You're right. I was fitting a tracking device to my children and trying to figure out the instruction manual.
Series, if you want to wire up your kids, be my guest. I didn't need to. To each his own...
Posted on 07/10/2006 1:47:07 PM PDT by Ben Mugged
Paige White was surprised when her parents figured out soon after she started driving last year that she'd gone 9 miles to a party, not 4 miles to the friend's house she'd told them she was visiting. It seemed to her almost as if her car was bugged.
It was.
Paige's parents had installed a device in their daughter's SUV that can tell them not only how far she's driven, but how fast and whether she's made any sudden stops or hard turns.
"I was kind of mad because I felt it was an invasion of my privacy," said the Los Gatos resident, now 17.
Parents, some of whom feel outmatched by their offspring in this tech-savvy world, are using a growing number of gadgets, software and specially equipped cell phones to track kids' driving, read their instant messages and pinpoint where they're hanging out.
~snip~But cyber-snooping is simply a new tool, experts say. It doesn't resolve the dilemma parents have grappled with for generations: How much free rein do you give children so they can learn the lessons they need to grow up and be independent?
~snip~
Proponents of the new technology say it can help protect kids -- whether from predators lurking online or their own bad driving. But while there may be gains, monitoring also can take a toll.
"The bottom line is, surveillance will cut down somewhat on potential risk behavior kids will engage in, but it is at a cost," Wolf said. "To the extent that you do surveillance, you are potentially interfering with your kids developing responsibility for their own lives."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I only pinged you because you were on the Nintendogs thread.
I won't ping you to anymore verichip posts.
That's fine... We agree on some things... I just don't buy into the 'vewy pwecise and compwicated pwan' you see. :~)
Honestly, I wish I didn't either.
They're your voices, you can tell them to stop ;~)
Do you work for the UN? It sure sounds like it.
We taught our children responsibility, accountability, and honesty.
In our case, things seem to have worked out very well.
We didn't have to read a book either.
You can see our spoiled lying little brats on my FR home page.
Well, if they are, thankfully hubby is a psychiatrist.
Maybe I can get a script for some kool meds or something ;)
Minor children who are under your roof do not have a right to privacy. It is a privilege.
Spouses often use surveillance technology on other spouses. You seem to think that this has only occurred with high technology. Maybe you are forgetting that in the past low technology tracking occurred.
Perhaps you forgot about the hairdresser salons where wives could keep track of gossip. Perhaps you forgot that when we lived in a more community-minded society people would call parents when they saw their kid was in a weird place or doing something they shouldn't be doing - and parents wouldn't be offended. People did and still do hire private detectives to check out what others are doing, especially if that person is acting funny or out of character, or they think they are lying.
You seem to have a problem with parents wanting to know if they can actually trust their child. If she had been trustworthy and doing the right thing, nothing would have come of it and this story would not exist because doing the right thing isn't news.
You forget that she had no idea 'her' SUV had a tracking device on it. She would've kept on lying as long as it was working for her.
I am more shocked that you think her behavior is more acceptable than her parents.
Every parent is part cop and part judge, but they are also a number of much more pleasant roles. I would rather feel more like a teacher, mentor, role model, etc - but when your kid is repeatedly lying to your face, they've broken trust and there is consequences. How you find out about it really doesn't make a difference. Whether it's a tracking device, a phone call from another parent, a speeding ticket in the mail, or if you catch them in a lie yourself, it's a big problem.
This is just bullplop. Tagging the kid did nothing. The kid did what she wanted to do and continued lying about it. tracking her didn't stop the behavior, nor would it have, because she didn't know she was tagged. Therefore she wasn't being conditioned because she didn't know she was being tracked.
Please put up a better argument, this is very lame.
And apparently you can't read either because you didn't even touch on anything in my response to you.
I can see a bunch of FReepers flipping open their Orwell Model Mark VI tracking device and entering little Johnies social security number.
"Well dear, he's on the corner of 6th and Broadway headed uptown at 47 mph in a blue sedan. Let's contact GM's On Star system and disable the ignition."
Actually, your comments, and your moniker, indicate that you have doubts trusting your children.
You're right. I was fitting a tracking device to my children and trying to figure out the instruction manual.
Series, if you want to wire up your kids, be my guest. I didn't need to. To each his own...
Explain why it is not rational - you just stated this without backing it up.
There are many potentially good reasons for it. A child that is a habitual liar is a prime reason for parents to use this device. A child that has been told not ot be in certain places or with certain people the parents don't want them to be around are others. A child that has had driving problems - speeding, for one - is another reason. Children that have shown they are too immature to be trusted through repeated past actions and statements are another.
And mind you, this is on the parent's vehicle. Maybe they want to know how their minor child is treating THEIR vehicle.
Because this is only a vehicle device, only kids with vehicles (and thus, are more mobile and are being entrusted with an expensive and potentially deadly heavy moving object) would even be tracked. That leaves a lot of kids where such a device as this wouldn't apply.
I think you're just against it because it's 'surveillance' and anything more about surveillance must be Big Brother. I'm not against parents knowing what their minor kids who they are legally responsible for are up to. I don't see this as the same thing as Big Brother tracking every move I make on public streets or forcing my car to have a tracker or implanting a chip in my arm.
As Freud put it, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
Trust is earned. When someone breaks that trust, they have just demostrated they are not trustworthy. Certain consequences come from being untrustworthy.
And these people certainly weren't over the top about it either. Reading the story, after they found out she lied the first time, they still let her go out, only to lie again and again. They didn't clamp down on her 'big brother' style after the first time. Maybe they wre hoping she'd stop lying to them. How Orwellian of them!!
And smart guy, my moniker has to do with my employment history in a certain intelligence organization.
BTW, I am happy that you apparently have 'good' kids and that they have never lied to you about anything. Maybe if they did it wasn't about anything you considered important enough to verify. Unfortunately not every parent has kids that have never broken their trust or required a parent to be on top of what they were doing because they were lying to them about where they were and who they were with.
As for lying, we set that down in stone, big time. When my son lied to me, after I proved that he had lied, I spanked him with a belt on his bare behind. That caught his attention!
We also explained to them that no matter what kind of trouble they ever got into, as long as the TOLD THE TRUTH, we would help them resolve the problem.
That's the wy we parents were raised.
I burned up my Dad's 6 month old Chrysler 300 by going 130+ mph (electrical fire). He asked me what I was doing, I told him the truth, and heard nothing more of it.
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