Gen Alpha Is the Experiment

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My daughter is learning to walk right now, which means learning to go up and down the stairs.

My oldest is very protective of her, which is sweet, but it also borders on overprotection. When she gets within 15 feet of the stairs, and her body is pointed in the general direction of maybe crawling toward them, he starts sounding the alarm while simultaneously grabbing her legs or physically blocking her.

Mind you, it's not that she's unsupervised. My wife or I, or both of us, are standing right there, and we're not at all worried about her safety.

So we showed him how you can stay back a safe distance, not holding her, and let her gain the confidence of crawling up our flight of stairs while making sure she's safe. The look on her face when she got to the top stair, turned around, and smiled so big with that joyful toothless smile was priceless.

This is the final installment in a five-part series that has tackled childhood surveillance. And I think the idea of a camera in the kids’ room comes down to the same thing as the stairs. Is it a constant hand on the toddler learning to climb, or is it staying a safe distance back?

You might expect me to land this series on ripping out your cameras, throwing away your AirTags and uninstalling your tracking software.

I'm not going to do that. As a futurist, it would be foolish to say surveillance cameras must all be removed. The reality is, our world is not going to go backward. We have built surveillance into the very DNA of society, for better or worse.

Something that I find so amusing at airports right now is the response some people have to facial recognition kiosks while going through security or boarding. I've watched people literally put their hands over the camera or make a big scene, like they don't want their picture taken. I watched one individual go off on a gate agent as to why he would never consent and how it was all part of some mega conspiracy.

Here's why that doesn't work. The whole airport has video surveillance everywhere. To get through security, they needed a photo ID. Logically, to have a photo ID, they had to have their photo taken by a government agency. It is reasonable to conclude their photo is already in the system. Their ticket is tied to their name, their birthdate, and often a known traveler number. Everybody from the airline to TSA to the people who run the airport knows who that person is, where they're walking, and whether they stopped for a Starbucks or a Dunkin' in the concourse. Even if they paid in all cash, a real name boarded that plane.

To be there, they had to give their identity, and now they're trying to hide it. We're already watched.

And it's accelerating. Take Google Home, for example. You no longer have to log in to get your alerts or scan your video. The camera will tell you, by facial recognition, who's at the front door, who went up to your kids’ playroom, and if they're cleaning or playing or changing a diaper. It goes beyond the walls of our home too. Kids wear watches that are phones, which strap a tracker to their body anywhere they go. There are shoes and Crocs designed with a slot for an AirTag. It literally follows us everywhere.

So the question isn't whether we watch people or not. It needs to be: What's the purpose of the camera? Is it to watch and to babysit, or is it to protect? I think that's what it comes down to.

Every parent that puts in a surveillance mechanism for their children is likely doing it to protect them and keep them safe. I really do believe that.

However, when an executive installs monitoring software, it's different. A lot of corporate surveillance is to protect the company, which is really important, or to make the company more money, or to protect the leadership. In a corporate setting, tracking is often to the benefit of the organization, and sometimes to the detriment of the team. I'm not opposed to using tools in the workplace, as I've used many, especially when I led sales teams. But the question is, at what cost?

While the mechanism and the goal are different from the house to the office, the impact on the one being watched is the same. It's still an erosion of trust.

So at what point is surveillance too far, and at what point is it just basic to getting ahead? We're having the same exact argument about artificial intelligence right now.

The other day I was driving down a highway near my house and saw security cameras up on 20-foot poles. Temporary ones, with a white box and a solar panel affixed to the bottom and a blue police light on top. Someone had planted a crudely drawn corrugated plastic sign in front of them, hand-written in Sharpie: “Surveillance is bad.”

While they were obviously angry about their traffic patterns being monitored, I think the data might actually align with that angrily scribbled plastic yard sign more than people think.

Because whether it's corporate surveillance or childhood surveillance, we think we're protecting. We think we're adding value. So let's look at what the data actually shows.

Ethan Bernstein, now a professor at Harvard Business School, spent 18 months inside the world's second-largest mobile phone factory in southern China, where he found the power of surveillance at work. He noticed that the workers had figured out faster, better ways to do their job that were not part of the official SOP. However, they would switch back to the official procedure the second a manager walked by. One of them suggested hanging curtains around the line so they could just work. That’s exactly what Bernstein did. The curtains were no more than hospital-like curtains. They didn’t stop a supervisor from walking in; they only gave the illusion of privacy. What he found was startling. Defect-free output per hour rose 10 to 15 percent on the curtained lines and held that lead over the 28 uncurtained line-shifts for five months (Bernstein, 2012).

That data compounds… Another team of researchers found monitored employees were more likely to break the rules, not less. More likely to cheat, take equipment, deliberately work slowly (Thiel et al., 2023). Monitoring stripped people of their agency, and once you don't feel like the author of your own conduct, it gets easy to hand responsibility for it to whoever is watching.

You don't need a factory floor to see this. Get a public speaker or a public figure into a room alone, where they're comfortable with you, and they are often a different person. Even the way they walk is different than when they're on a stage or in front of a camera. That isn't dishonesty. It's what a human being does when the audience leaves. When they aren’t being watched.

Children become sensitive to being evaluated by other people by 24 months old (Botto & Rochat, 2018). A group of researchers set out to see how five-year-olds were influenced by others around them. Left alone in a room, a five-year-old would take a sticker that belonged to another child 24% of the time. If another child was in the room, that dropped to 4%. The researchers concluded that by age 5, humans are actively managing their reputation (Engelmann et al., 2012). The instinct to perform when being watched is in place before many kids can read.

Child stardom is the closest thing we have to a natural experiment in growing up watched. Mara Wilson, who starred in Matilda and also played Natalie in Mrs. Doubtfire, described it this way: “Having to live up to your fan base is a little like having to deal with a million strict parents who don't actually love you” (Wilson, 2013).

She was talking about being surveilled. Even when no one was in the room watching her, she still felt the eyes on her.

One study published in 1998 examined 74 former child performers recruited through the Screen Actors Guild. Against the authors' general population rates, lifetime alcohol abuse ran as much as 202 times more likely, and drug abuse as much as 121 times more likely (Rapport & Meleen, 1998).

So we have run controlled experiments on how a two-year-old behaves when someone is watching. We have never seriously studied what happens to a child who is watched for an entire childhood. We're running that experiment right now, on Gen Alpha and Gen Beta, at scale, and we're calling it safety.

Trust as a foundational element to team success is not new. Patrick Lencioni puts absence of trust at the base of his pyramid in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Lencioni draws a distinction in that book that this whole 5-part series has been circling—trust.

Trust comes in many forms according to Lencioni. There's predictive trust, which means people do what they say they will do. There's also vulnerability-based trust, which means people are open and honest with one another about their weaknesses, their mistakes, and their fears. Lencioni argues that the second type of trust is what is crucial (Lencioni, 2002). At the same time, it is that same type of vulnerability-based trust that we see eroded with hypersurveillance.

The camera may prove which kid knocked down the tower. Or the location dot may prove she was where she said she'd be. The doorbell can prove the package arrived. The call recording is proof he ran the script properly. Every one of those is predictive trust, delivered perfectly, by a machine. It strips out the trust vital to a relationship. The machine removes the employee walking into the office admitting a mistake or the child raising their hand and saying it was them who knocked over the tower.

Lencioni also lists what a team without that trust looks like. They conceal their weaknesses and mistakes. They hesitate to ask for help. They jump to conclusions about other people's intentions. They waste energy managing their behavior for effect. They hold grudges (Lencioni, 2002).

Out of that list, jumping to conclusions about others’ intentions may be the single greatest issue presented with monitoring. We are presented with facts with proof from a machine; we interpret them a particular way, often without having the conversation with another human.

I'll never forget my dad, when I was little, handing me money to go in and order something at a fast food place and making me do it. He wouldn’t stand right behind me at the counter. He'd be far enough away that I couldn't turn around, and I had to muster up the courage and do it. If he was standing right behind me, my natural inclination would have been to turn to him.

My summers in the Chicagoland suburbs were spent riding the Fox River Trail. We rode endless miles. My bike speedometer was in kilometers, and for the longest time I thought I was going 45 to 50 miles per hour. Much to my chagrin, I eventually figured out I was going half that.

Anyway, often in those summers my neighbors, who were like siblings, and I would ride all around the town. Sometimes we would ride to the creek, or to a park, or to a friend's house, and many times to the feed store up the road that had cheap candy bars. But I also remember riding through three suburbs, 4.9 miles away, across a river to a McDonald's.

I was in late elementary school and had the confidence to walk up and order whatever it was that I wanted, often using money I had earned from my lemonade stand. I gained the confidence by being safely watched from a distance and then ultimately being trusted to do it on my own.

Cameras aren’t going anywhere, nor is location tracking or any other watchful tool we have. The camera itself isn’t the villain in the story. It’s here to stay, so the question is: what do we do about it?

Start by not looking. Whether you have cameras, whether you have sleep scores or location tracking, still ask your kid the question. What did they do at school today? Where did they go?

Force yourself not to look at the camera to find out what actually happened. Force yourself not to check the location, unless they're in danger, in which case, of course, you check. If they're not in danger, there's no reason to.

At work it's the same discipline with better software. You have the dashboard. You have the call recordings. You have the activity log. Go ask the person. Understand what is making them succeed or fall behind through conversation. And then use the data after the fact. Not as the lead-in.

Here's where leaders get this wrong. They've already been to the counter. They know the menu, they know what to ask for, they know where the condiments are. So they hand somebody a task as simple as go order, and expect them to fill in every blank in between.

Four weeks ago, when I kicked off this series, I asked whether seeing more of our children's days gives us more of our children, or less.

Less. Because most of what we've built isn't protection, it's childhood on a leash. We've handed a generation a kind of probation, monitored constantly because they aren't trusted yet, and then wondered why they never learned how to earn it.

It takes me back to my daughter climbing the stairs. We were there for her, behind her, close enough that if she slips she isn't going to get hurt, but still giving her the confidence to climb knowing that we trust her.

Connection is lost when we get the update on our phone before our kid slides into the back seat and asks us about the painted goat. Integrity and grit and resilience are what is lost when you let the camera decide the verdict.

Trust is ultimately what is lost when we watch our kids grow up via the monitors.