Parenting plugged-in teenagers

Computer-saavy kids now face more monitoring of their online activities.
By YUKI NOGUCHI
WASHINGTON POST
Maribeth Luftglass is a gumshoe mom.
The parent of three preteens periodically reads the text messages on their cellphones, monitors whom and when they're instant messaging and searches the Internet to make sure they haven't started blogging or set up profiles on social networking sites.
Her kids, in turn, sometimes attempt a little techno-judo to deflect her surveillance efforts: They change the text and background on the monitor to blue and black, making it harder for her to read the screen from across the room. They set their instant-messaging status to "invisible," so she can't tell they're online.
"I monitor all their online activities," and the kids are well aware that their technology-access privileges come with that cost, said Luftglass, who is the Fairfax County, Va., public school system's assistant superintendent of information technology.
The game of parental espionage and counterespionage gets ever more complex with technology.
Companies such as AOL and LLC have long been in the business of marketing products to help filter Web content and keep children safe while online. Now that some cellphones come with Global Positioning Systems and tracking software can log computer activity, parents are gaining new windows into their children's whereabouts and activities.
In most cases the corresponding transparency allows children to explore greater independence at the same time that it tethers them closer to parents who, for the most part, are acting out of a desire for more knowledge and security. And as parents and children tussle over where to draw the line for privacy, some children say parental intrusion simply forces them to create more-sophisticated ruses to undermine the increased supervision.
Where are the kids?
Recently, Sprint Nextel Corp. introduced its Family Locator feature, the first major-carrier service that allows parents to receive text messages of the address closest to their child's location. Disney Mobile, the cellular unit of the Walt Disney Co., plans to launch its service with child-tracking this month, and still another, Wherify Wireless Inc., plans to launch a safety-focused phone for children in August.
More than half of parents of children between the ages of 4 and 12 said they had a high interest in such a service, said Clem Driscoll, president of the research and consulting firm C.J. Driscoll & amp; Associates, which recently surveyed 4,000 parents on behalf of industry clients. Many younger children are willing to accept the trade-off, he said. "The cool factor can override the fact that they're being tracked."
Interest in the service declines somewhat with parents of older children, Driscoll said. "Parents with teenagers have mixed feelings. Some of them feel like they don't want to infringe on their privacy," he said. Tracking might lead to resentment, some parents told him.
The Internet can also weave intricate traps and ruses for children and their parents.
Increasingly, schools are relying on software programs that allow parents to access their kids' attendance, homework and test and quiz scores online. Fairfax County (Va.) Public Schools plans to pilot a program with that type of software this year. For the most zealous of snooping parents, there are even software programs that log key strokes and document the Web sites visited, allowing snoopers to trace old e-mail or instant-message conversations.
"Parents have a choice: Do you give kids autonomy or do you [watch] them," said Danah Boyd, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley who studies adolescent use of social networking sites.
Old concerns, new techniques
Parental access to this kind of real-time knowledge about their children is relatively new. Before cellphones, text messaging, social networking sites and school Web portals, parents simply had to trust that their children were where they said they were, doing what they were supposed to do.
Three years ago, 14-year-old Hunter Phillips called his father to say he was at a friend's house -- but several minutes later his father spotted him roving around the center of town. That incident became the inspiration for a GPS tracking business, called ULocate Communications Inc., founded by Alan Phillips in Framingham, Mass., and used by multiple cellphone carriers to track kids.
"It's a given that parents should know where their kid is," said Hunter Phillips, now 17. And the service doesn't work when the phone is off -- something that gives him the occasional flexibility to tell his parents he's on the road home when in fact he might not have left his friend's house yet, Phillips said.
More onerous and restrictive is Hopkinton High School's Web site, which recently allowed Phillips' parents to see that he'd scored a poor grade on a test -- landing him in hot water before he even reached home. To circumvent such incidents, "some kids have neglected to tell their parents that the site exists," Phillips said.
Parents just don't understand
For the most part, it's a fallacy -- or maybe a fantasy -- to think the average parent can outsmart teens when it comes to technology.
One classmate who "never does any work" once showed off a report card showing all A's and B's to an astonished Phillips, who said he asked how he'd finagled such a fine performance with no apparent effort.
"A little Photoshop helped," his software-savvy classmate informed him.
Often parents find it's the child who uses the tools to seek out Mom or Dad.
"They are the ones that call me more often than I call them," said Victoria Strohmeyer, an attorney who lives in McLean, Va. Nevertheless, she plans to send text messages to her 17-year-old daughter, Sarah, if she decides to attend the prom. "I'm always there; I'm watching over you," she plans to tell her, so she won't be tempted to join in with classmates who might be drinking and driving.
Child psychologists say monitoring children is ethically and socially acceptable to kids if it is fully disclosed.
"You need to tell your child," said Marc Skelton, a clinical psychologist in Laguna Niguel, Calif. "Ultimately, parents have a say in the end, but there's a process to it. The reason kids object to [secretive spying] is they're not part of the process."
Boyd, the Berkeley doctoral candidate, said that for decades, teenagers have looked for places to hang out with their peer groups, whether at a community center, a mall or a social networking Web site. If a parent walks up to a child's group of friends at a mall, they might stop chatting or suddenly change the subject. But in a virtual space, a parent can enter anonymously, and the child has no warning that anyone is listening in on his conversations with friends.
Although some parents may chose to lurk in the background, others try instead to keep up with their children's activities by joining their kids' social circles, by establishing their own blogs or Web pages on sites such as MySpace and linking with their kids' blogs.
"I've seen messages where kids will leave comments like, 'Yo, Mrs. Whatever,'" on their friends' parents' blogs, Boyd said. "Those are parents that teens really do respect."