The past two months have been fairly exhausting. With his new job, Steve now walks in the door at 7:15, instead of 6:15 every day. He also leaves the house an hour earlier. More parenting and house chores were moved to my side of the ledger.
Both boys are in new schools. I have to pick up Jonah from the high school after sports every day. He has more homework, which needs some minor parental oversight. (He forgot to turn in a homework comparing Hobbes and Locke. ARG. I used to teach classes on Hobbes and Locke!) Ian is in special ed, so it seems like we have a meeting every two weeks.
Things break. An hour before I hosted a pasta dinner for 15 cross country boys last Friday, water started pouring out of the bottom of the sink. I had to drain 4 pounds of pasta in the laundry room. A broken sink = two visits from the plumber and a trip to Home Depot for a new Delta faucet.
The schedules and the rhythms of the day are off, so I can’t go on autopilot. I have to make lists every morning.
So, I read this article about parental surveillance software with some dread. There’s more to do?
For the iPhone I will soon be buying him, I can get an iPhone Spy Stick, to be plugged into a USB port while he sleeps; it downloads Web histories, e-mails, and text messages, even the deleted ones. Or I can get Mobile Spy, software that would let me follow, in real time, his online activity and geographical location. Also available are an innocent-looking iPhone Dock Camera that would recharge his battery while surreptitiously recording video in his room, and a voice-activated audio monitor, presumably for the wild parties he’s going to throw when his father and I go out of town.
We do spot checks of Jonah’s phone and give long lectures about the lack of privacy on the Internet, but I never went full NSA on his cellphone. Should I?
Apt. 11d 
I read that too fast and thought “Time for shopping” in light of the previous post. So I was surprised when I got to the snooping at the end.
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When I think of Avonte story, that’s my first thought, that some form of tracker would have been an important solution to the problem (the FiLIP sounds like a good idea).
I use the tracking app on the iPhone for my children. It’s an easy way of knowing where they are and my kids do not currently have the right to be somewhere that I don’t know about. I think tracking without permission is not acceptable, and I don’t do that (my kids know that I track them). This is spot checking, location, as well as texts, photos, etc. on the phone.
The rest of it — video in their room, downloading computer use, well, that’s too much. I think my kids should know I can and do watch them, but I don’t think I need ways of monitoring them that assume that they are trying to hide things from me. And, yes, the data generated would be impossible to keep track of.
Did anyone else see the article about schools hiring data tracking/analysis companies to track their students online activities? (i.e. hiring NSA-style rejects to keep track of information on the web).
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Tracking is not going to solve the problem in all cases. And it can be detrimental to the relationship you have with your kids. Read the three articles here about a dad who spied on his daughter: http://storify.com/lblanken/teens-and-online-behavior
Spot checking is usually fine. Knowing your kid and their friends, even better. Talking to them regularly, better still.
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We never invested in the tracking tools but, with Autistic Youngest, I still get copies of all of her emails (an infrequent communication tool so mostly it’s to alert her that, hey, Granny sent an email!) and she still has to check with me before joining any forum or signing up for an online account.
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My eldest is 8, so maybe I don’t get it yet and I will in a few years. I suppose I should start with saying that I’m monogamously married, have been for 19 years, never did anything terrible before that, etc. In my late teens I was on the very early web chatting in a sexual way with men older than me and as a teen I browsed the porn collections of the people for whom I babysat. I talked to my friends on the phone where my parents could not hear me, sometimes engaging in a “who can create the most sexual innuendo” game. I hung out after school in the alley behind the school, where we occasionally had beer although I was a bit straight-laced and didn’t drink it. I went to an all-girls’ camp and had sex with one of the town boys and saw my first few joints although being asthmatic, you couldn’t pay me to inhale.
There are definitely worse things online than there were then (although my parents had /no/ idea it was even possible so there wasn’t anyone asking about it) and the whole sexting and trash-talking and bullying stuff bothers me, and meeting people from online without adult supervision is a total no-go for us.
But I am not entirely clear what the concern is that is making parents so crazy upset that they have to log their kids’ activities to this extent. Is it that an underage friend will send pictures that will lead to prosecution for child porn? Is it images of horrific porn (which does exist) that will taint their souls forever?
I am not posting this as a rhetorical device. I just don’t get it. Not all the experiences I listed above were ideal, but the actually damaging stuff was stuff like university hazing. The online connections I made have lasted in some cases 20 years, have landed me jobs, etc.
Right now my plan is to keep an eye on my child, maybe spot check, listen in, make sure he has strong connections to friends and family here, and if he gets obsessive look into it. I don’t know if that’s scarily naive or what but this whole monitor-everything movement scares me too. I don’t know how you grow up if your parents are monitoring all your keystrokes and text is how kids communicate.
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“But I am not entirely clear what the concern is that is making parents so crazy upset that they have to log their kids’ activities to this extent. Is it that an underage friend will send pictures that will lead to prosecution for child porn? Is it images of horrific porn (which does exist) that will taint their souls forever?”
One of the possibilities you’re not thinking of is, what if your child gets accused of bullying another child into suicide?
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Or your child is the victim . . . but, still not sure snooping will help. Some of this stuff happens on anonymous sites. Most kids I know know how to circumvent these things if they want to.
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I think I’d be more afraid my child would be actually guilty, I mean as fears go, because that would be awful. When I was teen I was briefly a mean girl (more commonly on the other side of it). The adults actually didn’t handle it well (they basically gave us the impression we shouldn’t be mean but were right about her ‘issues’), and I am glad the girl we made fun of didn’t kill herself. Kids did, I just don’t think people put the guilt/blame/situation together in the same way.
But I am not sure that fear would have justified monitoring our every move. Better moral education, yes.
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