As long as children are toddlers they receive continuous monitoring day and night. Keeping constant watch is important to protect the child and provide it with safety. As children grow older, the monitoring changes character.

Monitoring can be divided into three parts:

Observation. Parents must notice what the child is doing. This also includes knowing what the child does when it is not together with its parents.

Overview. Parents must know where the child is, who it is with, what it is doing and when it is coming home.

Adaption.Parents must organise daily life so that children can follow clear guidelines, and they must be involved in a child’s life in a way that encourages positive development.

The need for monitoring varies according to the child’s age and how the child functions. Our new social media have given parents new challenges that demand extra monitoring.

Children with behavioral problems have a greater need for monitoring than other children. They carry out unwanted acts more often when they know they are without parental monitoring. They easily seek contact with other children with behavioral problems and thus often end up in challenging situations. The less overview parents have over what their child does and who it is with, the more likely it is that the child will carry out unwanted acts. Through PMTO parents learn to create safe frameworks for following up a child, and how to overcome obstacles that hinder monitoring.