The other day, my eleven-year-old son handed me my iPhone with an accusatory air, as if to say: So this is what you people do behind our backs. While he was looking at stocks, he came across a news item reporting that AT&T, with another company, was about to introduce a snap-around-the-wrist, GPS-tracking, emergency-button-featuring, watch-like thingie for children. It’s called FiLIP, comes in bright colors, and has two-way calling and parent-to-child texting. It allows you to set safe zones, so that you’re alerted when your child enters or leaves a designated area.

A little stunned, I checked it out online. FiLIP, I found, is far from the first such gizmo; this one just has more bells and whistles than most. “The world used to be a little simpler,” went its mom-and-apple-pie pitch. “Kids ran free and returned at dinnertime, and parents didn’t worry so much. But today, parents are under more pressure than ever. ... FiLIP has a simple mission—to help kids be kids again, while giving parents an amazing new window into their children’s lives.” Right. And the Invisible Fence collar on my late lamented cairn terrier let my dog be a dog.

All parents have to let their children off the leash eventually—to let them go out unsupervised, to grant them free-ish range on the Internet. That moment always comes before you’re ready for it. For me, it came after a ninth birthday, when we hooked up a Nintendo Wii, then discovered, months later, that it could be used to roam the Internet. Another point was reached toward the end of elementary school, when my children announced that they were the very last kids in their class to get a smartphone. I stalled. Then my son showed me the FiLIP ad, and I discovered a universe of options.

For the iPhone I will soon be buying him, I can get an iPhone Spy Stick, to be plugged into a USB port while he sleeps; it downloads Web histories, e-mails, and text messages, even the deleted ones. Or I can get Mobile Spy, software that would let me follow, in real time, his online activity and geographical location. Also available are an innocent-looking iPhone Dock Camera that would recharge his battery while surreptitiously recording video in his room, and a voice-activated audio monitor, presumably for the wild parties he’s going to throw when his father and I go out of town.



Had such science-fiction-worthy products somehow become acceptable while I wasn’t watching? Apparently they had. When ZDNet conducted an online debate about parental espionage a few weeks ago, 82 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that parents “should be able to observe the full data feeds of what their children post and receive via Facebook, text, email, and any other application or service used on their devices. It is a parent’s right to ‘violate’ their child’s notion of ‘privacy.’” When a media researcher interviewed 21 parents in three Canadian cities in 2011, only three said that they had faith in their children and that they found such hypervigilance “harmful.”