Investigating Collaborative Controls for Sandwich Generation Families

The Family Circuit: A Family Tech Ethics Blog from the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown University

At Georgetown’s Center for Digital Ethics, we have recently launched a new Family Tech Ethics research program, with a number of CDE scholars working in this space. The Family Circuit highlights some of that work, which takes a more encompassing approach to technologies used by particular individuals like kids, parents, or the elderly– we are interested in these actors as family members and in the family as a collective unit. One way we are investigating tech integrated into families is by considering shared or collaborative controls used by sandwich generation adults for themselves, their children, and their aging parents.

Family Tech:

Technologies intended to be used across family members often embed assumptions about family relationships and privacy that may not align with families’ lived experiences or values. Some of these family technologies are features added to existing consumer products, like Apple Family Sharing, Google calendars, and Instagram Teen Accounts. Others like ElliQ or Life360 are specifically introduced to enable family access, oversight, and care. Despite significantly promoting digital safety tools like parental controls, adoption rates reveal a complicated landscape. This is especially true for the “sandwich generation,” meaning adults who are simultaneously managing oversight and engagement for teens and aging parents.

The tangled web of competing interests and incentives includes parent-teen trust dynamics, the severity of online harms, varying technological competence, changes in the culture of parenting, and the continuous evolution of profitable platforms. Technologies used to support aging family members also face complex adoption challenges. “Granny cams,” or surveillance cameras in nursing homes, represent one controversial example. These cameras reveal a tension that exists between the desire for safety oversight and privacy concerns among concerned family members, care facilities, staff, and residents. We will explore this tension through the lens of “collaborative control,” meaning looking at how digital control is exercised across different family relationships, with a particular focus on two interconnected domains: parental control for adolescents and digital monitoring for eldercare.

Despite the popularity of the concept of the “sandwich generation,” little has been written about their experience of simultaneously managing the digital lives of their parents and children. The few studies that do exist on this topic (like one from COX Mobile, Ketchum, and the Family Online Safety Institute) don’t delve deeply into the dynamics of family privacy. By investigating this relationship more deeply, we aim to lay the foundation for a new lens on privacy: family privacy. This project develops conceptual tools to understand how family autonomy is stressed and strengthened by digital technologies, with a specific focus on how “sandwich generation” adults simultaneously manage oversight and engagement for teens and aging parents. We’re looking closely at tech over five family stages:

1. Baby Tech

The growing market for baby technology, intended to help parents of infants and toddlers monitor their children’s bodily functions, reveals changing norms in parenting and the capitalization of parental surveillance marketed as a safety measure. Technologies for infant monitoring have often been labeled as health technology, with most of the market offering devices that help parents monitor infant safety while sleeping. As Ball and Keegan (2022) note, these devices offer parents digital measurements about sleep, targeted support for night-time care, and constant monitoring of infant sleep safety. While these devices may provide parents with in the moment reassurance that their baby is safe, relief is dependent on the effectiveness and reliability of the technology itself. As Dosso et al. (2025), note faulty monitoring devices may have the opposite result on parental wellness, leading to increased parental stress, anxiety, and sleep disruption. In this sense, the technology mediates the relationship between parent and infant in addition to parent and self. The capitalization of parental monitoring through technologies have also created a profit motive for parents to constantly surveil their children. As Leaver (2017) argues, manufacturers frame constant data-driven monitoring as responsible parenting, creating an incentive for parents to buy. As a result, however, the market has led to the normalization of what Leaver calls “intimate surveillance”, a form of close, well-intentioned, but invasive monitoring of infants by parents.

Photo by Anastasia Zhenina on Unsplash

2. School Tech:

The most high profile debate around tech in schools are phone bans, which, in some states, are mandated by the state government. As of September 25, 2025, thirty-four states have enacted laws or policies on cell-phone usage in the classroom. These bans have been enacted in response to concerns about teen’s decreasing attention spans, as well as falling literacy levels and math skills. According to a 2025 Pew survey, support for these bans are growing. At the same time, students are using more technology than ever in the classroom through educational technology (edtech). Unlike a teen’s smartphone, which commonly offer parental controls (even if they are not always effective), parents get little insight or say into the ways that their child engages with technology in the classroom. Devices are often introduced as early as pre-K and most U.S. schools have a 1:1 policy where each student has their own internet-connected tablet or laptop by second grade. The effectiveness of and motivations around edtech have come under increased scrutiny. Meanwhile, the White House has pushed for AI integration in schools, despite concern about the ways in which students may or may not be using AI tools to cheat on assignments and whether it supports cognitive growth. All of this leaves open questions about how technology should be used in schools and how parents should be involved.

Photo by Julie Ricard on Unsplash

3. Teen Tech:

In 2023, The Surgeon General came out with a report on the impact of social media on the mental health of children and teens. The report found that, while social media can have benefits for some children, there is growing evidence that social media can also have a risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and teens. These negative harms include poor mental health outcomes, including symptoms of depression and anxiety. The Surgeon General’s recommendations include guidelines for what parents and caregivers can do to help minimize these harms. While the report specifies that mitigating the harms of social media should not be solely the responsibility of parents and caregivers, they still have a significant role to play in protecting their children from online harms. Similar concerns have been echoed in Jonathan Haidt’s popular book The Anxious Generation. The need for parents and caregivers to be involved in managing their children’s relationship with technology is not limited to social media. According to a risk assessment report by Common Sense Media on teens’ use of AI companion chatbots, these chatbots pose risk to young people under 18, and parent awareness and dialogue with teens about these dangers are essential. These findings highlight how parents are expected to shoulder significant responsibility in managing young people’s technology use, and they do so within a broader system of tools, policies, and family dynamics.

4. Elder Tech:

Although technology in geriatric care is not new, recent advances have produced a growing category known as AgeTech: apps and devices that allow caregivers to monitor older adults’ health and daily activities remotely. These tools range from medication reminder apps and health trackers to wearables, smart home systems, and assistive robots for fall detection and daily task automation. Advocates argue that AgeTech supports independence, enabling older adults to remain at home longer and allowing distant caregivers to stay connected. Yet these technologies also mediate the relationship between caregivers and those receiving care, introducing new tradeoffs between harm reduction and intrusions into autonomy, dignity, and privacy. Toyokawa et al. (2022) found that some older adults felt monitored technologies fostered abandonment, replacing physical visits with remote oversight. Similarly, Berridge and Wetle (2020) observed that adult children often favored such tools more than their mothers, underestimating both their mothers’ technological competence and the importance of involving them in decisions. In this sense, AgeTech highlights how caregiving technologies can reinforce unilateral forms of control, even when marketed as supportive or collaborative.

Photo by Georg Arthur Pflueger on Unsplash

5. Legacy Tech:

Family relationships continue to be mediated by and through technology, beyond life itself. Families map their legacies across generations using DNA testing services like 23andMe to understand where they come from. After a family member passes away, their digital presence often outlives their physical presence on Earth. The responsibility of handling this presence, if handled at all, is usually left up to the deceased’s family members. The permanence of digital data presents an opportunity made possible only by technology. Where the memories and artifacts from a person’s life used to require physical preservation, social media now allows memorials to be richly accessible across time and space. Users who preplan for how they want their data handled can designate a legacy contact to posthumously access, manage, or delete their data through companies like Google, Apple, and Meta’s inactive account management and legacy features. Digital preservation enables multigenerational relationship building even after death. In 2022, Amazon teased an Alexa feature that would allow the AI assistant to mimic the voice of a deceased family member. In the promotional video, a small boy is shown asking Alexa to read him a story in the voice of his presumably deceased grandmother. Although the feature was never publicly released, it is assumed that video or audio recordings scraped from a deceased user’s social media accounts could be used to train the AI to take the likeness of a deceased user to foster connections between users without either needing to be physically present, let alone alive. Other companies like HereAfter AI, SeanceAI, and StoryFile have created similar features to enable posthumous connections and conversations with deceased family members through AI chatbots. Digital legacy systems represent the final stage of family digital monitoring, where care, control, and corporate mediation converge in managing a person’s digital self long after their physical life has ended.

Keep an eye out for writing and events covering these subjects here and other CDE communications.

The views expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Digital Ethics or Georgetown University.