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Parental Detectives
Using Digital Technology to Spy on Your Teen
By Kelly Burgess
To snoop or not to snoop, that is the question. With apologies to Shakespeare, that is the question that bedevils parents in our electronic age as much as Hamlet's existential angst did in the Middle Ages. While Hamlet was torn between the pain of his life and the uncertainty of death, what we're torn between involves something more precious than ourselves – our children. And what we're torn between is respecting their private lives and our fear of the great electronic unknown.
Vicki Courtney, parenting expert and author of Logged On and Tuned Out: A Non-Techie's Guide to Parenting a Tech-Savvy Generation (B&H Books, 2007), makes no apologies for being a snoop, nor does she try to hide it from her children. Four years ago, she installed a program on the family computer to monitor their every keystroke. However, she says that watching them that closely was never her intent, nor does she think her actions are an invasion of her children's privacy, because, as she rhetorically asks, what privacy should they have?
"They live in my house, which I own and where I pay all their bills and am responsible for them," Courtney says. "I don't think it's acceptable to stalk every conversation your kid has, and that's not the goal. However, the fact that your kids know you have a presence and that you're stopping in from time to time to make sure everything is OK will keep them from doing something online they know you wouldn't want them doing."
What Courtney doesn't want her kids doing is pretty straightforward. She doesn't want them (particularly her daughter) posting provocative or inappropriate photos on their Web sites, giving their contact information to anyone they don't know or talking to someone who may be masking their true identity. For her, it's about protecting her children when they're at an age where their emotional maturity is not developed and they have poor impulse control. In fact, Courtney no longer monitors her two older children, a son who's 19 and in college, and her daughter, 17.
