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September 20, 2011

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Tech helps worried parents spy

By David Crary | September 20, 2011, Tuesday | Print Edition

IN the 21st century, parenthood and paranoia often walk hand in hand. For some, the blessed event is followed by high-tech surveillance, a monitoring system that tracks the baby's breathing rhythms and relays infrared images from the nursery. The next investment might be a nanny cam, to keep watch on the child's hired caregivers. Toddlers and grade schoolers can be equipped with GPS devices enabling a parent to know their location should something go awry.

To cope with the uncertainties of the teen years, some parents acquire spyware to monitor their children's online and cell phone activity. Others resort to home drug-testing kits.

Added together, there's a diverse, multibillion-dollar industry seeking to capitalize on parents' worst fears about their children, fears aggravated by occasional high-profile abductions and the dangers lurking in cyberspace. One mistake can put a child at risk or go viral online, quickly ruining a reputation.

"There's a new set of challenges for parents, and all sorts of new tools that can help them do their job," says David Walsh, a child psychologist in Minneapolis in the US state of Minnesota. "On the other hand, we have very powerful industries that create these products and want to sell as many as possible, so they try to convince parents they need them."

Some parents need little convincing.

In New York City, a policeman-turned-politician recorded a video earlier this year offering tips to parents about how to search their children's bedrooms and possessions for drugs and weapons. In the video, State Senator Eric Adams, who has a teenage son, insists that children have no constitutional right to privacy at home and shows how contraband could be hidden in backpacks, jewelry boxes, even under a doll's dress.

"You have a duty and obligation to protect the members of your household," he says.

Another parent who preaches proactive vigilance is Mary Kozakiewicz of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, whose daughter, Alicia, was abducted as a 13-year-old in 2002 by a man she met online. He chained, beat and raped her before she was rescued four days later.

In recent years, both mother and daughter have campaigned to raise awareness of Internet-related dangers.

Mary Kozakiewicz urges parents to monitor children's computer and cell phone use, and says those who balk out of respect for privacy are being naive.

"It's not about privacy - it's about keeping them safe," she says.

On a different part of the spectrum are parents such as Lenore Skenazy, a mother of two teens in New York City who wrote a book called "Free Range Kids: How To Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)."

Skenazy, who let one of her sons ride the New York subway alone when he was 9, contends that many marketers exploit parents' ingrained worries about their children's safety.

"The idea is that the only good parent is a parent who is somehow watching over their child 24/7," she says. "You feel nothing should take precedence over monitoring your child's well-being every second of the day ... from the time they're born to when they go off to college."

Joe Kelly of St Paul, Minnesota, helped his wife rear twin girls (they are now adults) and founded a national advocacy group called Dads and Daughters. Like Skenazy, he bemoans commercial exploitation of parental anxiety.

"Markets play on this fear that something horrific is going to happen to your child, when the odds of that are minuscule," he says. "It might happen, but to have their whole childhood predicated on this remote possibility is, in the aggregate, even more damaging."

Psychologists who work with troubled adolescents and teens say parents often ask if they should be doing more surveillance.

"Ideally, parents establish good open communication and trust with their children, and they don't need to do all these things," says Neil Bernstein, a psychologist in Washington, DC. "But if the child is doing something to create suspicion, you can't expect parents to turn their back and not monitor."

Bernstein, author of "How to Keep Your Teenager Out of Trouble and What to do if You Can't," says the best approach is a balanced one - neither overly zealous and paranoid nor uninvolved and neglectful.

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