With back to school season upon us, both parents and kids will start worrying about homework, tests, and report cards any day now.

With two teenagers myself, I know how much more challenging it becomes to stay on top of this as your child gets older. Whether she simply doesn’t care to share or is embarrassed to ask for help, talking to your child about school can often feel like pulling teeth. Which makes parents uneasy - many remember a time when they hid report cards or changed grades when it came to their own parents. So how can parents stay on top of their kid’s schoolwork?

With today’s always-evolving technology, it didn’t take long for a new solution to surface. This year, many schools will make use of online programs that allow parents to follow what their children are doing in the classroom from home. Online programs have found a place in 49 states and over 10,000 schools – which makes the odds pretty good that you will have similar access. Thanks to studies showing that involvement by parents can have a positive affect on their child’s grades, many schools will provide parents information not just about grades, but about homework assignments, absences, late arrivals to school, and even classroom performance.

This system sounds fantastic, especially for late elementary and middle school children who start to demand independence and don’t always want to open up to their parents about school. These years often prove the most crucial in terms of parental involvement, setting the stage for later success and development both socially and academically. Even if your child shares information with you about his assignments and grades, these programs allow you to see things your child might not be telling you, such as when he has an incomplete after not turning in 3 homework assignments, or the fact that he was late to class last week because he was hanging out with his friends by the lockers.

Furthermore, even teachers don’t always have the time to contact parents with information you’d like to know. Perhaps, in a teacher’s mind, a C- doesn’t warrant a phone call and conference, but if your child went from a B+ to a C-, you would certainly want to be aware of it. And, of course, for those with teenagers in high school, knowing if your child skipped class or didn’t show up to school at all becomes just as vital as knowing his grade on last week’s biology exam.

A resource like this not only allows parents to track their child’s daily, weekly, and monthly progress in school, but will alert parents to the fact that their child is struggling, even if he wouldn’t have said so himself. This system also makes kids accountable; rather than asking my son Brooks every 10 minutes if he finished his homework, I can trust that he did, but check up to make sure his homework is always getting turned in, something likely to make us both happy. Kids will also work harder and be more open to discussing issues they may have when they know the info is out in the open, and the programs allow parents a way to get involved in their child’s academics at a time when they may find it most difficult to do so.

This system also works well for teachers; online-based systems open up communication between teachers and parents in an easy way. As everyone becomes increasingly busy, phone calls and meetings may not always seem plausible. Yet with posted information and follow-up emails, staying in touch about an issue becomes simple. In fact, in some places, parents who have already used the programs in the past feel so involved that schools have cancelled their parent-teacher conferences and given the time to classroom work, which speaks volumes about the perceived success of these programs. Furthermore, a number of parents in the armed forces and divorced parents who don’t live full-time with their kids consider this an easy way to keep up on what happens in school, even from afar.

Of course, this system comes with some controversy. Some see it as spying on our kids; instead of trusting them and then verifying it, we insist on verifying it first before we can trust them. Furthermore, if parents never allow kids to take responsibility for themselves and their schoolwork, this could exacerbate other issues – such as helicopter parents calling college professors to get grades changed. While kids do need to be checked up on, they also need to learn self-sufficiency and find success themselves. Finally, this system could potentially cause parents to focus too much attention on a single grade. Report cards are spaced throughout the year in order to present averages of grades, rather than each individual grade, as the average matters in the long run, while one bad quiz grade could be meaningless. Furthermore, some have claimed that kids will be more likely to cheat if their parents put too much emphasis on every individual grade, and parents may focus on punishment for bad grades rather than addressing the underlying issues.

Ultimately though, this tool can do a lot of good. Like a report card or progress report with constant updates, it will allow parents to always keep track of what’s going on in school, regardless of their location, a teacher’s schedule, or the willingness of their child to discuss their schoolwork. Like all technology, this could potentially be misused, but it is a resource meant to open communication between parents, teachers, and students, and encourage a student’s academic success, something all parents want to encourage any way they can.

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