My own children are grown up and most of my friends don’t have young kids. So I am a bit out of touch with the latest trends in "sensible" parenting. I used to be a "concerned" parent and have had my own share of "moments of terror" regarding safety which increased exponentially after the children got their driver’s licenses. I am still a concerned parent but with my adult children living on opposite coasts and I in the middle, roughly 1400 miles away from each, my well intentioned meddling now meets with an exasperated cry of "Chill, Mom!" emanating from both coasts. Lacking proximity and the wherewithal for active interference, I keep my worries to myself … in fact, I have mostly given up worrying. Also, important to note here is the fact that the era in which my kids were growing up (the ’80s and ’90s), technology lagged behind parental worries. Short of following them around 24/7, it was not possible to keep effective track of one’s children when they left home for school or leisure time pursuits.
Times have changed. Parents now have hi-tech ways of keeping an "eye" on their kids. After 9/11, we heard that all the suburban "Soccer Moms" overnight turned into "Security Moms" who deserted en masse the "education & health care" friendly Democratic Mommy Party for the swaggering "tough on crime & terrorism" Republican Daddies. Now, after years of Bush-Cheney’s macho but ineffectual war mongering, snooping, infecting the public mood daily with suspicion and phobias, not to mention the lethal Chinese toys that keep turning up in every toy chest due mainly to our obsession with free trade, low prices and maximum profit for American businesses, I bet that parents of young children are probably scared to death. But nowadays technology is keeping up with parental paranoia. Columnist Ellen Goodman recently discovered that the market is flooded with smart doo-dads which keep track of every movement and deed that a child might undertake. Parents are spending money with abandon to acquire the latest "safe guards" for their toddlers and teenagers. But the urgent question remains; despite the security of tracking gadgets, Bush (or 9/11 Giuliani) in the White House and anti-bacterial soaps, are the childrens safe?
(Readers / co-bloggers with young children, please let us know which hi-tech methodology you currently employ to stalk monitor your kids. Dean? Sujatha? )
PRETTY SOON, we’re going have to amend the favorite mom and dad moniker of the moment. Those much-vaunted helicopter parents are turning into black-helicopter parents. The image of parents hovering over their kids is morphing into the darker image of parents spying on their kids.
Here is the latest bit of high-tech surveillance equipment being marketed to parents. A company inauspiciously named Bladerunner has begun selling a jacket with a GPS device sewn into the lining. For a mere $500 plus $20 a month, a parent can track a child, or at least his jacket, all day long.
This is just a small addition to the family-friendly arsenal. We already have a full range of cellphones equipped with GPS. Indeed, the most common cellphone greeting is not "How are you?" but "Where are you?" Parents are being sold the idea that they can trust but Wherify – the name of one of the many manufacturers offering services that beam their children’s whereabouts to their cellphone.
Want to monitor what your kids eat at school? MyNutrikids gives you the scoop from the lunchroom. Want an automatic alert if he got a B on the pop quiz? Go to GradeSpeed. Want to monitor her instant messages? There’s IMSafer. And want to know whether your 17-year-old is speeding? Alltrack not only tells you but lets you remotely flash the lights and honk the horn till she slows down.
There is also a "safety checks" service courtesy of Sprint to let you know if your children showed up for soccer practice. And a "geofencing" service from Verizon that alerts parents if a child leaves the area circumscribed by her parents.
Next thing you know, there will be a chip implanted under your child’s skin. No wait! Somebody’s already invented that.
Goodman’s full article here.
Accidental Blogger 
9 responses to “Big Brother Meets Big Mother”
My kids aren’t hugely wired up or have their own cellphones (I rarely lend my cellphone to my son to make calls – being a bit of cellphone Luddite myself in that respect.)
How do I keep tabs on them? Good question.
The fact is, I don’t check on their movements too obsessively and have just a general sense of where and what they are doing. This doesn’t prevent me from being able to tell when my son has been playing Battlefield 1942 on the computer while I’ve taken his sister to a class, even if the computer appears perfectly normal when I get back, with him watching Mythbusters on TV in the living room. (And no, I’m not giving away my trade secrets!)
I trust them to largely do the right thing, though I don’t expect complete compliance and lecture to them if I find any violations. It may not have effect immediately, but will come back to haunt them when they deal with their kids far in the future ;)
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My son is pushing twenty-one months, so it doesn’t make sense at this point to wire him up and send him outdoors on his own. In any case, I am a decidedly skeptical parent, technology wise. My wife has a cellphone. I don’t. Friends lecture me: “What about emergencies?!” Yes, well, it seems to me I’m as likely to cause an emergency with one of these devices as effectively to respond to one. A solution, of course, is to avoid situations in which an emergency requiring immediate access to a cellphone would occur. It’s called prudence.
I take exception to the lurid angle these articles take against parents “spying on their kids.” I almost can’t process the phrase for a meaning. What could it possibly entail? Watching them too much? Using some device to watch them too much? Hiring a private investigator to watch them too much? Sounds like a healthy measure of good parenting to me! I love watching my son, making sure he totters safely from room to room or yard to yard, assessing his facility with collections of blocks and balls that outsize him, and so forth. I’m also extremely wary when he’s around my stereo, which, really, is his older sibling, my child I first adored. Knowing full well that I don’t approve of his touching my speakers, he has taken to puffing little wafts of breath upon them, which is fine with me…and I watch him like a hawk when he does it. If such spying is somehow compromising his autonomy, well, to heck with autonomy. (This is a lesson we are all learning these days, anyway.)
When the time comes for him to negotiate lunches at school or skip out to watch TV at a buddy’s house, so be it. All I know is that while he’s at home with his parents, he’ll eat well (give or take) and not have a television at all. I have no concern for purity. His diet will not be rid of capitalist fodder. But he’ll at least be aware of alternatives.
So, I’m not opposed to hyper-vigilance with one’s kids. I do question the reliability and utility of all of these techno-gizmos designed to secure them, though. I’m willing to bet most of them don’t work very well and are easily circumvented.
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Dean:
I think that watching your little son when he gets too near your stereo speakers is qualitatively different than the sort of “spying” about which people get more upset.
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A more general point in line with what Joe’s saying: common sense as well as the law recognizes that a reasonable expectation of autonomy (through application of a “stated interest” standard) increases, and a reasonable expectation of supervision (application of a “best interest” standard) decreases, with age. When you’re talking about a baby that’s not even two, the expectation of autonomy is basically nil. Your toddler’s not driving, getting B’s on pop quizes, or sending instant messages, Dean, so it makes sense that this stuff doesn’t compute.
Teenagers, on the other hand, need some amount of privacy and experience in managing their own affairs to develop as healthy adults. I wouldn’t make my teenager keep a food diary for me, because I wouldn’t want to humiliate her with the assumption that she couldn’t be trusted to take information and encouragement and use it to make healthy choices (or not, but still be loved). I wouldn’t read my teenager’s diary, because it would defeat my desire to impart the value of respecting privacy, and also to maintain enough trust in our relationship that my child would be willing to approach me when something really bothered him and he needed help.
Some of these devices (e.g. Nutrikids and IMSafer) are troubling because they seem, in essence, like hi-tech ways to read a teenager’s diary. The technology may be irrelevant. It seems to me likely, on the one hand, to be put to use by the same parents who would read their teenager’s diary or track her weight and food intake, and on the other, to be (as Dean notes), equally circumvented.
I can certainly think of people I’ve known who’ve been incredibly damaged by obsessively vigilant parents, especially women (perhaps either because parents are more protective of girls, or perhaps just because I have had more close female friends): girls whose parents monitored every bite they took and mile they jogged, who had terrible issues with food and body image; girls whose parents monitored every contact they had with boys, who therefore hid any such contact, with terrible results. I’ve also known kids, through babysitting, camp counseling, tutoring, etc. who seemed to me robbed of their childhoods, because of the obsessive control of their parents. Of course (especially both through my work with DCFS kids, and as a child of the 70s), I’ve also known people who were badly damaged by their parents’ total failure in their duty to supervise and protect them. Obviously, there’s a healthy balance. Some of these devices seem to me like they could be included in that balance (I’m really attracted to the one that doesn’t let the kid speed), while others don’t.
Ruchira makes a good point in connecting the rise in tracking gadgetry used by parents on children to a general paranoia: “[A]fter years of Bush-Cheney’s macho but ineffectual war mongering, snooping, infecting the public mood daily with suspicion and phobias, not to mention the lethal Chinese toys that keep turning up in every toy chest due mainly to our obsession with free trade, low prices and maximum profit for American businesses, I bet that parents of young children are probably scared to death.”
It seems worth wondering how the level of tracking parents find acceptable in application to their children reflects on the amount they find acceptable in application to themselves by their government, or the level that the children on whom they use such tracking will find acceptable.
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A more general point in line with what Joe’s saying: common sense as well as the law recognizes that a reasonable expectation of autonomy (through application of a “stated interest” standard) increases, and a reasonable expectation of supervision (application of a “best interest” standard) decreases, with age. When you’re talking about a baby that’s not even two, the expectation of autonomy is basically nil. Your toddler’s not driving, getting B’s on pop quizes, or sending instant messages, Dean, so it makes sense that this stuff doesn’t compute.
Teenagers, on the other hand, need some amount of privacy and experience in managing their own affairs to develop as healthy adults. I wouldn’t make my teenager keep a food diary for me, because I wouldn’t want to humiliate her with the assumption that she couldn’t be trusted to take information and encouragement and use it to make healthy choices (or not, but still be loved). I wouldn’t read my teenager’s diary, because it would defeat my desire to impart the value of respecting privacy, and also to maintain enough trust in our relationship that my child would be willing to approach me when something really bothered him and he needed help.
Some of these devices (e.g. Nutrikids and IMSafer) are troubling because they seem, in essence, like hi-tech ways to read a teenager’s diary. The technology may be irrelevant. It seems to me likely, on the one hand, to be put to use by the same parents who would read their teenager’s diary or track her weight and food intake, and on the other, to be (as Dean notes), equally circumvented.
I can certainly think of people I’ve known who’ve been incredibly damaged by obsessively vigilant parents, especially women (perhaps either because parents are more protective of girls, or perhaps just because I have had more close female friends): girls whose parents monitored every bite they took and mile they jogged, who had terrible issues with food and body image; girls whose parents monitored every contact they had with boys, who therefore hid any such contact, with terrible results. I’ve also known kids, through babysitting, camp counseling, tutoring, etc. who seemed to me robbed of their childhoods, because of the obsessive control of their parents. Of course (especially both through my work with DCFS kids, and as a child of the 70s), I’ve also known people who were badly damaged by their parents’ total failure in their duty to supervise and protect them. Obviously, there’s a healthy balance. Some of these devices seem to me like they could be included in that balance (I’m really attracted to the one that doesn’t let the kid speed), while others don’t.
Ruchira makes a good point in connecting the rise in tracking gadgetry used by parents on children to a general paranoia: “[A]fter years of Bush-Cheney’s macho but ineffectual war mongering, snooping, infecting the public mood daily with suspicion and phobias, not to mention the lethal Chinese toys that keep turning up in every toy chest due mainly to our obsession with free trade, low prices and maximum profit for American businesses, I bet that parents of young children are probably scared to death.”
It seems worth wondering how the level of tracking parents find acceptable in application to their children reflects on the amount they find acceptable in application to themselves by their government, or the level that the children on whom they use such tracking will find acceptable.
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Anna,
That’s an interesting idea, about the level of tracking parents consider acceptable being related to their comfort level regarding government tracking. Would these ‘helicopter parents’ not really mind black helicopters hovering over their houses and biometric identification stations at every public location? I wonder.
An alternative reason might be that parents are tracking the kids in a sort of inverse ratio to their own level of youthful peccadilloes, as in “I remember that I did this when I was young and it turned out to be not the right decision- let me ensure that my child never makes this mistake by tracking him/her”. Perfectly natural, when you consider that parents are in the business of ensuring continuance and trying to up the chances of their children surviving into a successful adulthood.
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Indeed, our government—maybe any statist government—is, always was, and always will be extremely paternalistic, for better or worse. Hence my point about the silliness of referring to “spying” on one’s children to characterize the behavior of a large portion of the parental population: Goodman isn’t talking about just a few “obsessively vigilant parents.” She’s talking about something on the order of a trend. She’s also implying, pace Joe, a qualitative difference between talking and tracking.
Although I’m all for cautious, common-sensical parenting, I won’t fall into this Sorites situation. (When does vigilance become obsessive? When do toddlers acquire autonomy? Where do we set the proper balance?) We get emotional mileage out of pretending that Big Mother is only now looming as a trend, when Big Brother has long sought to obscure his charges in the shadows. Nor should it escape notice that the title of Goodman’s article identifies the masculine with the state, the feminine with parenting. Is the worry that this traditionally maternal function has acquired habits exclusive to Daddy?
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Sujatha,
I completely agree that it’s natural for parents to want their children to avoid the consequences they suffered for their own bad choices. It just begs the question of the content of what they’re trying to have their children avoid, and whether the quality and quantity of tracking either furthers or justifies that outcome. Whether or not the same parents who support such measures would be comfortable with black helicopters hovering over them, it seems to me that their sense of duty as parents and as citizens would have them ask, in either case, for a rationale to justify the measure taken.
Another way I might think about this is through the prism of the traditional sources of state power to deprive someone of liberty: authority over individuals under parens patriae, the state’s authority, as “parent of the country,” to protect the individual, vs. state’s authority, for sake of public safety, to protect public safety and order.
We can and should make some distinction between when the black helicopters, and the kiddie tracking devices, are to protect the child so it can develop into an autonomous adult, and when they’re designed merely to police, for the sake of order and control.
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I have no experience of raising children and having them leave the nest, but this song by Joan Manuel Serrat makes me maudlin while capturing some of the sentiments expressed in these postings. It is titled “Esos locos bajitos” — “Those crazy little ones”. There are several versions of the song on YouTube, of which the following is just too cute.
Here’s a free translation :
Often, our children resemble us
And this gives us great satisfaction;
They are swayed by our looks and gestures,
Reaching out to us when we are near.
Those crazy little ones sit awake
With their eyes wide open
With no respect for the hour or customs
And we have to train them for their own good
Child, stop fucking with the ball.
Child, don’t say that,
One doesn’t do that,
One doesn’t touch that.
Burdened with our gods and our culture,
With our resentments and our futures.
They must seem to us to be made of rubber
When all they need is our stories
To send them to sleep.
We are compelled to direct their lives
Without knowing what it takes and with no vocation.
We transmit our frustrations to them
With warm milk and with every song.
Nothing and no one can suffer to stop
The advancing hands of the clock,
That they decide for themselves,
That they make their own mistakes,
That they grow up and that some day
They’ll bid us adieu.
Joan Manuel Serrat, at 64, is the grand old man of popular music and ballad in Spain. He is also idolized by the literate in much of Latin America. Unfortunately, like Chico Buarque, he will never set foot in these United States (I had to go to Puerto Rico to see him in concert). Thanks to an extended and famous run-in with Francisco Franco, Serrat is a minor historical figure, meriting much of one page in Robert Hughes’ “Barcelona”. Though he only attended technical school in his youth, he is a literate person and has set works of several famous poets to music. His own lyrics are also make compelling poetry, besides demonstrating his social and political consciousness, and telling vivid stories.
I can’t resist the factoid that the actress Penelope Cruz was named after his hit song of the 70s — though Serrat claims no responsibility for her parents’ divorce.
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