Harlan Coben The Undercover Parent

Is the use of spyware harmful or useful? In Harlan Coben’s article,“The Undercover Parent”, the article states that spyware will assist you in watching over or monitoring your child as he/she browses the internet making it easy to know if something is wrong with your child. However, I disagree with Harlan Coben’s argument that parents should consider using spyware as protection for their teens on the internet; it breaks trust between parent and child, it prevents the child from making their own decision, and spyware is not very effective.

To begin with spyware is not as effective as you would think. First off, you cannot monitor your child all day long. “There was a girl who was cyberbullied to the point where she committed suicide.” Also,

spyware can be a bad thing and push your child to become insubordinate therefore causing trouble for himself. If a boy found out his parents installed spyware on his computer, he might stop using that computer. Spyware can not be effective as there are better alternatives such as communication with your child.
In addition I believe that spyware will prevent the child from making their own decision.

This will be a bother to your child’s growth and will be an inconvenience to him/her. This is important to your child for he or she will not know the dangers of the internet and the world.. Spyware can make your child indecisive about things or maybe he cannot even make his own decision.

My final point is that spyware can break the trust between a parent and a child. If the child were to find out about spyware on their devices that could break the trust between the parents and child. The child will become aware that the parents do not trust their own child on the internet so the trust between them would disappear or be damaged. No parent would like the trust between their child and them to be broken or damaged.

It is important to be able to see what my child does on the internet so that I will know if something dangerous or bad is happening to him. If we do not see everything that our child does on that machine then we might not know if something bad has happened to our child. Everyone needs their privacy, as well as those children. Parents should understand that this can break the trust of their children. It is true that we need to be able to have a watchful eye on our children, however we do not need to watch them 24 hours a

day.