Small Explosion in the Lab??? Ignore it, Mom . . . .

In the July 12th issue of Time Magazine, Nancy Gibbs has an essay called "The Case for Keeping Out." She states that "As adults, we shudder at how our shopping is tracked and our searches searched and horrified that anyone can go online and find a satellite picture of our house. And then there are our children, who happily stand exposed in the public square, posting secrets on the Facebook walls, yet remain eternally elusive to the people who sleep in the next bedroom over."

She makes the point later than a variety of technologies exist to "aid" parents in snooping on their kids--ranging from ways to "crack" laptop passwords to drug-testing strands of hair from the teen's hairbrush. Software is sold that can be serendipitously installed on an iPhone that will "log" every text, every call, every GPS location.

Ms Gibbs says that she understands that impulse--it gives parents the impression that they are still "in control" of their teens. But she also (correctly) states that when it comes to technology, the kids hold the higher ground.

It is even more true today that with teens, we must parent using relationships rather than rules. As Ms Gibbs puts it, "if we don't trust our kids, we invite them to be less trustworthy."

In the end, we must allow for the "normal youthful mess-making, for it's practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are."

So yes, the technology exists (mostly because control-crazy parents will shell out the money for it!) to spy on our kids. But if we have done our jobs while they were younger, at this stage, willful knowledge can be just as damaging as willful ignorance.