Just Check the Camera, Dad

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A shriek rang out from upstairs, "No, it's mine!"

“Give it to me.”

Then the crying, followed by hurried footsteps. It’s the melody of sibling rivalry. Though my kids tend to get along much of the time, they are still kids. They are still siblings. and they still have their moments.

I try not to step in too quickly, hoping they will work it out. If they come running to me, pointing fingers at each other, I simply ask, “Did you talk to your sibling about it?” Most of the time, these squabbles escalate to declarative statements at one another, coupled with each trying to shirk off the problem-solving to the parents as the judge. Often, a simple question or a conversation amongst siblings can reach a resolution.

Then there are those times when something breaks, someone gets mildly hurt, or the situation seems more significant than, “he took what I was playing with.”

In those moments, I ask what happened and let each of them give their own account. They can present their opening arguments in their own words. They are not allowed to interrupt the other’s account of the story and can only provide a rebuttal afterward.

However, a few weeks ago, the proceedings unexpectedly changed. This time, a new article was admitted for evidence. One of my kids said something shocking:

"Just check the camera, Dad."

As I have admitted here before, I am a living paradox. On one hand, I love technology and gadgets. On the other hand, I also know the real dangers of all that accessibility, the security exposure, and the devastating impact technology, phones, social media, and artificial intelligence (to name just a few) can have on kids, families, workplaces, and society.

We did have cameras that captured this particular incident. They are a security measure designed to make us aware of external threats, not a surveillance measure to monitor our children. And yet, here was my own son, trying to use these surveillance devices to prove his side. He knew he was being watched.

We live in an age of childhood surveillance. We tell ourselves it is a security measure, and often it truly is. But it is also a far bigger concern, with longer-term implications than most are willing to admit. I refused flatly and told him that the footage was inadmissible in our family courtroom drama because it is not how you work through conflict. It is not how you learn and grow and fight for what is true. And when you take the friction out of working through a conflict, you take out the very thing that builds trust.

Trust is exactly what this second installment in this mini-series is about. Not privacy. Not whether you should or should not have security devices in your home. It is about the one thing these devices quietly take from our kids, our students, our workplaces, culture, and society, whether we ever watch the footage or not. That thing is trust.

Trust is delicate. You cannot buy it. You cannot install it. You cannot read a book about it and absorb it. You certainly cannot prompt trust into you via your favorite AI tool of choice and have it transform you into a trusted being. Trust is earned. It’s like a currency.

A child earns trust the only way anyone ever has, by learning to be a person of character, of integrity, of truth-telling. You give a little, they prove it, you give a little more.

In a way, trust is like planting something. You sow a seed of trust, and you cultivate it, slowly, over the years. It takes a lifetime to earn trust, and a split second to destroy it.

So picture the real scene in my house. Two boys and a knocked-over tower that took twenty minutes to build. I ask what happened. And here is what I am actually after. Left to sort it out, they may fabricate a story together, or tell me the truth together, or dig in and hand me two completely different accounts. Any of those is fine, because any of those teaches them something the camera never could. What it feels like to be trusted. How to handle challenging situations, no matter how trivial. And most importantly, how to be men of integrity.

As parents, our job is not to raise kids. They already know how to be kids. Our job is to raise adults, to build the character an adult needs, while still letting them keep the fun and the freedom and the carefree joy of being a child. Both at the same time. But somewhere in there, they have to learn responsibility, and the camera skips that lesson completely.

Maybe you think surveiling kids is a fringe habit reserved to a few anxious parents with too many apps. Or, in my case, too many tech-enamored parents with too many gadgets, using them to monitor their kids every movement. It is not. Peer-reviewed research finds that about half of parents digitally track their children's locations on an ongoing basis (Burnell et al., 2023), and consumer surveys report rates as high as 86% monitor their kids’ whereabouts regularly. Life360, a location-tracking app, reports approximately 95 million monthly users (Life360, 2026). Owlet, which makes the sock that monitors a baby's oxygen as it sleeps, cleared over a $100 million in revenue last year (Owlet, 2026).

We have moved from a world where we let our kids play and explore freely, unmonitored and unsupervised, to one where we don't let them sleep without keeping a literal pulse on them. Millennial and Gen Z parents of Gen Alpha and Gen Beta kids have plugged their kids into their own control center.

It is not just going to shape the future of parenting; it is going to rewire the future generations entering the workforce within the decade.

It did not begin in the nursery, either. It began in the marketplace. Shoshana Zuboff gave the model a name. She called it surveillance capitalism. It’s the idea that corporations treat "private human experience as free raw material" for products we never see (Zuboff, 2019). Large companies, from Google to Amazon to Apple, and so many more in between, have copious amounts of information on us that they are using as free raw material to build their empires. And subconsciously, I would argue the vast majority of us know this. We know our clicks are being tracked and used to “enhance our experience,” as they say. And we feed it anyway.

Tom LeNoble, one of Facebook's earliest employees, watched this get built from the inside. When I interviewed him on my podcast this week, he named the blind spot: companies get so deep in their own ecosystem, he said, that "they don't see what's coming from the outside," and they forget that their first responsibility is to protect the people they touch (LeNoble, 2026). Here is the sad irony: we were (and often still are) furious when companies surveil us. Yet, we turned around and did it to our kids. While we, as parents and leaders, may not be monetarily profiting or building an empire off of watching and monitoring our children, we are cashing out some life currency from the “trust” account. In an effort to protect, we are removing the very friction that builds character, resilience, independence, and trust. Now our kids do it to each other.

Recently, I watched a Gen Z college student proudly show off how he had tracked his friends across an entire summer of travel, a screenshot dotted with their locations all over the world. It is amazing that the technology can do that. It is also a little sad. These students cannot have one unrepeatable experience on the far side of the planet without their friends watching the dot move. Being tracked is no longer something a worried parent does to them in secret. Constant monitoring is in their DNA. They do it to each other as if it is normal.

I know what the other version felt like, because I lived it. When I was seventeen, I somehow convinced my parents to let me board a plane by myself and travel nearly seven thousand miles from home. I went to Beijing, China, for about a month for a cultural exchange experience. No iPhone. No app. No way to track me, and no way to reach me except the plan we made before I left. I emailed them when I could find internet and occasionally tried to coordinate a Skype call when we could. When I landed, I did not even know what the person picking me up looked like, and I had no cell phone to text or call. I walked out and hoped someone was holding a sign with my name.

That was not luck, and it was not recklessness. It was earned. My parents allowed me to earn their trust my entire life. They gave me boundaries and guidelines, and also granted me freedom. The more responsible and trustworthy I was, the more freedom I was awarded. I came home when I said I would. I saw the movie I said I was going to see. My yes was yes, and my no was no, and that is why my parents could put their seventeen-year-old on the other side of the world and still sleep at night. Well, to this day, I am pretty confident that at least one of my parents didn’t sleep much the entire month I was gone 😉

I want to say this as plainly as I can. Parents today are not even giving their kids the chance to earn that trust. They aren’t earning it with siblings, with friends, or with their parents. Instead, the kids are putting their trust in surveillance. In the idea that the camera will be the source of the truth, that their location tracking will prove that they were where they said they would be.

There is one more twist. The watching does not even calm the person doing it.

We wanted the next generation to be safer than our childhood. And I am all for that. But we traded trust for safety. We thought that all this watching would give us peace of mind because we have information and knowledge we otherwise could not have without technology-assisted surveillance.

Real-time visibility does not make a parent calmer. It makes them want to know more. It is the waiting for a notification and checking each activity on a feed. That scrutiny does not equate to peace of mind. It accomplishes quite the opposite. As humans, we were not built to be all-knowing, and the tools that promise omniscience mostly just lengthen the list of things we feel we have to check and in turn worry about.

This year, a national survey showed that 25% of the parents who track their children said the tracking sometimes leaves them more anxious, not less (Clark et al., 2026). We are already more stressed than other adults, and the Surgeon General has pointed to technology and our concern for children's safety as part of the reason (U.S. Surgeon General, 2024). The watching was supposed to buy us calm. For a lot of us, it just gave us one more thing to refresh and get nervous about.

And none of this stays home. It follows these kids to work, which is where I spend most of my time thinking about how each generation shows up in the workplace.

Years ago, I sat in an executive meeting when a colleague's phone buzzed. He glanced down, leaned over, and said, "My daughter's in trouble when she gets home." He had her grade on a missed assignment before she did, pushed to his phone in the middle of a leadership team meeting. She never had that sinking feeling and pit in her stomach and internal debate of “Should I tell my dad? When should I tell him? How should I phrase it?”, the small dread, and the more important life skill of mustering the courage of saying it out loud. Instead, the only fear is over what the consequence will be since the dad already knew.

Kevin Stinehart, a teacher I had on my podcast last month, said it in one line: "Protection can turn into overprotection." His fix is not more control, it is less. He tells teachers to act less like referees and more like park rangers, there "to cultivate what's growing" rather than to manage every interaction, because "it's not until they have those moments of friction that they'll learn those capacities and skills" (Stinehart, 2026). Trust is one of those capacities, and it grows in exactly the friction we keep sanding away.

He is not only speaking from experience. When researchers looked at what protects teachers from burnout, the single strongest factor was how much they trusted their students, ahead of trusting their colleagues or even their principal (Van Maele & Van Houtte, 2015). Follow teachers across several years and the pattern holds, with steady trust tracking real gains in their well-being (Tsuyuguchi et al., 2025). Trust is not just another important team-building activity or helpful soft skill. It is load-bearing.

Gallup estimates that low engagement and low trust drain around $10 trillion dollars a year in lost productivity from the global economy (Gallup, 2026). For effect, just so you can see all the zeros, that’s $10,000,000,000,000 lost globally due to mistrust. We are raising the youngest generations to expect verification instead of trust, and then we are going to hand them our companies.

So back to my two boys.

If I check the camera, I get the answer. I learn who knocked over the tower. I can see the entire sequence of events. What started the spat, and who did what to whom and when. What I lose is the only thing that ever grows in the not-knowing, the moment where they have to decide, together, whether their word means anything. I would trade a thousand correct answers for that.

We did not stop trusting our children. We just stopped needing to. We handed the job to the timestamp, the location dot, to the pulse oximeter, and the camera in the corner. It feels like safety. It works like a slow erosion of the one thing that lets people live and work beside each other without a machine in between.

There was supposed to be comfort in all of this knowledge and information. The record was the one thing that could not lie. The camera did not take sides. The footage just showed what happened. Was that not the solution to all of the distrust in the world?

Well, next week, we find out whether that was ever true.