NEW YORK — 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 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 cellphone 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,” said David Walsh, a child psychologist in Minneapolis. “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 on how to search their children’s bedrooms and possessions for drugs and weapons. In the video, state Sen. 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, 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, mother and daughter have both campaigned to raise awareness of Internet-related dangers.
Mary Kozakiewicz urges parents to monitor children’s computer and cellphone 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 said,
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’s somehow watching over their child 24/7,” she said.
Joe Kelly of St. Paul, Minn., who helped his wife raise twin girls (they’re 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 said. “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.
Neil Bernstein, a psychologist in Washington, D.C., and 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.
A look at some of the monitoring tactics and products available to parents:
Baby monitors:
These devices — some limited to audio monitoring, others also with video capability — have developed a reputation as a mixed blessing. They can provide parents with peace of mind, freeing them to be elsewhere in the house while the baby naps, but sometimes they accentuate anxiety.
“Some parents are reassured by hearing and seeing every whimper and movement. Others find such close surveillance to be nerve-racking,” says Consumer Reports, which has tested many of the monitors.
The monitors operate within a selected radio frequency band to send sound from a baby’s room to a receiver in another room, a technology which can be vulnerable to interference from other electronic devices. Prices of models tested by Consumer Reports ranged from $30 for audio monitors to more than $200 for some with video.
Models at the high end of the price scale include the Dropcam Echo audio-video system, for $279. Its manufacturer says the system automatically detects motion and sound, and sends alerts to a parent’s smartphone or iPad.
Parents are warned not to rely on monitors to prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and they should be sure that the monitors’ electrical cords are kept away from cribs. Earlier this year, about 1.7 million Summer Infant video monitors were recalled after being linked to the strangulation deaths of two infants.
Tracking devices:
Of the roughly 800,000 children reported missing in the U.S. each year, the vast majority are runaways or were abducted by a parent. But there are enough kidnappings by strangers to fuel a large, evolving market for products catering to apprehensive parents.
The devices range from clip-on alarms to GPS locaters that can be put in a backpack or stuffed in a doll, but they have limited range and can raise safety concerns of their own.
Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, says the devices can be helpful in some circumstances but worries about overreliance on them.
“Some of them encourage parents, perhaps unwittingly, to forget their basic responsibilities,” he said. “There are parents who think they can depend on the technology, not on themselves.”
He recounted the case of one little girl who activated her wristband alarm when she was abducted. The abductor cut off the device, left it behind and later killed the girl. Allen said the child might have been better off yelling for help.
Generally, the gadgets are in two parts — a main device carried by the parent and a small alarm attached to the child. If a child vanishes, the parent can activate the alarm.
Other gadgets use GPS technology, relying on satellite signals, that allows parents using a Web browser to track the location of an enabled device such as a cellphone.
One company, Brickhouse Security, offers a GPS child locater for $200 that functions as a digital watch and can be locked into the child’s wrist. If forcibly removed, an alert is sent to the parent’s cellphone and email.
Spyware:
For many parents, one of the toughest decisions is whether to spy on a child’s computer and cellphone activity. It’s common for some children to send more than 100 text messages a day, and a recent Associated Press-MTV poll found that about one-quarter of teens had shared sexually explicit photos, videos and chat by cellphone or online.
Walsh, the Minneapolis psychologist, says the best initial step for parents concerned about online risks is a heart-to-heart talk with the child, with monitoring used as a contingency measure only if there’s clear justification.
“If it does make sense to use some spyware, I would never do that in secret way,” said Walsh, whose own three children are now adults. “Tell your children you’ll check on them from time to time. Just that knowledge can be effective.”
Mary Kozakiewicz disagrees, saying deployment of spyware must be kept secret.
“You can’t let them know it’s there, or they’ll do it at a friend’s house,” she said.
AmberWatch promotes various safety devices and technologies, including SafeText — a system enabling parents, for $5 a month, to monitor their children’s text-messaging. The system sends alerts when it detects potentially dangerous or inappropriate text messages, so the parents don’t have to review vast numbers of messages themselves.
Another enterprise, Software4Parents, reviews and sells a range of spyware products. Among the site’s featured products are Spector PRO and eBlaster, for sale at $99, and touted as ways way to monitor online chats, instant messages and emails.
“Receive complete transcripts of the websites they visit, keystrokes they type and more — all delivered right to your email inbox,” the site says.
Several spyware brands, including Mobile Spy and MobiStealth, now offer systems that work with Android, Google’s operating system for mobile phones, ranging in price from $100 to $150 per year.
The software “gives you complete control over your child’s cellphone,” says MobiStealth.
Article source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2016150590_ptparentpatrol10.html?syndication=rss
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