Parenting or Spying: Who’s Watching The Kids?
If you electronically monitor every website your kids view, secretly read all their instant messages, filter their TV viewing, restrict their incoming and outgoing calls, and track their movements by GPS devices lurking in their backpacks and cell phones, are you parenting, or spying?
Spying, and proud of it, say parental proponents of stealth, who insist that protecting their children has no limits. “If I’m responsible for their actions, then I should be able to snoop,” says a mother in Tennessee. A Texas mom is point-blank: “I have made it perfectly clear there is no privacy in my house.”
And no difficulty violating it. Just a single piece of spy ware makes subterfuge simple, allowing parents to view everything their kid does online, including both sides of IM conversations. Parents who don’t like what they see can secretly shut down the kid’s computer by remote, then blame it on a mysterious network problem.
“I can see why some people worry that parents will become too controlling,” says a Texas father of five, “but I’ve found that technology actually lets you give kids more freedom.” By controlling what his kids do and see, he says, he hopes to “eliminate” the possibility that they’ll make bad decisions that could bring lasting harm.
Care or control? Insight or intrusion? The debate continues, especially in the increasingly popular grade-tracking programs that allow parents almost hourly access to their child’s progress in school, with the cooperation of teachers. Depending on the software, parents can check test and homework grades, disciplinary notices, attendance, missed assignments, and their child’s daily class ranking, on command.
A Georgia mother who used to incessantly check her child’s school progress by logging on each day at 6AM, has re-thought her dependence on electronically tracking every aspect of her daughter’s daily life. “It speaks to all your neuroses as a parent, all this need to control, that pressure to make sure everything is perfect,” she said. “How are these kids going to learn to be responsible adults?”
Tell us what you think: Should parents use technology to monitor their kids? Is it parenting, spying, responsible, or something else?
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Comments
Wow......
Some talk about kids like they’re all criminals! You made it seem like the default was violence unless a parent interfered. Kids have their own personalities regardless of what you do (to an extent) and being monitored 24/7 would only make them more sneaky and rebellious (as it should)!
mothernature | 1 year, 8 months ago
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Not to call anyone stupid but...
Saying that parents have to earn their child’s trust is kind of dumb. I think that parents earned the right to respect and trust from their kids when they spent all those many years feeding them, changing their diapers, kissing their scraped knees, keeping them out of the knife drawer and away from electrical cords, etc.
That is not to say that I think parents should be covertly spying on their kids, but a parent’s job is to keep their child safe. I think part of that is checking up on your children and keeping them honest. However, I don’t think being sneaky is they way to go about it. I think parents should be transparent in the way they deal with their children.
Mary | 1 year, 8 months ago
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Trust
It is a matter of trust. As a father of three, I have found myself, again and again, in a position where I had to rely on my children’s best judgment. I cannot be everywhere at every moment, so I had to let them be who, and what, they were, are and will be. If the child did something to alert me that my trust had been misplaced, then yes, I did closely monitor what they were doing. I told them, up front, what I was going to be doing, and why. The WHY was always the most important part. They (thankfully) chose to stop the behavior that was causing me to be over their shoulder, and the behavior would stop. To simply make it a habit is questionable at best.
James Allard | 1 year, 8 months ago
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Spying or not on your kids
Call it whatever it can be called, I’ll try my best to find out what my kids are up to. Regardless of whether it is private or not, I have the right to know. They come before anything else, especially their safety and piece of mind!
Lyllibeth Muller | 1 year, 8 months ago
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teaching comes first
In a world as fast-paced and connected as ours,some things are out of our hands.
Primarily parents should teach children about the internet,without using scare tactics, to allow them to form their own ideas, and then discuss what is safe to do, and who can see what they are doing.
As soon as a child is of an age where they make their own decisions, they deserve private space; even if it’s only the space between their ears.
To spy on a child’s online activity—-their every move—- is to peek at them through keyholes, tap their phone conversations, and read their diary. It is one and the same, since most children have replaced those modes of expression and communications with internet stand-ins…
Privacy is so, so important. It allows a child to be acknowledged as an individual. It shows a respect for them, that they in turn can learn to have for others. Learn to trust your child, and teach them to be trustworthy.
lois kazan-hernandez | 1 year, 8 months ago
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Some spying, some not....
OK, the fact that parents can monitor absolutely everything that the child does, now that’s spying. I personally IM people across the country every day. It would be like talking to your friends while your mom stands there, doing the whole ‘hi, I’m his mom’ thing. It’s bloody horrible. Now, monitoring your child’s grades is not spying. That is something that needs to be monitored almost constantly, because trying to pull a child’s failing grade up is bloody difficult. Basically saying; when at home, give your kids freedom, but let them know their boundaries. School, however, is something that will set you up for life, so it should be monitored very, very closely.
Average Person | 1 year, 8 months ago
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We all live with informational overload
I’m a parent and, in addition, I was born in 1941. I remember the world before the first TV ever came into our house and when it finally did it had a 9 inch screen. No computers. No calculators. No TV. Imagine that!!
The amount of new information I encountered each day then was a drop in the bucket compared to what we are bombarded with today. As a former teacher, believe me when I say that I experienced a generation that have a very short attention span, all due to the waves of change I experienced over the course of my life the results of which are now standard operating procedure.
Rather than trying to prevent young people from watching the wrong programs or surfing the bad web pages, it may well be better to speak directly to what they are experiencing and will experience continually no matter what we do as parents of teachers. We may have to talk to them directly about what the world is now feeding them every day. We may have to set aside some time and periodically ask questions of them find out what they think about what they are seeing and hearing from their friends, actually deal with the craziness they experience every day.
The problem is that someday, maybe sooner than we want to even think about, they are going to have to face the world entirely on their own and take full responsibility for what they do. The waves of information are only going to get bigger. We’d best teach them how to ride the waves without drowning in the crosscurrents.
Pasquale Bottiglieri | 1 year, 8 months ago
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Foundation before technology
I think the use of technology can definitely provide a more thorough insight into your child’s life. But, as your child becomes a teenager, they will need their privacy and I think the best policy is to make sure the foundation you have set during the early years is a strong one. Then you can rest assured that even though your child/teenager will be exploring their natural curiosities (no matter how much technology you have) about life with sensibility. I think that monitoring what they are exposed to is good to a certain extent, but the most important thing is making sure you are available for them to talk to about the issues they face.
I have to say that checking children’s school progress online daily is not a positive contribution to their experience in school. They will stress about school enough when/if they go to college, let them enjoy primary and secondary school a little more and let them be a kid without having to compete in the classroom for approval.
Sharon Keefauver | 1 year, 8 months ago
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Taking it a little too far
Yeah, it’s a parent’s responsibility to be aware of where their kids are and what they are doing, but what ever happened to good, old fashioned trust? If you have a kid you can’t trust, sure maybe spy on them for their betterment, but I would think there are bigger problems than what they are doing, like WHY are they doing it? A responsible parent shouldn’t have to spy on their kids. A responsible parent should know in their heart that they have equipped thier kids to be responsible, and then give them the freedom to do so, even if it includes letting them make some mistakes, and then, of course helping them work through the consequences of said mistakes, through which, the child would learn more responsibility.
Tinkerbelle1978 | 1 year, 7 months ago
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Earning trust
My mom trusted me and I was a good kid – most of the time. But, I lied to go places that my parents wouldn’t approve of and went to parties they didn’t know about. Kids are too immature to pass up a good time it they can get away with it.
I will grill my kids on where they are going and then do spot checks. I may not call or drive by a when they are at friends house every time, but enough to keep them wondering. I may be in the back of a movie theatre. Then I’ll know how they act when they think no parents are around. That’s how I’ll know they’ve earned the trust.
Lisa Schwartz | 1 year, 7 months ago
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