Did You Get the Photo of the Goat?

Was this essay forwarded to you? Join for Free Here

This is the first "summer break" we've had since having kids. We tried to balance it with family trips, me taking the summer off from speaking, and letting my oldest go to a few day camps he was interested in.

The one I (and he) was most excited for was Farm Camp.

My expectation, based on the marketing, was an immersive week with chickens, donkeys, a couple of sheep, the kind of hands-in-the-dirt week. I was hoping for some fresh eggs and some great stories.

So I picked him up on the first afternoon, expecting to hear about the chickens. What I got was a goat.

He climbed into the back seat and, before I could ask about his day, he threw out the first question.

"Did you get the photo of the goat they texted you?" he asked excitedly.

"What are you talking about?"

"The goat that we painted."

"The what? That you did what to?" I questioned.

The rest of the almost 30-minute drive home, I was interrogating my six-year-old. Was it a picture of a goat you painted, or did you paint a real live animal? What did you paint it with? What colors? Why? What did the goat think? Was it really paint?

I never got to the bottom of it. I could not tell you, even now, whether my son spent his afternoon painting a picture of a goat or painting an actual goat. And then, to top off the unusual recap of his day, he also reported that they sprayed the goat clean with squirt guns. Even a week later, I'm still scratching my head.

Don't get distracted by the wild story that we are still attempting to verify.

Notice what my son did first. His first instinct, before he told me a single thing about his day, was to ask whether I had already seen it. He asked whether I had received the text message with the picture of the goat.

That was when it hit me.

The question a kid used to get in the back seat was open-ended: “How was your day?” It allowed the child to tell their experience in their own words, from their own perspective.

My wife and I have experienced this with our own kids. She may get one account and a series of stories from the day, and I may get a different set of stories. Not conflicting, just different snapshots. And sometimes another moment surfaces a few days later. Not good, not bad, just their recounting of what they experienced.

A child has the freedom to share what they think is most important. And that sometimes means they choose not to share things they think could get them into trouble, may be embarrassing, or they may still be processing. It is that very uncertainty and unknowingness that caused parents to pre-empt the conversation by already knowing.

My son expected me to already know. His baseline expectation was being reported on, monitored, tracked, even. And that terrified me.

It made me wonder whether he felt he had any true freedom or autonomy. And then it made me question something bigger, the impact this level of constant information, and dare I say, surveillance, has on the next generation of students, of employees, and ultimately for managers and leaders.

The pattern is alarming. Gen Alpha, and Gen Beta right behind them, is being raised in a world so watched, so tracked, so monitored, so analyzed, that it produces a false sense of security and a false sense of reality. The sleep score, the number of steps, body temperature fluctuations, location sensing, speed detecting, inbox monitoring.

Over the next few weeks, we are going to follow that pattern of childhood surveillance and explore how it seeps into their core development, altering how kids trust, how it seeps into relationships, into how a generation comes to decide what is even true, and into why polarity may get worse, not better, in a world where everyone has video footage to prove their side.

We changed how a childhood gets reported. And in changing how it gets reported, we changed the basis of the next generation's perception of truth, conversation, relationships, and reality.

I think we have this backward. We convinced ourselves that more access and more information, through location tracking, instant grade notifications, and cameras in the kids’ rooms, would keep the next generation safer than the previous generation. And, in turn, it should keep us (parents, teachers, and leaders) sane. We sought out the information to answer our questions, to increase accountability, to feel more aware.

Many would argue that more information is simply better. But, adapting the words of the oh-so-wise philosopher Biggie Smalls, "Mo’ money information, mo’ problems.”

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Lenore Skenazy on my podcast. She has spent 17 years arguing that we have frightened ourselves about a world that is, by most measures, safer than the one she grew up in. I asked her about the newest shape of that fear. The trackers. The cameras. The apps.

She stopped me. "You are stepping into the thing that I think about the most and talk about the least," she said (Skenazy, 2026).

Sit with that. The woman who built a career on a bestselling book and popular TED Talk on free-range kids says the surveillance of them is the part that now keeps her up at night.

Studies show that about half of parents now track their child's location in some form (Burnell, 2023). The point is not that tracking is inherently wrong. It is the promise underneath it, that you will never have to worry again, because you can always check. But that does not deliver peace.

In the episode, Skenazy compared today’s child monitoring to checking a locked door. The relief lasts until the next urge to check. Then she said the line I have not been able to put down. "We're replacing faith with certainty, and certainty is a lot more tenuous, because you have to keep checking it, than faith" (Skenazy, 2026).

That is my whole argument; she just said it far more eloquently than I. We reached for certainty and information because we thought it would settle us and provide us with an answer. Certainty turns out to be the more anxious way to live, because it has to be renewed every few minutes, and faith does not. We were never meant to be all-knowing.

If you don't have kids, don't ignore this conversation. This is not about kids alone, nor parenting. It is about the next generation and how it will impact the future of the workplace, of culture, and of society.

These children, primarily Gen Alpha and Gen Beta, are the people you will hire. In fact, in just 5 years, Gen Alpha will be eligible to enter the workforce. We need to be thinking towards the future.

These formative traits will walk into a workplace within the decade. The generation growing up under the camera is already learning to verify before it trusts, and a workforce that cannot extend trust without a receipt is a different workforce than the one most leaders know how to run. We will get to exactly what that looks like before this is over.

Which brings me back to the goat.

If that camp had run a live feed, I would have seen the goat before my son said a word. And I know what I would have done with the head start. I would have walked into the pickup line already decided, already impressed, or already concerned, my opinion already made, asynchronously and out of sync with a relational, human conversation with my son. The ride home, the questions, the not-knowing, none of it happens, because the surprise was spent before he buckled in.

Some do a version of this at birthdays or holidays, and I have always found it a little ridiculous. Someone doesn't know what to get you, so they send you to the mall to pick out your own gift. You buy it, you hand it back to them, they wrap the thing you already chose, and then you are supposed to open it and act surprised.

Nobody is surprised. The joy in a gift was never the object. It was the not-knowing. It is in the released anxiety when you don’t actually hate what that person got you. Will it fit? Will I like it? Is it another regift from Aunt Gurtrude?

When you remove the not-knowing, you have removed the experience of the gift.

A live feed removes the not-knowing from childhood the same way. And notice what my son actually wanted. He was not worried that I might have seen him and the goat. He was excited that I might have already experienced it. He wanted me there. Kids carry what their parents think into every room, whether or not the parent is standing in it. He did not need a camera to feel me watching. He needed the story to tell me himself.

So here is the question I want us to carry over the next few weeks. Does seeing more of our children's days give us more of our children, or less?

And, more importantly, does childhood monitoring and surveillance help…and where could it potentially create long-term problems?

This is the first of five essays around this theme. It starts here, at home, with the feed. It ends somewhere I did not see coming when the goat first came up, at the place this whole thing is already beginning to swing back.

I did not think much more about the goat until a few days later, when my son said something in another room that I have not been able to shake. It had nothing to do with a goat, and everything to do with what happens the first time a child learns that the camera remembers better than he does.

That is what I will unpack next week.

If you know someone raising kids, leading them, or hiring them fifteen years from now, send this their way. It reads better as all five, together.