Transitioning from Digital Monitoring to Digital Self-care among adolescents

Abstract

In the present time, digital monitoring has become a staple among parents concerned 
about the digital usage of their children. A witnessing of the ever-increasing number of devices 
has been observed in the recent times ranging from portable music players to the modern 
smartphones, the latest and most dynamic entrants in the list being smart devices from home, 
smart robots and wearables. With a humongous increase in this number of devices owned by and 
employed in action by adolescents simultaneously, there tends to arise concern for the digitally 
well-equipped adolescent among parents. Enter digital monitoring which has helped to 
significantly tone down the intensity of the worries thus in picture. However, digital monitoring 
in it‟s approach seeks to control and not remediate upon various prevalent issues like screen 
time, app and recreational usage, app based activity and other such parameters. Time being, 
digital monitoring has asserted it‟s place as one of the rightful strategies to monitor and 
maintain safer digital space for adolescents. On the contrary such form of monitoring in specific 
cases is an act of unauthorised spying or digital abuse thereby at times tampering with the rights 
of adolescents and children. 
The paper aims at analysing the need of digital self care among adolescents. It also 
examines the lack of a well-devised and carefully curated plan for allowing adolescents to 
transition from digital monitoring to digital self-care.The paper encompasses the idea that this 
proponent of digital self-careneed not directly be a function of the formal school curriculum but 
a cumulative imbibingof the school, parents, other students, device manufacturers and the 
society together.The paper thus critiques upon digital monitoring as a concept redundant or 
irrelevant to the adolescent age group having already equipped themselves with ample 
workarounds to bypass monitoring checks and prescribed app usage regulations. Therefore, it 
lays down the need for a responsibility oriented, participatory and democratically advanced 
approach to meet the needs of the superior strategies of digital self-care while keeping their 
adult counterparts on a readily available standby so as to facilitate them as and when the need 
to do so is demanded or felt. 
The approach considered herein is qualitative. Under qualitative study, the case study 
approach has been used to understand digital monitoring and critique upon it thereby enlisting 
it's shortcomings, further needs and scope of improvement and the inevitable need of transitioning towards a more participatory endeavour of digital self-care from the rather governing or directing notion of digital monitoring.