Future Now
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Kids Tech Safety: Techno-Guardian Angels
How do you allow your kids the freedom to take risks without putting them in grave danger? How do you allow them enough freedom to break their arms, but not their necks.
Over the next decade, a series of tracking, surveillance, and security technologies will present new opportunities for modulating a child's risk environment, and will create new privacy, control, and resistance dilemmas for parents, educators, and caregivers.
In our report: The Magic of Kids Tech, we outline several key forecasts in the safety and security space for kids.
1. Kid-Mapping:
Ubiquitous digital connection and lower-cost biological sampling and metrics have enabled the growth of the kid tracking industry and new government-mandated identification databases. Parents are using digital tracking software to monitor Internet use in the virtual world as well as outfitting their kids with sophisticated mobile devices and expecting frequent phone or text “check-ins” for monitoring in the physical world. In some instances, they are installing passive tracking applications in mobile and wearable devices that constantly relay location and other data about their kids.
2. Backlash Against the Bubble
Technologies, laws, and parental practices that result in children growing up in over-protective bubbles are not only aesthetically or culturally unappealing, but may also be harmful to a child’s overall social, psychological, and cognitive development in the long run.
Psychologist Ellen Sandseter argues that for healthy emotional and cognitive development, “children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground.” She notes that a “child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.”
In the coming years, we can expect to see a growing backlash against the use of technology to create bubbles of overprotection. However, no parent or guardian wants to leave a child overexposed to risk either. So, the demand for more “invisible” protection systems will grow. The adoption of completely ubiquitous, ambient, but hardly noticeable monitoring and tracking technologies will take hold, allowing parents to more finely modulate the risk environment.
3. Blended Reality-Separate Worlds
The fear of the comingling of kid and adult worlds, and with it the fear of sexual assault, kidnapping, and emotional harm, has driven the development of software-based content filters. Context and user-aware systems that can determine the age of a user will reduce privacy for all users, and create potentially labyrinthine processes for adult-kid communication and interaction.
In physical space, the mere presence of nonparental adults in a playground or child’s area is enough to warrant legal action. This mentality is spilling over into the digital realm as well. New laws and policies attempting to limit direct communication between kids and adults, especially via social media spaces such as Facebook, are being proposed and passed more frequently.
The implications of these forecasts will affect parenting and education in the years to come. The argument that protectionism is ultimately harmful to a child's development will lead to novel ways of introducing managed risk into a child environment, but drawing that line will be difficult and will evolve. Breaking through and hacking these technological safety nets will be one way kids assert their independence and resistance to control. Managing a child's