The widespread adoption of various digital technologies by today’s teenagers has added a modern wrinkle to a universal challenge of parenthood – specifically, striking a balance between allowing independent exploration and providing an appropriate level of parental oversight. Digital connectivity offers many potential benefits from connecting with peers to accessing educational content. But parents have also voiced concerns about the behaviors teens engage in online, the people with whom they interact and the personal information they make available. Indeed, these concerns are not limited to parents. Lawmakers and advocates have raised concerns about issues such as online safety, cyberbullying and privacy issues affecting teens.
A Pew Research Center survey of parents of 13- to 17-year-olds finds that today’s parents1 take a wide range of actions to monitor their teen’s online lives and to encourage their child to use technology in an appropriate and responsible manner.
When it comes to monitoring their child’s digital use and interactions, parents tend to take a hands-on approach to monitoring what their children do:
- [tweetable url="http://pewrsr.ch/1OAZ9zT" alt="61% of parents say they have ever checked which websites their teen visits.]61% of parents say they have ever checked which websites their teen visits.
- 60% have ever checked their teen’s social media profiles.
- 56% have ever friended or followed their teen on Facebook, Twitter or some other social media platform.
- 48% have ever looked through their teen’s phone call records or text messages.
In addition, nearly half (48%) of parents know the password to their teen’s email account, while 43% know the password to their teen’s cellphone and 35% know the password to at least one of their teen’s social media accounts.
But even as parents use a number of these hands-on methods to monitor their teen, they are relatively less likely to use technology-based tools to monitor, block or track their teen. This is a consistent pattern that has also emerged in previous Pew Research Center surveys of technology use by parents and teens. For instance, the new survey results show:
- 39% of parents report using parental controls for blocking, filtering or monitoring their teen’s online activities.
- 16% use parental controls to restrict their teen’s use of his or her cellphone.
- 16% use monitoring tools on their teen’s cellphone to track their location.
In addition to taking a range of steps to check up on their teen’s online behavior, the vast majority of parents also try to take a proactive approach to preventing problems by speaking with their teen about what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable online behavior. Specifically:
- 94% of parents say they have ever talked with their teen about what is appropriate for them to share online, with 40% doing so frequently.
- 95% have ever talked with their teen about appropriate content for them to view online, with 39% doing so frequently.
- 95% have ever talked with their teen about appropriate media to consume (such as TV, music, books, magazines or other media), with 36% doing so frequently.
- 92% of parents have ever spoken with their teen about their online behavior towards others, with 36% doing so frequently.
A note about the findings in this survey
These findings are based on a national survey of parents of teens ages 13 to 17, conducted Sept. 25-Oct. 9, 2014, and Feb. 10-March 16, 2015. One parent and one teenage child participated in each survey. If a parent had more than one child in the specified age range, one teen in the household was randomly selected for the survey. The data in this report about parenting behavior pertain specifically to parenting behavior towards the specific teen who also completed the survey.
This report differs from Pew Research Center surveys of parents and technology conducted prior to 2014 in that this survey was administered using an online panel to a nationally representative cohort of teens. Pre-2014 surveys of teens and technology were conducted via telephone, cellphones as well as landlines. Due to differences in modes, figures presented in this report will not be directly compared to Pew Research Center studies of teens conducted prior to 2014.
At the same time, there are a number of broad trends that resonate in both our current and previous work. As in past Pew Research Center studies, this research finds that a majority of parents report discussing acceptable online behavior with their teen as well as checking up on what websites their teen visits. Meanwhile, the share of parents who use more technologically oriented methods, like parental monitoring software, to monitor their teen’s digital life continues to remain comparatively low.
