The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

Two articles about the latest surveillance technology available to the modern family-- you can read here in the Guardian about a new jacket with a GPS chip in it, and here in the New York Times about new GPS-equipped cell phones—have left me feeling more spooked than such stories usually do. My nostalgic reflex is to feel sorry for kids. In the constant struggle for independence, today’s teenagers have it so much harder than we did, boomers often sigh. They’ve got helicopter parents in thrall to an ethos of hypervigilance and tempted by all kinds of gizmos, who feel any youthful misstep should be preventable—and if not, is somehow partly their fault. We had parents who worried, sure, but from a distance. They couldn’t track our whereabouts on weekend evenings, and the tacit ethos was that minimal information probably was better for all concerned. But the Times story suggests a more oppressive development: At this point, kids may have only themselves to blame. It seems we have a market of non-stop networking students, unable to bear being out of the social loop for a minute, to thank for the latest surge in tracking technology. Don’t they see how they’ll come to regret this? It's grist for, what else, yet more self-blaming angst on the part of parents: Look at what our hovering has produced—a generation at risk of undervaluing autonomy.