[Mb-civic] ATTENTION PARENTS: IMs: What's a Mother to Do? - Ruth Marcus - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

IMs: What's a Mother to Do?

By Ruth Marcus
Tuesday, March 7, 2006; A17

I've been wrestling recently with the issue of domestic surveillance. 
Not the NSA-al-Qaeda variety. I mean an even more controversial kind of 
domestic surveillance: spying on your kids.

Time was, a parent's major privacy dilemma was whether to peek at a 
child's diary. More than one mom of my acquaintance -- some sheepish, 
some unrepentant -- has acknowledged engaging in such old-fashioned 
snooping. But as more and more communication has migrated from 
ink-on-paper to cyberspace, the always imprecise calibration of 
children's privacy vs. parental oversight has taken on new layers of 
moral complexity and technological feasibility. Big Brother, meet Big 
Mother.

Is monitoring your kids' Internet activity -- say, reviewing the Web 
sites they've visited -- a violation of their rights or a paradigm of 
parental responsibility? At what age is this Net nannyism appropriate? 
When kids are just learning to surf the World Wide Web, certainly, but 
it's not as if you can stop worrying once the training wheels are off. 
One mother told me she discreetly checks the porn sites in her teenage 
son's history folder to make certain they're not too extreme. I cringed, 
too, but her approach may be realistic; teenage boys will be teenage 
boys, and they're not just looking at centerfolds these days.

The questions don't get any easier from there. Do gentle parents read 
their children's e-mail? Install software to intercept their instant 
messages? Keep track of who's in their chat rooms? Read their blogs? 
Even for those who insist they wouldn't read an old-fashioned diary or 
eavesdrop on a telephone call, privacy in cyberspace poses difficult issues.

The first, of course, is keeping kids safe and away from harmful 
material. But intruding on the grounds of safety is the easy call. The 
harder one is deciding what expectation of privacy children ought to 
have in their online lives. In part, this is because, with the Internet, 
the medium affects the message. The simultaneous immediacy and distance 
afforded by Internet communication leads people -- children as well as 
adults -- to write things that they wouldn't say in person, or even over 
the phone. Mean girls tend to get even meaner in cyberspace.

Think of all the nasty notes you wrote -- or, if you're more like me, 
that were written about you -- in middle school. Then imagine the 
ability to cut and paste them and send them to your 10 closest buddies. 
The Internet facilitates and expands the ability of kids to do the 
dumbest things.

And there's another factor: Kids today probably aren't any more apt than 
kids a generation or more ago to do dumb things. But they may be more 
apt to do them younger. That in itself alters the privacy calculus. And 
so, merely shielding your kids against talking to strangers online or 
visiting inappropriate sites might not be going far enough.

My husband and I have been thinking about all this lately because of the 
IM fever that's infected our daughters, about to be 9 and 11. Instant 
messaging -- often with the same friends they're simultaneously on the 
phone with -- has become their new hobby. And while I'm not worried 
about who they're "talking" to -- I know who's on their buddy list -- I 
do worry about what's being said, and how.

Yes, 9 sounded awfully young to us, too, and, yes, we thought hard about 
just saying no, to her and her older sister. But taking away a 
middle-schooler's IM these days is like denying her access to the 
telephone. And, or so we told ourselves, even if we were letting them 
jump the gun, we'd be confronting the same problems in a few years.

Instead, we've had The Talk -- many talks, actually -- about the rules 
of the Internet road. Still, there's something disturbingly familiar 
about the eyes-glazed-over look I get whenever this subject comes up. It 
is, I fear, the same disdainful yeah, yeah, yeah response my parents got 
when they lectured me 30-some years ago about whatever it was I was 
probably already doing.

I was talking about this with some parents the other day when the issue 
of monitoring software came up -- programs that, depending on the degree 
of intrusiveness, record all Internet use or simply log 
instant-messaging conversations. Roaming around the Internet afterward, 
I came across an IM monitoring program that offered a free 10-day trial 
period. I confess: The download tempted me, and I did click. I snooped 
on a few of my kids' conservations, which were notable mostly for their 
inanity and deliberate (I hope) misspellings.

So was I satisfied? Kind of, in that sick and guilty way you feel after 
you've downed an entire pint of Ben & Jerry's in one stealthy sitting. 
Would I install the software permanently? Don't know, but probably not 
without telling my kids it was there.

I do know this: It's all made me nostalgic for the ethically unambiguous 
days when the only domestic surveillance we felt the need to engage in 
was switching on the baby monitor and listening for the snufflings of a 
sleeping infant.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/06/AR2006030601238.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060307/bad46b53/attachment.htm