Age, Autonomy and Diminishing Returns
What is proportionate at seven is surveillance at fifteen, and the effectiveness falls as the justification weakens.
The same arrangement changes character as a child grows. Both the case for it and its usefulness decline, and they decline together.
The practical lesson in “Age, Autonomy and Diminishing Returns” is to make work visible without treating visibility as certainty. Organisations exploring more information for attendance point system can add structured project and time evidence, provided the purpose is disclosed and any interpretation is checked with the people affected.
Young children
Oversight is uncontroversial: they are not yet capable of judging what they encounter.
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Filtering, time limits and shared-space use handle most of it.
Detailed activity recording adds little, because the risk is what they stumble into rather than what they seek.
Early adolescence
The period where most monitoring is installed, and where the trade is most finely balanced.
Genuine risks exist and judgement is still developing.
And a growing legitimate claim to some privacy, which is part of developing that judgement rather than a threat to it.
Open, limited and discussed is the workable version here.
Later adolescence
The case weakens considerably.
A sixteen-year-old has a legitimate private life and in many jurisdictions meaningful data rights of their own.
Monitoring at this age frequently produces concealment rather than safety: a second device, a different account, a friend's phone.
Which means it stops working at roughly the point people most want it to.
The effectiveness curve
Monitoring is most effective when least needed and least effective when most wanted.
A young child has nothing to hide and no means to hide it; an older teenager has both.
Recognising this in advance prevents the escalation spiral, where each discovered workaround prompts a tighter measure and a better workaround.
What replaces it
The thing that scales: knowing what they are doing because they tell you.
Which depends entirely on whether telling you has previously gone well.
Every conversation about something they disclosed is an investment in that, and every one that became a confrontation is a withdrawal.
The autonomy argument, stated plainly
Privacy is a capability that has to be practised.
A young person who has never had any has not developed judgement about their own boundaries or anybody else's.
Which is a cost that does not show up until later, and it is the strongest argument against indefinite monitoring.
The review point
Set an age or a date at which the arrangement is reconsidered, and say so when it starts.
It gives them something to work towards and it forces the decision rather than letting it persist by default.
Most monitoring that causes damage is monitoring nobody decided to continue.
What to check
Is the arrangement the same as when it started?
Does it match the age they are now?
Has it produced anything in the last six months?
And is there a point at which it ends?