angela's blog

I saw a promo for a newscast about parents monitoring their children. From what I could gather, there's a device out there, similar to a cell phone, that can be forever monitoring kids. It can tell you where your kid is, where he's going, how fast he's driving, and so on. I understand that these electronic devices are useful. And believe me I am all for technology and advancing it. After all, a built in GPS system in my friend's car got us around a flooded road when we tried to go to the beach. A cell phone let me know when my younger brother got into a car accident and needed me to come get him. But, and perhaps I just don't understand as someone who is not a parent, is it really necessary to get one of these devices just to keep an eye on a teenager? Surely the average American parent doesn't need an expensive device to know where his or her child is? I'm not THAT old and yet at 24 I can still remember when it was my responsibility to call my parents if I left my friend's house to go to an ice cream shop. Or if I was staying at school late to study with a friend. I didn't have a cell phone. My parents didn't have a GPS system. They had to trust me to tell them where I was and what I was doing. Now, granted, most of my friends and I were pretty good kids. If we were staying after school it was because we were working on a project or practicing for an orchestra performance or at a sports practice. If we left a friend's house, it was to go to another friend's house, or in some "extreme" cases we'd leave a friend's house to go get something to eat, go to a Barnes and Noble to get a dessert or soda, and it might be a few hours before we got home. Is this super child monitoring device really that necessary? Or is it an advertising gimmick to replace good parenting? I don't believe that there's any way to replace good parenting. You can install cameras, plant phones or GPS devices to watch your kids but shouldn't the point of these technological devices be a complement to parenting, to be helpful instead of to replace good sense? For instance, I think it's a great idea to give your teenage son or daughter a cell phone with a limited number of minutes so that you can be contacted if they leave where they are, if they're stuck in traffic, in case something happens to him or her on the way home from a party. But is it really necessary to monitor your child to the extent of how fast is he driving, where exactly she's going? Is your child really not trustworthy enough without these devices? The disclaimer to all this is that I'm not a parent. I don't know what it's like to have a teenager out at all hours of the night, I don't know what it's like to hand over the keys to your car to your 16-year-old and say "Drive carefully", I don't know what it's like to drop your daughter off at a friend's house and just assume that her friend is as responsible as you know your daughter is. But my point is that isn't there something that can be done about all this? Something that parents can do? I've been the victim of good parenting and I never went anywhere without calling. One time, ONCE, I forgot to call because my friend Sarah (of law school graduation fame) and I were watching a movie at her house, and we fell asleep and lost track of time. It is, and always will be, hard to keep track of time when you're not awake! I got home at 10:30 or so, even though I had said I was going to be home at 9:30. I got into enormous trouble. And that was that. But after that I was still allowed to go out, it was an honest mistake. It never happened again. The responsibility that I learned in high school, to let people know whether I'm going to be late, to show up to places on time, and to avoid situations that might be trouble later, has followed me up to now. Isn't that the whole idea of parenting? To teach your kids to stand on their own two feet and to know right from wrong, without someone watching them all the time?

Posted by Mrs. Cooper on 5.15.2006 at 5/15/2006 05:31:00 PM | Permalink