In 2007, a revolutionary piece of technology came out- the iPhone. Our minds could only think of a computer as a large IBM, a desktop computer, or a laptop. The iPhone defied the limit of the average person's imagination. But there it was: A computer that could fit inside your pocket. A computer that could connect to the world's largest database, the Internet, whenever it wanted to (as long as your cell reception was decent). 

There is always a cost to the things that we invent, and the smart phone was no exception. When people could start sending messages and photos to people via texting, obviously some people were going to use it inappropriately, like sexting. When social media began to boom with new outlets like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter, there were always going to be people, especially teens, who were going to use it irresponsibly. 

Parents became confused and scared of this new technology that could ruin someone's life if they used it incorrectly. Entrepreneurs took advantage of parents' fears and starting creating applications that would monitor and control a teenagers phone, including monitoring its current location and the amount of time the phone has been active during the day, controlling the phone during ceratin hours of the day, controlling the phone's ability to access the dark web, and finally, monitor a teenager's texting and call history.

As a teenager myself, I may not not have all the knowledge of a adult who has experienced everything that I'm going through right now, plus more. I may not always make the smart decision sometimes because I don't have enough experience with making decisions, but the absolute ability to monitor what their teenager is saying through text reaches a level of creepy that I don't think we've seen before within an average family.

According to a study conducted in 2013, 60% of parents admitted to looking at their kid's texts and call history either by taking their phone and physically looking at it, or by using some sort of text tracking application. The number has only gotten higher over the last five years.

As human beings, teenagers have a right to privacy. Teenagers may not be fully mentally developed yet. Teenagers may not make all of the right decisons yet. But those reasons cannot excuse the fact that parents are spying on their teenagers social lives at any time that they want to. Some aspects of teenagers' lives over text should just be private: Boyfriend/Girlfriend relationships, conversations between friends, children who need to talk to other family members about abusive parents, and other areas. Children whose conversations are constantly being monitored will shut themselves out of their social lives in fear of their parents interrupting it.

Keeping children at a hair's width does not prepare them for life after high school. After spending their childhood being spied on will not have learned the skills for perfect internet use when not under parental supervision. The best way to help children and teenagers become the proper users of the internet is to teach them how to behave correctly and let them sort out the little mistakes on their own. As a teenager myself, I have made plenty of little mistakes whiel using social media or texting. As long as parents can teach children to have the correct fundamentals for not doing extremely bad things on the internet, teenagers are quite capable of handling and fixing their mistakes on their own as young adults.

Parents and adults never use what their parents strictly controlled. Adults remember the things that they were tought and learned from making mistakes. We should not make important childhood decisions based on fear, and that goes for the creepy monitoring of teenagers' texts.