direct targets onto encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. After Meta encrypted Messenger by default, the number of reports reaching the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children dropped nearly 20%<\/a> in a year\u2014a trend the center attributed to lost visibility. Parents can block access to such spaces, but tech-\u00adfluent kids can slip around that through browser versions, borrowed phones, or secret accounts.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite their flaws, content-\u00admonitoring apps thrive because parents feel overwhelmed. There is no federal law in the US requiring platforms to design their products to be safe for users, and any safeguards that do exist have proved insufficient time and time again. In 2024 the Molly Rose Foundation (MRF), a suicide prevention nonprofit, analyzed 12 million moderation decisions<\/a> related to suicide and self-harm that had been logged by six major social platforms. More than 95% came from just two of them: Pinterest and TikTok. Instagram and Facebook each accounted for 1% and X.com for even less\u2014evidence, the researchers argue, not that they host less worrisome content but that they\u2019re less inclined to moderate it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meta\u2019s Instagram Teen Accounts fared little better in MRF audits. Of the safety tools tested in a 2025 review<\/a> coauthored by Arturo B\u00e9jar, a former Meta engineering director who designed many of the company\u2019s antibullying tools in the mid-2010s, only 17% worked as advertised. Josh Golin, who runs the children\u2019s advocacy group Fairplay, offers the simplest explanation for such failures: \u201cAlmost any change that\u2019s going to make kids safer is going to mean less money.\u201d Documents unsealed in lawsuits against Meta allege that the company weighed safety fixes against the engagement they would cost\u2014and chose growth.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some groups are working to create more accountability. ParentsSOS is a coalition of families who have lost children to online harms. The group has been a driving force behind several state laws. In 2017, David\u2019s Law made cyberbullying a crime in Texas, and Mississippi criminalized sextortion after 16-year-old Walker Montgomery died by suicide within hours of being targeted by a scammer posing as a teenage girl.\u00a0<\/p>\n The courts are moving too. Nearly 2,900 federal lawsuits by families and school districts are pending against social media platforms. And in March 2026, New Mexico became the first state to win its own child-safety case against Meta, netting a $375 million verdict. A newer wave of suits targets AI: The parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine are suing OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT coached him toward suicide. And in January, Character.AI settled a wrongful-death suit brought by the mother of a 14-year-old who had formed an intense attachment to one of its chatbots before taking his life.\u00a0<\/p>\n ParentsSOS members have also been instrumental in advancing the Kids Online Safety Act in Congress. In its original form, the law would have imposed a duty of care on social media companies, meaning they\u2019d have to design their features to mitigate harms to minors rather than to maximize engagement. They would also have to give kids tools to limit who can contact them. It overwhelmingly passed the Senate in 2024, but its chances of becoming law remain in flux. The House\u2019s new rewrite\u2014blessed by the tech industry<\/a>\u2014strips the duty-of-care provision.\u00a0<\/p>\n But even as they push to fill the regulatory void, parents who have faced tragedy don\u2019t see monitoring tools as an answer. \u201cYou don\u2019t pay extra for seat belts in the car, or airbags,\u201d says ParentsSOS cofounder Maurine Molak, whose son David (of David\u2019s Law) died by suicide in 2016 after months of cyberbullying.\u00a0<\/p>\n Other critics of monitoring tools say the real issue is with how they\u2019re built. The systems, says Wisniewski, need to be reworked so they keep kids safe without violating the privacy and autonomy that adolescents require. The goal isn\u2019t no monitoring or social apps, but better ones\u2014and a principled way of preparing young people to handle risk while also promoting trust between them and their parents.\u00a0<\/p>\n Wisniewski\u2019s resilience-based approach focuses on developing three pillars: self-regulation to help kids decide what healthy use looks like, risk coping to teach them what to do when something bad happens, and a support system of trusted adults and peers to turn to. She didn\u2019t invent the idea of resilience; the finding that children grow stronger through manageable exposure to adversity has anchored developmental psychology since the 1970s. Sonia Livingstone, who has studied children\u2019s online lives at the London School of Economics for over two decades, has amassed evidence from 33 countries<\/a> that online risk and opportunity are inseparable, and that children shielded from every risk never get the practice to handle any.\u00a0<\/p>\n A growing body of research indicates that inculcating resilience works in practice. In 2024, development economists at Hiroshima and Hitotsubashi Universities published a randomized trial of a digital-safety curriculum<\/a> that was taught to junior high students in Vietnam. Across four modules, students learned how scammers and groomers operate, how to protect themselves, and how to find help. When tested a month later, only about 15% of those who\u2019d taken the training engaged in risky online activity, compared with 50% to 60% of the control group. Similarly, Wisniewski\u2019s own research suggests<\/a> that teens high in resilience, exposed to the same risks as everyone else, show less negative impact from that exposure.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/MIT-Teh-Review-Illu1-FINAL-send.jpg?w=840\")
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