Spying on your children

It’s complicated.

I read this week about new apps with GPS that promise you can track your children when they are Halloween Trick-or-Treating. Oh boy. If you are that worried about knowing where they are, why wouldn’t you be with them?

This reminds me of a conversation I had some years ago with other parents – mostly women – and all six of them favored monitoring which websites their teenage children were visiting. None, so far as I could tell, ever actually installed the monitoring software but they wanted to snoop and felt it was justified. I didn’t and their kids certainly didn’t.

So here we are some years later and we are in a mobile age when parents can monitor where their children are – if they want – by installing an app that allows them to track the smart phone their teenager carries. In the old days you did this with a chip insert; nowadays it can be done with the GPS signal. I don’t know about you but that seems disturbing to me. Like Lojacking your kid.

Proponents of greater snooping like to say “Trust, but verify.” This is a contradiction. If you are verifying, then you are not trusting. I favor “The kids have to learn to trust you and you have to prove you are worth trusting.” That said, if you are a parent, you know that verifying is required too, so “Don’t trust but verify” might be more accurate. You have to be “smart” about the verifying and “smart” about how you handle what you uncover.

What do I know? Not much. Having kids is a mystery. But I do think the real issue is what you should be snooping for. Unless you have grounds to really worry, I cannot see any value in snooping on the kids’ online activity or cell phone use (other than checking the monthly bill). Inappropriate texting or Facebook postings are something you just have to endure till the kids learn to be smarter and when kids are young you can generally see what they are doing if you ask nicely. What can and should be verified is cigarettes or alcohol or drug use and risky sex – as the kids get older - and snooping technologies won’t help you much with those. Good old-fashioned detective work is the way to go. There are usually tell-tale signs if you know how to look discreetly. Most kids make a mistake sooner or later. As Bill Cosby once said, it’s a guerilla war.

In the end, parents just have to be patient and hope that their kids will work through the latest crisis, whatever it happens to be, and they need to be there for them.