Don’t trust your kids? There’s an app for that!
1984 and Brave New World scared me. I like to think that a good book changes you in some way. It makes you appreciate life, allows you to look at the world from a different perspective, or opens your eyes to something new. Huxley and Orwell, they didn’t necessarily open my eyes. They just changed me by scaring the shit out of me.
What if there actually was a world where your every move was monitored? If you sped, swerved, or drifted in a car, someone far away would know about it? If you sent a sexually provocative text, someone far away would read it? And what if that someone was your mom or dad?
That world is upon us. Behold, the Protector, which is about to be released from the nice folks at Taser. It just might change parenting forever.
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Here’s how it works: You, the parent, load the program on your child’s cell phone. (You do this with their knowledge, although not necessarily with their consent.) Once that’s done, you basically have tracking software on your kid.
It follows the child’s every move, sending a log with a record of the phone’s location (which, as long as your child doesn’t ditch the phone, should tell you where your kid is, too.) There’s even a feature that sets off an alert when the phone leaves a pre-determined protected zone.
“I really don’t need [my daughter] leaving thirty, forty, fifty miles out of town,” says Taser spokesman Steve Tuttle. “So, I can put up a geo-spatial fence, and if she happens to go outside this area, I want to be alerted and I want to know where she’s at.”
Protector’s keystone feature is a defense against distracted driving. The program connects to hardware installed in the car and gives new meaning to the expression “backseat driver.” Parents are essentially on their kid’s date with them. Texting is disabled. Settings can be adjusted so that the phone shuts off when the child is driving, or so it can only call home and 911.
“As they start approaching that age of driving, I’m going to want some protection,” Tuttle says. “I want them focused on the driving, and I want to do this seamlessly and painlessly.”
Protector reports on driving habits, letting parents know whether little Johnny is going over the speed limit. Protector also allows parents to screen every call in and out of their child’s phone. (Unless, of course, the kid is smart enough to buy a secret cell phone for all his/her inappropriate calls.)
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Protector grew out of the Taser ideal: safety, effectiveness, and accountability. The Phoenix-based company’s founders were in their early twenties when they started the company, based around the controversial Taser stun gun. Now they’re older, and they have kids. And apparently, they aren’t messing around.
Worried about “sexting?” Protector monitors text and photo messages for explicit and sexual content, flagging the messages as best a computer system can. (It’s had some beard-related false alarms.) The next step, according to Tuttle, is a custom algorithm that won’t even allow the phones to send those types of messages.
“Someone could say that’s it’s Draconian, but if I’ve got a 10-year-old, since when is that a democracy?’” Tuttle wants to know. “Parents have to do things that are very undemocratic, but they do it in their children’s best interests. That’s why they’re called juveniles. That’s why they stay in our homes until they’re of age. We’re supposed to be guiding them. We’re supposed to be parents and mentors. We’re not supposed to be their best friends.”
But is the Protector too much parenting, or too little?
Dr. Diane Bukatko, Professor of Psychology and Joseph H. Maguire ’58 Professor of Education at the College of the Holy Cross, doesn’t see Protector setting a good precedent. He says it’s an easy way out for parents.
“I think the major issue here is that it doesn’t promote the kind of parenting that leads to healthy social-emotional outcomes in adolescents,” Bukatko says. “I think this device actually makes it easier for parents to abdicate their responsibilities. They can just use a piece of technology for control rather than having an important discussion and instilling certain values of responsible judgment and decision making.”
Dr. Jane Nelsen, author of the Positive Discipline series of books on parenting, also sees the Protector as a means of removing some of the accountability from parenting. Nelson says that if kids can’t use a phone responsibly, they shouldn’t have one. The same goes for a car.
“Parents create irresponsibility and then try to control irresponsibility electronically,” Nelsen says. “The way that they create it is by giving their children too many things that they’re not ready to take responsibility for. I often say to parents, your job is to manipulate your kids, but we want to do it in ways that teaches them self discipline and self control, and that teaches them valuable social life skills that make our job obsolete because we have manipulated them to learn self discipline and responsibility. To me, this kind of manipulation and invasion [with Protector] teaches the opposite.”
Bukatko agrees, adding that the level of control Protector allows parents to exert over their teenagers is unsettling. “It’s frightening, actually.”
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Bukatko concedes that cyber bullying, texting while driving, and sexting are serious problems parents must face. But she insists that research shows better ways to tackle them.
“It is true that accidents are a leading cause of death among teenagers, and that distracted driving is a major factor in accidents,” she concedes. “But the research also shows that effective parenting has certain ingredients and includes warmth and support and behavioral control with the end goal being healthy responsible decision making and behavior management.”
Bukatko agrees that behavioral control is necessary at an early age, but the bigger task is eventually teaching children how to act on their own. “The big job for parents, in general, is to help their kids learn how to regulate themselves,” she says. “That’s really a huge job in parenting: helping children to be able to manage themselves and regulate their own behavior. This device just removes those opportunities.”
There aren’t any shortcuts or magic bullets to parenting. Parents learn as they go, each day a new challenge. All the while, the children are learning how to act, and how to be responsible. They’re even learning how to be parents.
“There’s this thing we call, in my field, ‘the inter-generational transmission of parenting,’” Bukatko says. “Parents, because they don’t have formal instruction on how to be parents, they look back to their own childhood experiences and how they were parented. Often times that sets a model for the way they behave when they become parents themselves. I’m not sure this is setting in motion a healthy dynamic of parenting.”
Parents are selfish, no? My mother used to get angry when I got hurt, because it *scared HER.* Not being able to walk around the block until I was 9? Because SHE couldn’t bear if anything happened to me. Of course parents would rather their kid never have the opportunity to get hurt or do wrong– because if they DO (& they will), Mom & Dad hurt. And Mom & Dad just don’t want to go through that, so kids become baby dolls instead of developing human beings. My mom died when I turned 21, so I actually got to… Read more »