Shannon Proudfoot, Canwest News Service, December 28 2008

From electronically leashed toddlers to test kits that promise to reveal the details of teens’ sex lives, technology is offering parents increasingly sophisticated ways to track their child’s every move.

But as these products become more affordable and accessible, experts and parents worry that companies may be exploiting parents’ fears and creating a generation of anxious and needy children. "The fear marketing in the parenting industry starts during pregnancy - ’You have to do this, you have to do that,’" says Ann Douglas, the Peterborough, Ont.-based author of The Mother of All Parenting Books. "Parents need to really take a step back because we’re programmed to want to protect our children, so our initial response is to react instinctively and say, ’OK, I have to get that.’"

Many of these high-tech safety products feature bright, toylike designs and cute names like "Angel Alert" and "GiggleBug," but the sales pitches are anything but cuddly.

"An unattended wandering three to five-year-old-child is at risk for shock, burns, falling, poisoning, traffic accidents, and even abduction," one website warns parents.

ChildSafetyTech.com, which ships to Canada, offers a candy-coloured "AmberWatch" that promises to emit an alarm with a decibel level comparable a rock concert when a panic button is pushed.

Several websites sell bullet- and knife-proof Kevlar backpacks priced up to several hundred dollars.

Brickhouse Security offers computer surveillance software and key-capture devices to monitor kids online and nanny-cams hidden inside teddy bears, clocks and air purifiers for keeping an eye on caregivers. There are also a variety of tracking systems that include a transmitter for the child and a parental receiver unit that tracks a child’s whereabouts and sounds an alarm if they wander too far.

Brickhouse started out five years ago providing specialized equipment to law enforcement, says CEO Todd Morris, but requests from parents of special-needs children and people caring for seniors with dementia convinced the company there was a commercial market.

A dramatic Duracell commercial touting the battery brand’s reliability in the Brickhouse Locator has started airing in Canada, where Morris estimates about 15 per cent of the New York company’s sales are based.

"I would never want these products to stand in the way of old-fashioned common sense," says Shelby Gilbert, the Windsor, Ont.-area mother of three children aged five, two and one year, and the author of a blog called Dress Down Moms. "You don’t want to depend on these things."

Tracking devices might be useful in an amusement park or large shopping mall, she says, but at home she simply keeps a close eye on her children and makes sure they’re playing in safe areas.

High-tech devices should never replace teaching children about safety at each stage in their development, whether it’s toddlers learning to distinguish toys from dangerous objects or teens telling their parents where they’re going after school, says Christina Rinaldi, a child psychologist at the University of Alberta.

"What you want them to be able to do is make decisions, be critical thinkers and be able to understand their environments," she says.

Rosanne Parent, a mother of seven children ranging in age from 18 months to 12 years, is turned off by the fear-based marketing employed by some companies. Author of a parenting blog called Telling Mom, the northern Ontario resident believes parents tracking their children too closely run the risk of setting up a distrustful dynamic or stunting their independence.

"When you start needing the gadgets to monitor every aspect of their lives, you can almost fall into a trap of having too much dependence on you and not letting them have a little privacy," she says.

The vigilant products don’t stop when kids head off to high school, either.

This fall Ford Motor Company unveiled MyKey, a monitoring device that allows parents limit the speed and stereo volume when their teens are behind the wheel.

The teen section of the Brickhouse website offers a cellphone monitor that can read deleted text messages or restrict calls, "BlackBox" hidden cameras for the car and grim statistics about alcohol and drug use and sexual behaviour. The CheckMate infidelity test kit has been repurposed as a $49.95 teen sex screening kit that promises to detect fluids on clothing and help parents "find out the truth and establish a dialogue with confidence."

Morris at Brickhouse says these products help compensate for the loss of parental oversight brought on by busier dual-earner households and kids with their own cellphones and Internet access.

"This is not taking away privacy necessarily," he says. "It’s bringing back the balance to the place where parents were comfortable with it, where they had some level of knowledge of what was going on in their children’s lives."

The problem with covert surveillance is what to do with any information you uncover, says Douglas, because teens would be justifiably outraged" to find out their parents were playing forensic investigator in their bedrooms.

"Are you going to be able to go to your child and say, ’I tested your underwear’?" she says. "Probably anything you’ve gained is far less valuable than what you’ve just done to the relationship."
(original link)

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THE DOCTOR: All part of the elite’s plan to DESTROY the traditional family unit and turn us all against each other. These items are always targeted towards the safety-minded, but there are so many possible applications for such products it would be impossible to say which ones can be used for what purposes. Some say it is okay to monitor your children’s internet but not a spouse’s internet use, but the technology is there to apply it to anyone. You are trusting someone (who you KNOW is already breaching someone else’s privacy) not to do the very thing they are doing to someone else to you. Maybe you could demand to monitor THEM to make sure they don’t monitor YOU, but then THEY would want to monitor YOU to make sure YOU weren’t monitoring THEM unless to find out if THEY were monitoring YOU. It is a vicious circle, and that is exactly the way they want it.

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