The surprising source of kids’ stress lurking on parents’ phones

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.

I’ve been reporting on kids’ mental health for more than a year now, and one concern keeps coming up in my interviews with parents and experts: school apps. Blackboard, Schoology, ClassDojo, the list goes on — these apps help teachers communicate with families, and parents and other caregivers keep track of their kids’ learning. Good, right? 

Kind of.

The tools started to appear in the early 2010s but really took off in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when millions of schoolchildren were forced to adapt to learning from home, said Leah Plunkett, author of Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online and a faculty member at Harvard Law School. 

Some, like Blackboard or Google Classroom, function as “open grade books,” where parents and kids can see each assignment grade as a teacher enters it. Others, like ClassDojo, allow families to keep track of kids’ behavior at school. Still others can be used to send messages or manage extracurriculars like band or sports.

The apps are now ubiquitous — open grade book tools are in use in a majority of public and private high schools in America, Gail Cornwall reports at The Cut. These tools are an improvement over the system many millennials remember, in which students and parents might not find out about their grades until the school quarter or semester was almost over. 

By that time, “Sometimes it’s too late to bring those grades up,” said Meg St-Esprit, a Pittsburgh-based journalist and content creator whose almost-13-year-old son’s middle school uses Google Classroom and PowerSchool. Now kids and parents can track their progress — and their difficulties — together.

But the apps have raised privacy concerns, with some experts fearing that sensitive data about children could fall into the hands of cybercriminals or be used to limit kids’ opportunities later on. 

Others fear that by encouraging parents to monitor every fluctuation in their children’s grades, the tools are fueling an achievement-obsessed culture that can lead to stress and burnout among kids. “It can feel like you’re always plugged in,” St-Esprit said. “It can feel a little bit like hustle culture.”

School apps are helpful — and stressful

If you don’t have a school-aged child at home, you might be surprised at the sheer number of apps that contemporary education entails. 

St-Esprit, who has four children including her middle-schooler, has used not just Google Classroom and PowerSchool but also Seesaw, Remind, Bloomz, ClassDojo, PaySchools Central, CutTime, and TeamSnap. The notifications alone can be a time suck for parents: I received at least one during each call I made for this story.

Still, for many families, the apps are a more efficient mode of communication than, say, a flier wadded up in a kid’s backpack. Parents often appreciate the transparency of open grade book apps, as well as the ability to message a teacher quickly rather than setting up a conference during the workday (some teachers appreciate the flexibility, too). “It is fundamentally good and constructive for school systems to have real-time, reliable ways to communicate with parents and guardians,” Plunkett said.

Phone apps aren’t a reliable mode of communication for everyone. Some families don’t have smartphones. Some don’t have the spare time necessary to navigate a veritable forest of login and setup instructions, some of which can be confusing even for relatively tech-savvy parents (not that I speak in any way from experience). 

With open grade book tools and other school communication tech, “There’s just such clear ways that privileged parties benefit and others do not,” Catharyn Shelton, an assistant professor of educational technology at Northern Arizona University, told EdWeek. 

App developers are aware of these concerns and some have taken steps to address equity issues. ClassDojo and Seesaw, for example, allow teachers to translate messages into a student’s home language.

Beyond accessibility, the apps come with other problems. Seeing every assignment grade show up on a phone or computer screen and knowing your parents will see it, too, can be anxiety-producing for kids. St-Esprit’s son recently got a low grade on an assignment and “he was anxious about it while we waited for that grade to pop up,” St-Esprit said. 

“Google Classroom is a source of stress for me,” her son, Eli, told me in an email. “It’s hard to navigate.”

The apps can also encourage an obsessive focus on grades at the expense of learning. “She’s constantly like, ‘Did they grade that test? Did they grade that essay?’” one parent of a 12-year-old told The Cut. 

Emily Weinstein, lead author of a recent report on teen stress and burnout, said that the apps and the atmosphere of “constant quantification” they can create can contribute to high levels of academic pressure felt by young people today. Other experts have argued that the ability to track kids through apps has led to a hypervigilance among parents that leads them to limit children’s autonomy — which in turn can harm kids’ mental health and hold them back from developing crucial social and cognitive skills. 

“We’ve got this idea right now that the closer we keep our kids, the more information we have, the more we direct, the more that we control, the better off our kids will be,” Lynn Lyons, a therapist who specializes in anxiety disorders, told me last year. “And the research is showing the opposite.”

The apps also raise privacy concerns

In addition to mental health concerns, some experts worry that the apps leave schools and families vulnerable to hackers. Some apps are used to communicate pickup plans, which can include a child’s geographical location, Plunkett said. “If that app has a breach, then all of a sudden, whoever’s getting that information has access to where every child in that school or school district is going.”

Meanwhile, records of students’ behavioral challenges at school could come back to harm them later in life, Plunkett said. And the use of AI by schools and districts is raising the stakes on all conversations about student data. A school could use behavioral information to deny a student a letter of recommendation, Plunkett said, but “what I’m even more concerned about are those instances where there may not necessarily be a human review,” where data could be aggregated and analyzed by computer to make predictions or draw conclusions about students.

Schools have long kept data on student grades and test scores. But the apps in use today raise the possibility of collecting and storing a larger, more granular array of information that could be used in ways students and families might not understand unless proper guardrails are put in place.

Updated federal youth privacy legislation would be a start, Plunkett said. App developers also need to provide schools with “nutrition label-style information” about what data their apps collect and how it can be used, she said.

Schools, meanwhile, can curb app overload by communicating really important information — a sick child, a serious behavior problem — by email, phone, or face-to-face meeting, St-Esprit said. 

The goal should be for parents to get “enough information to know what’s going on,” but not so much that “there is this constant state of looking over the child’s shoulder,” Plunkett said.

“There was something to be said for the brick-and-mortar days” of the ’80s and ’90s, she added. “We went to school and our parents didn’t necessarily know everything we did there every day, and I think that was probably good for everybody.”

What I’m Reading

A growing number of states are considering legislation to protect the privacy or compensation of child influencers.

More states are also using opioid settlement money to help “grandfamilies” — grandparents raising kids whose parents struggle with substance abuse.

Young people today apparently prefer gummy Halloween candy to chocolate options, which is an incorrect opinion.

My older kid and I just finished the Eerie Elementary series, about an evil elementary school that eats children (a premise that really resonates with kids who have mixed feelings about school). Now we need a new book series to start — I am taking recommendations. 

From My Inbox

“The experience of high school (and even middle school!) students has become far more rigorous and demanding,” a 17-year-old reader wrote to me in response to last week’s newsletter about teen stress and burnout. “To pursue my field of interest I’ve needed to go through an extreme amount of work only to apply to a reputable institution and find a flood of essays waiting for me — Caltech alone has nine. Over these last four years, I’ve done research competitions, nonprofit work, math competitions, astronomy competitions, and quiz bowls just to make my application competitive. I still have anxiety about the future because I’m unsure if anything I’m doing will matter.”

This is a tough thing to hear from a young person, but also confirms  what the researchers found in their report. It’s a reminder of the need to examine the economic and cultural pressures that make kids feel they have to achieve so much so young.

Lastly, I’d love to hear from families and teachers about apps — do you, your students, and/or the kids in your life use them to keep track of grades and extracurriculars? Do you love them, hate them, or both? Get in touch at anna.north@vox.com.