Is spying on your child’s phone ever justified?

Worried about what mischief their teens could be up to using their phones, many parents feel the urge to snoop and monitor their children’s use of smart phones. PHOTO | FILE

What you need to know:

  • Saturday Magazine posed this question to six parents. Out of this six, three said that it is OK and yes, they do spy on their teen’s phone. The tone of their responses suggested that they have a right to spy on their teens’, their privacy notwithstanding.
  • But most teens are more tech-savvy than their parents are. They are more likely than not to be aware of the apps that are running on their phones and sniff yours out.

If your teenager is anything like Charity Njau’s 16-year-old daughter, then you understand the sort of relationship she has with her mobile phone – eyes glued to the screen, fingers forever twiddling on the keypad and ear phones stuck in her ears.

Charity says the phone makes her daughter come off as antisocial and rude: “She sometimes locks herself in her bedroom to while the time away on her phone. And I often hear her giggling as she types and takes photos,” says Charity.

As a parent, Charity wonders if she has a right to see what her daughter up to in there: Is it OK to spy on your teenager’s phone?

Saturday Magazine posed this question to six parents. Out of this six, three said that it is OK and yes, they do spy on their teen’s phone. The tone of their responses suggested that they have a right to spy on their teens’, their privacy notwithstanding.

Two said they don’t; they haven’t and don’t intend to. One said her teen doesn’t have the type of phone that can be spied on.

SMART SPYING

From the parents who admitted to spying, we noted that their spying techniques are not as technically smart as the term ‘spying’ suggests.

Theirs is more like sneaking around, as Njeri, a mother of two teenagers, does. She says, “I usually look through my daughter’s phone to see the calls that have been made and the messages that are coming in and being sent out. I also look through her chats on WhatsApp, as well as her Facebook and email accounts.

“My daughter’s school allows students to take their phones to school, as long as they don’t use them in class. She’s still young and growing, so she needs my watchful eye and she knows I snoop around.” Njeri says, adding that she hasn’t seen anything alarming so far.

A technically smart way to spy, says Mark* – a technology worker from Nairobi Web Experts – is to install a tracking and monitoring application on your child’s smart phone, that secretly sends you reports about their activities.

He explains, “You need to have access to the phone first before you install this app. Some of these apps can be hidden from the apps menu, so your teen doesn’t know that he is being monitored. You configure the app to monitor the activity you want – calls, SMS or Internet activity.“It sends you a summary of activities to your phone in the form of an SMS every few days.” Mark continues, “You will see numbers he dialled and received, messages sent and received, and the websites he has visited in that time. However, it doesn’t show you exactly what your child viewed on the Internet when he visited various sites. But you will get a general idea.”

But most teens are more tech-savvy than their parents are. They are more likely than not to be aware of the apps that are running on their phones and sniff yours out.

Getting caught means loss of your trust – you had been poking your nose in their personal business behind their backs. So what happens after your child finds out you are spying on him?

“Depending on the type of relationship you have with your teen,” says Kimani Githongo, a psychologist, “this loss of trust will negatively affect your interactions with him. He will always look at you with suspicion and harbour feelings of mistrust for a long time afterward. Reclaim this lost trust by apologising, quitting your spying or reaching out to him in a friendly manner to explain your actions.”

GET CONSENT

If spying isn’t your cup of tea, there are other ways to monitor your teens and their cell phones without breaching their trust. Kimani advises, “Get his consent to monitor his phone activity.” Getting consent is recommended when you see signs that warn you your teen is using his phone for inappropriate behaviour – he keeps it close to him and under lock at all times.

Or throws a fit when you yank it from his hands to sneak a peek at what he’s doing on it.

Kimani continues, “Another way around it would be to guide your kids on what to do and not do on their phones, especially on the Internet. Engage them maturely about the dangers of sharing details online. Give them the space for their privacy by letting them think these things through for themselves.”

Alternatively, you can take a preventive measure as Faith did. She got her 13-year-old son a ‘safe’ phone, that is: one that doesn’t have access to the Internet. Its functions are as basic as making and receiving calls, and sending messages. You can’t install or remove apps. Faith says that such a phone isn’t appealing to the hip crowd of tech-savvy teens, but it does its job anyway: “I don’t worry too much about what he’s up to on his phone.

And he doesn’t spend too much time on it, anyway,” she says.