Technology has made parenting so much more complex. You can be more involved than ever, or you can leave your kid to rot their brain on TikTok unsupervised for the majority of their waking days. The choice is for parents to make, but there are certainly cases of observing your kid too closely. I was in high school when the Life360 app became popular, and so many parents of my friends used it. The app diligently tracks a person’s location and collects tons of data about how they’re traveling from place to place. One of my friend’s mom would track how fast she was driving and reprimand her if she went even 10 miles over the speed limit. Who has time for that? Parents were watching every move their 17-year-olds made, and it made high school feel like a panopticon even more than it already was. If you’ve ever been personally victimized by an overbearing parental observer, these parenting texts might strike a chord.