Parental monitoring is a construct of longstanding interest in multiple fields—but what is it? This paper makes two contributions to the ongoing debate. First, we review how the published literature has defined and operationalized parental monitoring. We show that the monitoring construct has often been defined in an indirect and nonspecific fashion and measured using instruments that vary widely in conceptual content. The result has been a disjointed empirical literature that cannot accurately be described as the unified study of a single construct nor is achieving a cumulative scientific character. Second, we offer a new formulation of the monitoring construct intended to remedy this situation. We define parental monitoring as the set of all behaviors performed by caregivers with the goal of acquiring information about the youth’s activities and life. We introduce a taxonomy identifying 5 distinct types of monitoring behaviors (Types 1–5), with each behavior varying along five dimensions (performer, target, frequency, context, style). We distinguish parental monitoring from 16 other parenting constructs it is often conflated with and position monitoring as one element within the broader parent-youth monitoring process: the continuous, dyadic interplay between caregivers and youth as they navigate caregivers attempts' to monitor youth. By offering an explicit and detailed conceptualization of monitoring, we aim to foster more rigorous and impactful research in this area.

家长监控是多个领域长期关注的一个概念，但它到底是什么？本文对正在进行的辩论做出了两点贡献。首先，我们回顾已发表的文献如何定义和实施家长监控。我们表明，监测结构通常以间接和非特定的方式定义，并使用概念内容差异很大的工具进行测量。结果是，实证文献支离破碎，无法准确地描述为对单一结构的统一研究，也无法实现累积的科学特征。其次，我们提供了一种新的监控结构表述，旨在纠正这种情况。我们将家长监控定义为看护者为获取青少年活动和生活信息而进行的所有行为的集合。我们引入了一种分类法，识别 5 种不同类型的监控行为（类型 1-5），每种行为在五个维度（执行者、目标、频率、背景、风格）上有所不同。我们将父母监督与其他 16 种经常混为一谈的养育结构区分开来，并将监督定位为更广泛的父母-青少年监督过程中的一个要素：照顾者和青少年之间在引导照顾者试图监督青少年时持续的、二元的相互作用。通过提供明确而详细的监测概念，我们的目标是促进该领域更加严格和有影响力的研究。