We are The Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health or ACAMH for short. And this is ACAMH Learn. Hello, and welcome to Mind the Kids. I'm your host, Mark Tebbs. I've spent my whole career working in mental health services, in various guises, from frontline service provision to being director of mental health commissioning. I'm currently chief executive of a charity. So I'm really interested in grassroots organisations and how we really make community impact. In each episode, we talk to researchers and practitioners about their research. It's an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the latest research in child and adolescent mental health. Probably, today, the most important qualification, from my perspective, is being a parent because today, we're going to be talking about parental monitoring. I'm delighted to be joined by Isabel Aks and William Pelham, from the University of California, to discuss parental monitoring in an episode that's called Monitoring Versus Knowing, Rethinking the Parent-Child Dynamics. Isabel and William have recently published their paper in JCPP Advances, and we are going to dive into a conversation with them now. Isabel, would you tell us a little bit about where you're based-- I know you're in the States-- and a little bit about your research interests? Yeah, for sure. So I'm Isabel, I currently live in California, in San Diego, specifically, and I work at UC San Diego as a staff research associate. I graduated from UCLA a few years ago, with a degree in cognitive science and a computing specialisation, and have been riding the wave of psychology research since then and will continue to in the future. Because I'm going to graduate school next year to get my PhD in clinical psychology. Excellent, really lovely to meet you. Will, same question. So I'm a clinical child psychologist. And I am here at UC San Diego. And I'm a professor, so I do research. And then, also, I'm a clinician. So I see kids, teens, and families in our psychiatry clinic here at UCSD. Great stuff. So I think, with this podcast, we're probably divide it up into two halves. So the first half, we'll be talking about parental monitoring generally, and then we'll dive a little bit more into the specifics of your paper. So I guess, as part of the preparation for the podcast, I was talking to my son, and he's-- finishes his university. And I was talking about parental monitoring. And he said, well, that's just spying, isn't It? That's when you're spying on us, Dad. So could you just tell us what parental monitoring actually is and what it looks like in that everyday [INAUDIBLE]? Yeah, for sure. I'm really glad you brought that up because I feel like when we say, parental monitoring, it sounds like this official technical term for spying. That's really funny. But really, it's actually a lot more casual than that. It's things that parents are already doing, most parents already do every day. Basically, we're just referring to anything a parent does to get information or to know something about their child's life. So it can be as simple as asking your child about what they're doing today. You can find out how they're doing in school by looking at a school report. You can get to know their friends, very casual things. It doesn't necessarily have to be going into their room and looking at what they're doing or spying on them. Perfect, OK. So that's a great example. So I guess the other thing that I had a conversation with my son about was he disclosed some of the things that I didn't know about, from his childhood. And I guess, I imagine there's some kind of tensions around parental monitoring, particularly in those teen years when there's some of those higher-risk behaviours. So is parental monitoring a common cause of tension? Yeah, also a great question. I'm not a parent myself, but I've also had lots of conversations with my mum about this. And a huge tension within the parent is, like, how do I balance supporting my child's autonomy, their independence, but then also making sure that they know that they're safe and that they're taken care of and giving off the impression that I actually care about their life, right? So there's always going to be that to juggle. So to your question, I think, in some cases, for sure, it can cause a little bit of tension if the parent and the kid aren't really aligned on what's going on, so if the kid feels like, OK, my parent's looking a little bit too much into what I'm doing. They're tracking my location too much. Why does this need to happen? But of course, in other cases, it can be, super beneficial and actually lead to some positive lines of communication between the parent and the child. Will, did you want to jump in there? It's a great question. It's always a balancing act. And I hope, Mark, whatever you found out didn't scare you too much, from your son there. So I think it's easy to say, at one end of the spectrum or the other, right? As a parent, if your son had never done anything you didn't know about, that would probably mean you were a little too intense, right? On the other hand, a lot of the families I work with in clinic, part of the issue is it's gotten out of control, what the teenager is involved in and what the parents are aware of. So it's a balancing act. And that's part of what Isabel was getting at in the paper here. Yeah, and I guess it was really interesting. Isabel, that response about talking to your mum. And I imagine that parental monitoring has changed quite a lot. There's a generational shift. Is that what you've found? Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think when my mum was a kid, it was all about, OK, lay out your plan. If you're going out with friends, tell me about it, right? And then I'll hear about it when you get back. Now we have all of these new digital means of getting information about your kid, tracking their location, texting them while they're out, getting real, live updates on what they're doing, right? So it looks very different now than it used to. And I'm sure it will continue to change and evolve over time. And that's why I think it's really important-- In this paper, we're trying to figure out a way to study parental monitoring in a very specific, programmatic way. And of course, the way that we study parental monitoring is going to change, depending on the type and form of monitoring, right, as we go on. Is there any advice around how parents can reach that balance? Is there a rule of thumb around how that balance is reached? Yeah, I think it's a great question, Mark. And I wish there were a simple answer where I could say, do exactly this. It all depends on the kid, the situation, and the parent, right? One of your other questions, though, goes to the way I think about it, which is you asked about trust. And I think of trust as the foundation. Why is trust important? I mean, one, one of the main ways, as a parent, that you can monitor is talking to your teen, right, asking them how they're feeling, what's going on in their life. If they don't trust you, you're not going to get a lot of useful things out of a conversation like that. So that's the bedrock trust. It also goes the other way where, as a parent, if you don't trust your teen, that's also going to make it hard to monitor. Because you're going to be really tempted to go to-- the word you used at the beginning, Mark, to snoop, snooping, right? You're tempted to go more toward that, be less respectful of privacy, independence. And if you feel like you just can't really trust what they're telling you, you can't trust them to make good decisions. So when you ask about where to fall, how do I have balance, granting independence and privacy and also monitoring that to keep them safe, I go back to, do we have trust going both ways in the relationship? As long as we have that, maybe we're somewhere in a good spot, in the middle. Yeah, I think that's incredibly helpful, and it really resonates with my parenting experience. I think our monitoring behaviour shifted as-- the changes that our children were going through and the level of concerns we had. But I guess, at the heart of it, we were trying to provide as much freedom as possible whilst keeping them safe. But it felt like a very dynamic, changing [? process. ?] Yeah, as you say that, Mark, actually, maybe I'll take that answer from you and use that in the clinic. Because I like that way of thinking about it. Your goal is to give the most freedom you can. And then the way you ramp down is only, what do I need to do to keep them safe? And like you said, for some-- or as I mentioned earlier, it depends on the teen in the situation. You just spoke about a thing that's true of all teens, which is age. The way we monitor a 12-year-old would be very different than the way we monitor an 18-year-old. If it doesn't change, that's a problem. We're not getting our teenager ready to go out in the world and be independent. I'm wondering what happens-- you must see this in the clinics, of when that trust breaks down and what impact that has on parental monitoring. Yeah. I would say, by the time I see families in the clinic, it's almost always a big issue. That trust has been broken. And not just trust, but there's a lot of conflict around the monitoring. So whenever the parent is trying to do it, it's pretty annoying to the teen, right? It feels invasive and bad. And then for the parent, the trust is broken down, where they don't really trust that the teen is telling them the truth, for example, about what's going on or what their plans are. So it's often the first thing we do in therapy, is work on that. And if you were a parent who's feeling that way, I think that's really a time to think about getting professional help. Because rebuilding trust is something that can be hard to do, just the two of you. But sometimes, having a third person in the room, pursuing family therapy where it's you, your teenager, and the therapist are all in the room talking together, just a little bit of help with the mediation sometimes can be what gets the ball rolling back the other direction, right, into we're rebuilding trust. We're getting to a place where, as a parent, I can grant more independence and privacy. And as a teen, I can trust mum or dad's doing this for the right reasons, rather than just because they don't like what I'm doing. Yeah, that's really, really helpful advice. I suppose I'm thinking about all of the pressures that families face. We see it a lot in our charity work, the pressures of poverty, and work, and break up of relationships. I'm just wondering how parents can still foster that communication in those really trying situations. Yeah, it's a great question. I'll say a little bit, and then I don't know, Isabel, if you want to add to this. But the first thing I would say to families in that sort of situation-- and hopefully, this is reassuring-- is, in our studies, it doesn't look like what matters is the sheer amount of monitoring. It doesn't seem to be what's important is, like, you asked a certain thing a certain number of times, you monitor really intensely. What seems to be more important is that you were intentional, or thoughtful, or strategic about what you did. So when I work in the clinic with families who are in that situation, a lot of other stuff going on, a lot of other stressors, my mind goes to prioritisation. What can we pick out that feels sustainable for you, for your situation, as strategies for monitoring? The other thing I would say is don't be afraid to ask for help. And so monitoring is a team job. Especially as your teen gets older, you're going to have less and less time where you're actually with them. And there's a lot of other people in their life. Friends, siblings, teachers, coaches, neighbours, all of these people are people that can help both in understanding what's going on in your teen's life and then also supporting you in balancing one more responsibility, in terms of all the other-- on top of all the other things going on in your life as a parent. Yeah, I think what you said about intentionality is really important. I would also say, as you hear Will talking, you can get the sense like we don't know exactly-- it's not a one-size-fits-all situation. There's a lot going on, with a lot of different families. People are in different situations, have different backgrounds. So the common line here, what's really important is just that you're trying. And parents are going to make mistakes. Parents might have to ramp up their monitoring or reel it in. And that will change and adapt with the situation and with the family. So if it feels hard, it's because it is. We're still figuring this out as researchers, and parents are still figuring it out as parents. But what really matters is just that you're trying and you're giving off the impression to your child that you really care. Yeah, I love that response because I think there can be a lot of fears of getting it wrong and that stopping people trying. But actually, the effort, the connection, it feels like it's at the heart of what-- part of the benefit of parental monitoring is that care. OK. Yeah, and it's trial and error, even as the therapist. So, many times, I suggest to a parent, go home and try this. And they comes back. It didn't work at all. So that's part of the process in figuring out what works for you and your family. Let's turn a little bit more to your paper. The essence of the paper seems to be the concept of parental monitoring has been reconceptualized over time. It's changed a lot over the last 50 years. So could you unpack that for us a little bit? So what's really important to keep in mind through this is just that 50 years ago, people thought parental monitoring was important. And today, obviously, we still think it's pretty important. So that aspect hasn't changed. It's a timeless concept. What's changed more is how people study and conceptualise parental monitoring. So in 2000, a pair of landmark papers came out and basically shifted the focus away from what the parent is actually doing, so these things like asking your kid about their day and stuff like that, to the actual knowledge and things that a parent has in their mind about their kid. And it might seem like a subtle shift, but now the field has centred more on this study of parental knowledge, so the things that a parent knows, rather than the things that a parent does. And the point of this paper is really just trying to shift that focus back to things that the parent can actually control, in order to give some good recommendations for parents about what to do in order to foster that sense of trust that Will was talking about earlier. OK. So can you tell us a little bit more, why this distinction is so important between what a parent does and what a parent-- For sure. So monitoring, as we define it, is something a parent does to gain knowledge. So knowledge is part of it, right? It's part of the motivation. But it doesn't only function to give a parent knowledge. It can also function to give off a sense of care from the parent to the kid. And why that's so important is, for example, during the course of a day, a parent might ask their kid, OK, how's your day going? Who are you hanging out with? That might function to give a parent knowledge. But over time, if the parent's consistently asking the kid, how's your day going, how are your friends, it shows the kid, OK, my parent's involved in my life. My parent cares about me. And that goes towards a longer establishment of trust over time. And so it's not actually necessarily the knowledge that a parent gains from asking those questions. It's really the impression that they're giving off. I suppose I'm thinking about my parenting again. And I think there's times where maybe I was given misinformation, but there's still the process of asking whilst building the bond and attachment with my children. Is that part of what your research has been uncovering? Yeah, that's a really good example, Mark. And one way to think about it is, what's successful monitoring? So if monitoring was all just about finding out information, then, like in your example, it didn't work, right? Because you didn't get true information. You got misinformation. I like that word. In our sense of it, we wouldn't call that a failure, right? We would say another reason monitoring is important is just because the message it sends to your team, right, that you care about what's going on in their life, that that can have its own impact that's healthy, independent of, maybe you didn't find out all the details about what happened or what went on. How does this reconceptualization change the research field? What was the implication of this change in direction? Well, I think it really changes how we study monitoring and how we assess it. So if we think of monitoring as the same thing as knowledge, which is the thing we're moving away from, but if we think of it that way, then we could just ask the parent, OK, what do you know about your kid's life? And that would be the only way to assess monitoring. But if we think about it more as these attempts by the parent and behaviours that the parent does, then we can get really specific with what we're measuring. So we can say, what did you do today to get this information? What sort of things did you say to your child? Did you track their location? When did you do that? And if we have these more specific ways of measuring monitoring, then we can see how that impacts the youth's behaviour. Yeah, I'll add to that a little bit. And this one, I might do a retake, Mark, because this, I think, is the crux point of how to explain it. So your question, Mark, was, what's the point of the reconceptualization? Or why does it matter, right, switching to knowledge? OK. I think it goes back to what we call a success or how we figure out what is effective monitoring. Earlier, we were talking about all the challenging trade-offs and tricky stuff involved, as a parent. It's not a simple, one-size-fits-all thing. When the field moved toward thinking of the goal of monitoring as solely to get knowledge, to find out information, that that's what makes it successful, that steered a lot of the research toward, OK, what strategies of monitoring give you the most knowledge, right? We're saying the way we want to think about it is, instead, what strategies of monitoring set your teen up for the best adjustment, the best success, the best healthy development? It's a different question. It sounds similar, but it's a pretty different philosophy of, what are we trying to do in the research, not just to find out information about what's going on in the teen's life, but to set them up for broader success? OK. So it feels like it's much more about the impact and the relationship, rather than actually an information exchange, a how do you gather information. Because I guess, especially with technology, there's lots of ways of gathering information that increase knowledge, but don't necessarily do that bonding and attachment aspect that you were describing there. Yeah, exactly. I think there might be cases where a parent goes on Find My iPhone and sees where their kid is, but the kid has no knowledge of that at all. So that doesn't really affect the kid. Or maybe the parent repeatedly doing that does affect the kid. We don't really know. If the kid doesn't know about it, then that changes how we study it too, right? So we're assessing it both from the parent's and the child's perspectives as well. Yeah, the example of those phone apps, so the real popular one is Life360. Or Find My iPhone, a lot of people use that on the iPhones. One way to think about it, again, when we go back to knowledge, is knowing where your kid is is the most basic form of monitoring. Isabel was talking about, for 50 years, people been talking about that. One way to look at it is it's all about knowledge. When those apps started and we could track the phone, did that totally solve the problem? No, right? Because I might be able to see a little dot on the map about where he is, but I want to know more than that. I want to know who is he with, what is he up to, why is he there. So again, I think thinking about that example shows or supports our broader idea of monitoring is about more than literally knowing where your teenager is on a map. Yeah, I think that example really brings it into clear focus, doesn't it? You can know where your child is for an app, but actually, some of those anxieties and the issue of safety is probably not necessarily totally resolved by having that knowledge. Yeah. We haven't brought this up yet. I also hear from parents that, these changes in technology have also changed my expectations of myself as a parent. It used to be, without this technology, there was just no way to know this level of detail about where my teenager was at all moments. And almost, now, having the technology has changed, what I feel responsible to do in a way that some parents say is overwhelming. There's so much to possibly monitor, so many possible things I could do. And I only have so much time or energy. Yeah, and I think, also, going back to one of your early questions about autonomy being a little bit too involved, some of the stuff that we've found is, actually, parents want to be doing more of this sort of monitoring. And kids take it as a given nowadays, that you share your location with mum and dad. So the lines of what is invasive and what's not become very blurry once especially technology has taken into the equation. Do we have a sense of how that is linked to child development and well-being? Do we have a sense of whether this increased monitoring is a force for good or not? I think my answer, Mark, would be, that's a really great question, and unfortunately, we don't have good answers. Some of these technologies have gotten popular very recently and move very quickly. So we just talked about the location tracking on the phone. Another one we hear about all the time is what my teenager is doing online, social media. And because the technology has moved so quickly, the research really hasn't kept up with it. So I think, unfortunately, we're a little bit behind, in terms of being able to say, for example, for what your teen does online, what you should do, this is going to work best. We can make some guesses, based on research we've done before about general monitoring of what your teen is up to. But when it comes to the technology stuff, there's a lot to be learned still. I think it's a really difficult space for parents to be in at the moment, actually, where they find that balance in a world that's changing very quickly. Yeah, and when we do these studies-- we just finished one where we were interviewing parents about how they're approaching this right now, monitoring what their teen does online. And we meet parents and hear answers that are at totally opposite ends of the spectrum, right, so parents who tell us, I don't even give my teenager a smartphone because I'm so concerned about how would I really even know what's going on, all the way to parents who say, to me, that's way too much of a invasion of privacy, to be thinking about what are they doing online, what's happening in their social media accounts. So I think that speaks to there aren't a lot of good answers right now, where parents are doing such different strategies. Yeah, I think advice or the good news about all of this is that adaptability is really important in regular monitoring and monitoring online. In a lot of cases, one of the difficulties is if we're measuring monitoring, we don't know where this monitoring is coming from. So did it get started because the parent was just like, I want to structure my kid's environment? Or did the kid do something, and then the parents like, I have to monitor it? And so going back to the technology thing, I think, in a lot of cases, some parents are like, I don't even want to touch it. I don't even want to go there. But also, once your kid-- if your kid sees something or if your kid does something online, parents will typically react to it. So keeping your mind open, and keeping your options open, and making sure that you're being super adaptable as a parent is really important both in the real world and adapting to these online things that, honestly, a lot of parents might not have knowledge of until their kid goes on. Yeah, and I think it also, what Isabel was just saying, speaks to your question earlier about how to strike the balance, Mark. And now I'm forgetting what Isabel said that made me think of that. Can you remember what-- Adaptability, responding to what your kid does. Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK. Yeah, so what Isabel just said, I think, also goes back to your question earlier, Mark, about how do you strike the balance. And I think something we can confidently say is that good monitoring is matched to the level of concern for your child. So if your child or teenager has just never done anything at all that's risky, or concerning, or potentially dangerous, I wouldn't be suggesting to you to do really intense monitoring. You always want to match. And sometimes, over time, as your child gets older and changes interests and activities, you might need to increase the monitoring. You might need to decrease the monitoring, rather than it's like pick one thing and do it forever. Again, I think that's great advice. And sometimes I think we're looking for really clear guidance. If I do this, then everything will be OK. But it feels like it's much more dynamic and changeable. And that process of assessing risk and where the child's at is an ongoing, changing process. Yeah, and your listeners who have more than one kid already know this. Because they're realising they don't do exactly the same thing for each of their kids. So parents have an intuitive sense of the need to adapt and match, and we would just encourage them to lean into that. You said that the research field was still catching up with some of this. So I'm just wondering whether you've got any further research planned? Or are you aware of any other research that's happening in the field, that's going to come unlined soon? Yeah, well, Will has been doing a lot of programmatic work on parental monitoring recently. So we started off writing this pretty big paper on our conceptualization of parental monitoring and laying out some foundational principles for how we can study it. And so I think that is a huge push towards really thinking about this in a specific way. Because as we've alluded to throughout this conversation, it really changes from family to family and situation to situation. So having a very detailed understanding is really important. In terms of our studies, we've got a lot going on in the future, I think. I mean, we've written a few IRBs and proposals to study parental monitoring in different ways. We have this one study that we just launched that's looking at a specific night out of a teen and the specific things a parent does throughout the course of just one night out, so like a Saturday or Friday, and then how the parent's collecting information and making an effort with their kid. And we're linking that to different things, like adolescent disclosure of information. So that's just an example of a cool, specific way that we're measuring these monitoring actions. Cool. I love it. That sounds really interesting, to bring it down into a case study of what it looks like. Yeah, so we're really interested in this topic and doing some of our own research. And I would say the good news, when I talked earlier about we know less about the digital monitoring, that's a really active research space. So actually, even in the UK and Europe, I think, is some of the best research right now, people doing research on-- sometimes it's called digital parenting, to mean all the stuff that falls into that bucket. And I think if we do the podcast again in five years, there'll probably be a lot more to talk about. I'm also just wondering whether there's any kind of policy or system impacts of your work. Is there anything you'd like to change or make more strategic, policy level? Yeah, it depends, Mark, on which system you're talking about in that question. I could give you an example of one that I think is a really helpful cross-system policy. And it's changed since the beginning of my career, which is, at least in the US now, a lot of schools have online grade books. So as a parent, you can log in and see, this is how my teenager is doing in different classes. These are assignments that have or haven't been turned in. These are test grades. And when I started my career, that was like a part-time job for parents, like when they had a middle-schooler or a high-schooler who was struggling at school, emailing, calling six, seven different teachers, trying to get replies. The school setting up those grade books has made a lot of parents' lives so much easier, on that monitoring front. On the other hand, I also work with parents who say, yes, we have electronic grade book, but the information in it is completely out of date or wrong. And so it might be, only at the very end of the quarter, suddenly I see all these missing assignments pop up, that got uploaded last second. So in that case, it's worse than nothing because you, as a parent, thought, from there, everything was going great the whole quarter. So I think any system that works with kids and teenagers, something they can do to help parents with monitoring is make it easy to routinely get trustworthy info about how things are going. And I think the more that that part of monitoring can be taken off parents' plate, the more parents can spend that energy on the trust, the relationship, the communication, rather than just getting basic information. Yeah, I also think, just in general, changing the way that we talk about this kind of stuff is also really important. It was funny, that example that you brought up at the beginning of the podcast of you mentioning parental monitoring to your kid and then thinking that it's spying or snooping. It's a funny example, but also, it gets at the way some people think about parental monitoring as this bad word. I don't know if I want to mess with my kids autonomy, their independence. Where's the line? But opening up conversations like this and thinking of it as just a way to build that trust and a way to have love and communication in your relationships is really important across the board, for schools, and for parenting programmes, and for policy making. Yeah, that's a great, great point, Isabel. And what I'm concluding, Mark, is we need a rebrand of the term, better than monitoring. There's some stigma around it, like it's a bad thing to do. So we'll have to think about that. I don't know if you have ideas, Mark, of what we should call it instead. We'll have to speak to the ACAMH marketing team, see if they can come up with a rebrand for parental monitoring. Yeah, but I agree. It does have those connotations of snooping and something that's invasive. Actually, what you're talking about is relationship and trust. And yeah, and so it's not that, but yeah, rebranding sounds like a good idea. Yeah. An analogy sometimes I use with parents in clinic is if you think about your own relationships, like your husband, your wife. If, every day, you came home and you never asked at all what happened in their day, right, that would be sending a message. It's not so much you have to know every single little thing, but that monitoring is about more than just information. It's about relationships. Yeah, yeah, and that example brings home the balance a bit as well. You wouldn't want your relationship to be monitoring your every movement either. OK. Look, we're coming to the end of the podcast. I just wondered whether there's any final take-home message for our listeners. Sure, yeah. I think, coming back to some of the main points here, it's really important, as a parent, to be intentional and thoughtful with monitoring. So what does that look like? If you're not doing any monitoring at all, maybe start doing a little bit more. If the monitoring doesn't seem to be effective, maybe change up a tactic. And going back to a point from earlier, if it feels hard, if you're starting to feel discouraged, it's because it is a hard thing to do, to strike that balance we've been talking about. So just try. Just keep trying. And the more you try, the more you're sending the message, as Will said, that you care and that you want a good relationship with your kid. Well, thank you so much. Great final send-off message. It's been really lovely speaking to you both. I hope our listeners have enjoyed the podcast. If you've enjoyed the podcast, then please leave a review. And subscribe to the ACAMH podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mark. Pleasure. Thanks. [LIGHTHEARTED MUSIC]