I'm Marjorie Funnett.

I'm Elizabeth Rees.

This is Best to the Nest.

The podcast that's all about creating strong, comfortable, beautiful nest that prepares to fly.

I am so excited to talk about surveilling your kids today.

Wow. Is this the chatter on the playground yet with moms and dads about tracking your own kids

through one of the many tracking apps that there are? Yeah, definitely the tracking. That's a benefit of the little

watch that we have for my eight and a half year old, but we don't really use it. It's very

interesting. There's also a lot of discussion over like, do you look at your kids' phone? Are you

reading their text messages? Are you looking at their

Snapchat? Are you weighing in on this? And a lot of that is happening with friends of mine who

have kids who are more in like the 13 to 17 range where, you know, mine are a little bit younger.

So I just listen. My eyes get really wide and I like soak it all in and I'm like, what kind of

psychopaths are you? And where am I headed? Because it feels very scary, there Marjorie.

And it's easy to judge these crazy parents of teenagers until like you're one of them.

What inspired this discussion today is an article I

found in the Atlantic called the very common, very harmful, well-meaning thing parents do.

Surveillance your kids will only backfire. And it's by writer DeVora Heitner. And I found this

fascinating. I'm going to read you a little bit of it because I think this is a really important topic for parents to think about when their kids are little.

Because you want to begin to have that conversation with them about surveilling them before their teenagers.

You don't want to bring this up when they're 13 because they're going to be like,

hell no, they're going to have lots of fake accounts and you're never going to know what they're doing. So she's the author of the book Growing Up Public. But here's some statistics I want to give you.

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