David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
Spying on the Text Generation
By Neil Swidey, The Boston Globe
June 8, 2008
When it comes to watching over their tech-obsessed teenagers, parents are learning the dangers of too much information.
One mom does her best surveillance work in the laundry room.
Her teenage son has the habit of leaving his cellphone in the pocket of his jeans, so in between sorting colors and whites, she'll grab his phone and furtively scroll through his text messages from the past week to see what he's said, whom he's connected with, and where he's been. Sometimes, she'll use her own phone to call another mom she's friendly with and share her findings in hushed tones.
Effective detective work? Absolutely. Effective parenting? That's less clear.
If her sleuthing prevents her son from engaging in unacceptably risky behavior, then it will likely have been worthwhile. But her own actions are not without serious risk. How can she act on her insider information without revealing the way she gleaned it? How violated would her son feel if he walked in on her in the laundry room, mid-scroll? And, more subtly but just as important, how can she not think less of her son after seeing in intimate detail this blow-by-blow accounting of the messy teenage experience that previous generations of parents viewed only from a safe, soft-focus distance?
Then again, the other extreme on the parenting spectrum - providing zero oversight and cheerily hoping for the best - is probably just as risky.
In manifold ways, technology makes life easier for parents - from improving the efficiency of after-school pickups to offering the ability to check in with our kids at virtually any moment. But technology also makes life a whole lot more complicated. It's part of our kids' consciousness from even before they can talk. As they get older, the gap between their fluency with it and ours widens, and they're exposed to much more adult content, at a younger age, than we ever were. As teenagers back in the 1980s, some of us would think nothing of sitting through half an hour of scrambled Cinemax in hopes of catching a fleeting flash of unscrambled breasts. (That wasn't just me, right?) Today's teens can catch all the unscrambled action they want on their cellphones while waiting at the bus stop. Back then, the single home phone line was the central nervous system of the household, with calls being intercepted by Mom or Dad, or a little sister who delighted in screaming, "It's for you, and it's a girl!" These days, parents of teenagers marvel at how silent their home phones are; for their kids, the cellphone has become the great telecom bypass road. And text messaging provides even more freedom, since it knows no curfew. In a recent survey conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited, one-quarter of teens admitted to having texted or called their boyfriend or girlfriend hourly between midnight and 5 a.m.
Through calls and texts on their phones and instant messaging and Facebook on their laptops, teenagers live in a state of continuous connection with their friends. And because that connected state also links them to a sometimes scary world with Internet predators and peddlers of gambling and porn, many parents are justifiably nervous. They worry about the people their kids are swapping messages with and whether they're telling the truth when they report their whereabouts.
Naturally, the marketplace has stepped in to ease their worries. The products and services range from the mild and transparent to the exhaustive and secretive. There are basic parental controls that block access to unapproved websites and messages from unapproved IMers. There are GPS programs for cellphones that allow parents to track their kids' every movement. There is spyware software that provides transcripts of their kids' IM sessions. And there is newer software that does essentially the same thing for text messages on cellphones. One of these services, called My Mobile Watchdog, insists on making the cellphone monitoring clear to the child. Another, called FlexiSPY, promises exactly the opposite, marketing itself as a way to either "Protect Your Children!" or "Catch Cheating Spouses!" (Unsaid in the marketing boasts: "Risk Losing the Trust of Your Entire Family!")
The array of services makes it possible for parents to know exactly what their teenagers are saying and doing at most any hour. But there is no product offering parents perspective on how much they really ought to know.
MIT professor Sherry Turkle is a leading thinker on the relationship between human beings and technology. She's also the mother of a teenage girl. So she knows what she's talking about when she says, "Parents were not built to know the kinds of things that technology makes possible."
Earlier this year, my middle daughter announced at the dinner table that a boy in her class had gotten a cellphone. To grasp the significance of that announcement, you need to know this about my middle daughter: She is in kindergarten.
Now, you might have the urge to respond the way I did: What could a 5-year-old possibly need with a cellphone? Aside from an occasional trip to the bathroom, when in his life is he not under direct adult supervision?
Yet this is only a more extreme instance of what's happening in homes across the nation, as the pressure mounts on parents to equip their kids with cellphones at ever younger ages. Some 75 percent of American teenagers ages 13 to 17 have cellphones, according to a 2008 survey by the research firm Yankee Group. To see where things are headed, look to the Nordic countries, the leading edge of telecom trends. In Norway, according to Telenor/Statistics Norway, 87 percent of 10-year-olds now have their own cellphone.
In part, that push is coming from the kids, who feel peer pressure to keep up with their Razr-toting friends or risk social irrelevance. But it's also coming from the parents, who've seen all the media reports of kids texting home when their schools have gone into emergency lockdown and want that same ability to be connected in a crisis.
It's not surprising that safety concerns would drive down the average age when kids get cellphones, says Leysia Palen, a University of Colorado computer science professor who has researched teens and texting. A similar pattern happened with adults. Fears of breaking down on the highway persuaded many people to add a new monthly bill to their stack. As much as they may have vowed to use their cell only for emergencies, once they saw how it could make life easier, they integrated it into their daily routines. In research parlance, the technology was "domesticated."
It is surprising, though, that texting has taken off the way it has. When you think about it, it's a pretty crude technology, all that fumbling and thumbing to convert numbers into letters. But, Palen says, it took hold among teens in Europe and Asia first (followed years later in the United States), because it was cheap and private. Cheap because under overseas mobile-phone plans, text messages were priced a lot less than voice calls. And private because it allows direct, adult- circumvented communication at any time, whether under the desk during class or under the covers at home after lights out.
Yet teenagers have a very different concept of privacy. MIT's Turkle began her teen research with this question: How can you find intimacy without privacy? But she soon realized her premise was wrong. "It's kind of an old-think question," she says. "For grown-ups, intimacy involves a kind of privacy. For teens, they're coming up with a kind of intimacy that doesn't depend on privacy."
That explains how they can feel intimate IMing a dozen friends at once. It explains the fast-growing appeal of Twitter, a Web application that allows people to broadcast a real-time play-by-play of their every mundane move, as though our great democracy will be strengthened with the knowledge that Jenna from Spokane is now about to brush her teeth. And it explains why most of the teenagers I know, whether they're from Roxbury or Sudbury, have no use for the private message feature on Facebook, preferring to post comments on their friends' Facebook public "Wall." The thought hardly seems worth expressing if it isn't expressed to a large audience. (Two other things most teens I know increasingly have little use for: e-mail and voice mail. They see e-mail as something akin to the rotary phone in an elderly neighbor's house: usable if necessary, but why would you choose it when there are so many better options? And they see leaving or checking voice-mail messages as a waste of time that only parents seem to indulge, since caller ID makes it clear who called you, and texting makes it easy to transmit information.)
It's not uncommon to see two teenage pals riding in the back of a car, each one texting a friend somewhere else rather than talking to the friend sitting next to them. It's a throwback to the toddler days, when kids engage in parallel play before they're capable of sustained interaction. To many adults, this behavior is rude, suggesting to the person you're traveling with that there has to be someone more interesting somewhere else. But few teens find any cause for offense, since they all do it to one another.
Much has been made of how this interconnectivity is making teens more independent. But Turkle has come to the opposite conclusion. "The parent is always on speed dial," she says. Until recently, if a teenager was on the subway and saw someone who didn't look quite right, or became lost or frightened, she would have to work it out for herself. Now she just texts her mom. Turkle stresses that as a mother, "I'm certainly not glamorizing frightening experiences for teenagers." But there was something about having to work things out yourself "that was important to being a teenager."
In the past, being a teenager wasn't just about getting to stay out later, she says. "It was about people not knowing where you were, and what that felt like."
Jackie sites barefoot on the leather couch in the family room of her Stoughton home, replying to the stream of instant messages coming through the Dell laptop she keeps balanced on her knees. She twirls her dark, curly hair during the brief breaks when she is not typing. It's around 7:30 in the evening, and because it's her 13th birthday, the volume of incoming IMs - from Jeremy and Becca, Jenn and Kobi, Leah and Bobby - is even higher than normal. Jackie's been online only for a year, but she has no trouble keeping up her pace of replies, even as she carries on a conversation with me and occasionally glances up at the TV.
She's not the only one paying close attention. Sitting 15 feet away in the living room, her mother, Susan Komisar Hausman, is working on her own laptop.
Since Jackie is just beginning the teenage journey, Susan feels it's essential that she chaperone the ride. Despite all the stranger-danger warnings she gave her daughter about life online, not long ago Jackie gave her first name to someone who randomly e-mailed her but who she assumed was a friend of a friend. When he sent back a crude reply, Jackie knew she had made a mistake.
"My biggest concern," Susan says, "is her safety - people getting access to her."
Susan has no desire to jeopardize her daughter's trust, so she is upfront with Jackie about how closely she is watching. She uses the AOL parent controls to their fullest strength. No one is added to Jackie's IM "Buddy List" without Su- san's approval, and that list includes Susan, so she can always tell when her daughter is online. Jackie is allowed to visit only those websites that Susan has approved, and Susan receives a daily report of Jackie's online activity. About once a week, she logs on to Jackie's account to eyeball her e-mails and any instant messages her daughter has saved.
"A lot of my contemporaries are reluctant to police their children's activities," Susan says. "I don't stand over her with a shotgun, but I do believe in being diligent."
She hasn't allowed Jackie to get her own cellphone yet. But when she gives in, she'll likely be a prime customer for the clever service called My Mobile Watchdog, which sends parents real-time copies on their own cellphones of every text message and picture sent or received on their child's phone. The volume can be overwhelming, since many teens traffic in hundreds of texts every day. (That's why so many parents have switched to plans that cover unlimited text-messaging.) To make things more manageable, parents can elect not to receive copies of texts from people they "approve."
Bob Lotter created the service through his Southern California-based software development firm eAgency. He says that in his volunteer work with the Orange County Sheriff's Department, he's found that predators "are moving from the PC to the cellphone" because carriers generally expunge text messages after a week or two. That makes it easier for predators to avoid getting caught.
But there are at least two problems with the Mobile Watchdog-type approach. First, it presupposes that the biggest risk to our kids is the kind of creepy middle-aged predator pretending to be a 13-year-old that has kept NBC's Dateline on the air. Second, it sidesteps the reality that teenagers who know they are being closely monitored by their parents are going to find ways to elude detection.
I don't mean to suggest that sicko predators don't exist, but statistically speaking, they shouldn't be a parent's biggest worry. Teenagers have gotten pretty savvy at sussing out who is a complete stranger online. In the age of Facebook and MySpace, the biggest risk seems to be the false sense of security both teens and their parents can get from the friend of a friend: Kyle goes to a different school and I've never met him, but he must be OK because he's a friend of my friend Ashley. In fact, Ashley may have never met Kyle either, but that doesn't stop her from listing him as a friend in her hunt to rack up a friends list that tops 500. And it may not have stopped her from IMing with him either, since there's this fascinating way in which teenagers have regular IM relationships with kids they don't even talk to in school.
Jackie is at the front end of the teen experience, and so far Susan's active involvement in her daughter's wired world seems relatively hassle-free and prudent. But it will likely become a lot tougher to sustain in the next few years. That's because there's a natural desire, and a need, for teenagers to have their own parent-free zone as they get older.
As a graduating senior at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, Sam McFarland is grateful his parents trusted him to make the right decisions once he had established himself as worthy of the trust. A few of his friends had parents who were exceedingly vigilant. The result? "You don't hang out at those kids' houses as much," Sam says.
He also saw firsthand the perils of parents spying on their children. When one of his friends was 14, the kid's parents reprimanded him for something he had talked about online. Immediately, he knew they had been spying on him, and it didn't take long for him to determine they'd been doing it for some time. "He was pretty angry," Sam says, "He felt kind of invaded." At first, his friend behaved, conscious that his parents were watching his every move. "But then it reached a tipping point," Sam says. "He became so fed up about it that, not only didn't he care if they were watching, but he began acting out, hoping they were watching or listening so he could upset them." And things only got worse from there.
So how should parents walk that line, between the ostriches in the sand who don't have a clue about what their teenagers are doing and the hot-on-their-tail private eyes who know an unhealthy amount? Like so much about parenting, the answer seems to be knowing when to step in and when to walk away.
For a snapshot of this progression, come inside the white split-level home in Norwood that Maura and Greg Heckmann share with their three kids, Tim, 16, Hayley, 14, and Chris, 10.
The lower level essentially belongs to tall, sandy-haired Tim, who is in his sophomore year at Xaverian Brothers, the competitive Catholic boys high school in nearby Westwood. On an average weeknight, Tim has Facebook and IM sharing screen space on the Mac outside his bedroom as he keeps connected with dozens of friends simultaneously. His Samsung Slider cellphone rests nearby, ready to receive the next text message. (The typical IM or text exchange begins with the haiku of "WU," "NMU," "JC" - shorthand for "What's up?" "Not much, you?" "Just chillin'." Every once in a while, he'll strum his guitar or look up at the TV to catch some Ninja Warrior on the G4 network. Playing softly in the background is his personal soundtrack that shuffles between the Beatles and a Swedish techno band called Basshunter. Amid all this, he is doing his homework.
Although Maura and Greg come across as youthful parents - she's a 40-year-old nurse practitioner with reddish hair, he's a 43-year-old creative director with a goatee - they've long been mystified by Tim's miasma of multi-tasking. Yet they've come to accept that it's just the way things are with his generation, which has refashioned the concept of time into a series of interruptions so constant that they hardly seem like interruptions anymore. As long as he's keeping up his grades, they figure he's handling things fine. And they always know exactly how he is doing in school, thanks to Edline, the service that Xaverian Brothers and schools across the country use to give parents continual e-mail updates on their children's academic performance. Just the mention of Edline is enough to provoke a Pavlovian groan from Tim.
When they gave Tim his first cellphone at age 12 and he also began spending more time on the computer, Maura and Greg had the usual concerns. Every time Maura walked by the computer, she would ask Tim, "Who are you talking to?" But they had some advantages other parents don't, namely Greg's deep technical knowledge. In addition to his regular job, he freelances as a computer consultant, so, as Tim says, "he knows too much about computers" for his kids to expect to pull anything over on him.
Calling it his "fear of God" speech, Greg warned them, "I can know everything you're doing online. But I'm not going to invade your privacy unless you give me a reason to."
By relying on the threat of intervention rather than intervention itself, Greg has been able to avoid the drawbacks that several friends of mine told me they experienced after monitoring their teenagers' IM and text conversations. These are all great, involved parents who undertook limited monitoring for the right reasons. But they found that, in their hunt for reassurance that their teenager was not engaging in dangerously bad behavior, they were instead worn down by the little disappointments - the occasional use of profanities or mean-spirited name-calling - as well as the mind-numbing banality of so much teen talk. (Technologies change, but it seems as though the endless loop of he-hates-me, did-you-see-the-look-that-b****-gave-me chatter has been dominating teenage conversation since mean-girl hominids were first walking upright, calling out Lucy for being knock-kneed.) Moreover, these parents came to the conclusion that it would be impossible for them not to think less of their kids if they continued to listen in, and that would be unfair, because their own parents never had transcripts of their teen conversations and were no worse for not knowing.
Leysia Palen, the University of Colorado professor, says the work of social theorist Erving Goffman is instructive. Goffman talked about how we all have "front-stage" and "backstage" personas. For example, ballerinas might seem prim and perfect while performing, only to let loose by smoking and swearing as soon as they are behind the curtain. "Everyone needs to be able to retreat to the backstage," Palen says. "These kids need to learn. Maybe they need to use bad language to realize that they don't want to use bad language. If parents are always going to be monitoring, their kids are always going to be front-stage."
That's not to say kids should be let loose from the start. All the parents I spoke with said they were happy they had been actively involved when their kids were wading into wireless waters, both because of the serious dangers out there for young teens and because in the IM world, things can get out of hand quickly. Maybe it's the lack of face-to-face contact that allows people to type things they would never say in person. Or maybe it's how easily sarcasm can be mistaken for seriousness, or vice versa. When teens get into uncomfortable territory online, they need to turn to parents for guidance and perspective. And the parents who seem connected to technology, rather than advertising their disconnect like an ever-blinking 12:00 on a VCR clock, are going to be better equipped to help.
It's no coincidence that Greg and Maura monitor a lot more closely the IM and texting activity of their 14-year-old daughter, Hayley, than they do 16-year-old Tim. The Mac that Hayley uses sits in the high-traffic dining room, allowing them to keep tabs on her just by walking by. They've seen how quickly things can flare up. Someone says something about someone, it gets back to that person, and there are angry feelings all around. Seeing how much the discord can distress their daughter, and even affect her behavior, Greg and Maura enforce cooling-off periods. They'll turn off her IM, letting her back on only after things have settled down.
"It gets taken away fairly frequently," Maura says.
Hayley offers a knowing shrug.
Tim tells his sister it will get easier once she gets out of the eighth grade. "Everyone hates each other, says stupid things, `Oh, you're retarded.' They're just laughing, but you think they're serious."
Hayley concedes, "Online, you don't know if people are serious or trying to be funny."
Tim reassures his sister that the scrutiny from their parents will ease up for her in a few years. To a degree.
For all the ways technology opens the door to an uncertain world, Maura and Greg have to admit that it gives them more control by keeping their kids more tethered to home. I ask them if they know more or less about what's going on in their kids' lives than their parents knew about their teenage lives. They don't even hesitate. "More," says Maura. "A lot more," says Greg.
Because kids can remain in the loop with whole groups of their friends without actually being next to them, the urge to always be out of the house isn't as intense as it was in the days when kids roamed the town, unpoliced in packs, until curfew.
"It's hard for parents to let go," Maura says. "We've had such tight control over their lives."
She points out that when she was an 11-year-old growing up in Hyde Park, she was hopping on the Orange Line alone.
Tim's eyes widen. "You'd never let me do that!"
"You're right," she says.
As much as she and Greg have learned to give Tim more slack, it's not nearly enough for his liking.
"I've thought about why am I so strict when my parents weren't?" Maura says.
Tim jumps in. "For that reason exactly! You do the opposite of what your parents do. I'm so angry at how strict you guys are, I probably won't be half as harsh on my kids."
I decide to leave that comment alone for a while. But much later in the conversation, I ask Tim how, knowing what he knows about teenage life, he would handle things if he were the parent of teenagers right now.
He thinks about it for a minute. "I would do what my parents are doing," he says finally. "Have the ability to monitor and know how to do that, but have at least some trust in my kids so I could let them have their own privacy. But I'd want to have the ability to know."
Maura flashes a surprised smile. "Thank you, Tim."
By Neil Swidey, The Boston Globe
June 8, 2008
When it comes to watching over their tech-obsessed teenagers, parents are learning the dangers of too much information.
One mom does her best surveillance work in the laundry room.
Her teenage son has the habit of leaving his cellphone in the pocket of his jeans, so in between sorting colors and whites, she'll grab his phone and furtively scroll through his text messages from the past week to see what he's said, whom he's connected with, and where he's been. Sometimes, she'll use her own phone to call another mom she's friendly with and share her findings in hushed tones.
Effective detective work? Absolutely. Effective parenting? That's less clear.
If her sleuthing prevents her son from engaging in unacceptably risky behavior, then it will likely have been worthwhile. But her own actions are not without serious risk. How can she act on her insider information without revealing the way she gleaned it? How violated would her son feel if he walked in on her in the laundry room, mid-scroll? And, more subtly but just as important, how can she not think less of her son after seeing in intimate detail this blow-by-blow accounting of the messy teenage experience that previous generations of parents viewed only from a safe, soft-focus distance?
Then again, the other extreme on the parenting spectrum - providing zero oversight and cheerily hoping for the best - is probably just as risky.
In manifold ways, technology makes life easier for parents - from improving the efficiency of after-school pickups to offering the ability to check in with our kids at virtually any moment. But technology also makes life a whole lot more complicated. It's part of our kids' consciousness from even before they can talk. As they get older, the gap between their fluency with it and ours widens, and they're exposed to much more adult content, at a younger age, than we ever were. As teenagers back in the 1980s, some of us would think nothing of sitting through half an hour of scrambled Cinemax in hopes of catching a fleeting flash of unscrambled breasts. (That wasn't just me, right?) Today's teens can catch all the unscrambled action they want on their cellphones while waiting at the bus stop. Back then, the single home phone line was the central nervous system of the household, with calls being intercepted by Mom or Dad, or a little sister who delighted in screaming, "It's for you, and it's a girl!" These days, parents of teenagers marvel at how silent their home phones are; for their kids, the cellphone has become the great telecom bypass road. And text messaging provides even more freedom, since it knows no curfew. In a recent survey conducted by Teenage Research Unlimited, one-quarter of teens admitted to having texted or called their boyfriend or girlfriend hourly between midnight and 5 a.m.
Through calls and texts on their phones and instant messaging and Facebook on their laptops, teenagers live in a state of continuous connection with their friends. And because that connected state also links them to a sometimes scary world with Internet predators and peddlers of gambling and porn, many parents are justifiably nervous. They worry about the people their kids are swapping messages with and whether they're telling the truth when they report their whereabouts.
Naturally, the marketplace has stepped in to ease their worries. The products and services range from the mild and transparent to the exhaustive and secretive. There are basic parental controls that block access to unapproved websites and messages from unapproved IMers. There are GPS programs for cellphones that allow parents to track their kids' every movement. There is spyware software that provides transcripts of their kids' IM sessions. And there is newer software that does essentially the same thing for text messages on cellphones. One of these services, called My Mobile Watchdog, insists on making the cellphone monitoring clear to the child. Another, called FlexiSPY, promises exactly the opposite, marketing itself as a way to either "Protect Your Children!" or "Catch Cheating Spouses!" (Unsaid in the marketing boasts: "Risk Losing the Trust of Your Entire Family!")
The array of services makes it possible for parents to know exactly what their teenagers are saying and doing at most any hour. But there is no product offering parents perspective on how much they really ought to know.
MIT professor Sherry Turkle is a leading thinker on the relationship between human beings and technology. She's also the mother of a teenage girl. So she knows what she's talking about when she says, "Parents were not built to know the kinds of things that technology makes possible."
Earlier this year, my middle daughter announced at the dinner table that a boy in her class had gotten a cellphone. To grasp the significance of that announcement, you need to know this about my middle daughter: She is in kindergarten.
Now, you might have the urge to respond the way I did: What could a 5-year-old possibly need with a cellphone? Aside from an occasional trip to the bathroom, when in his life is he not under direct adult supervision?
Yet this is only a more extreme instance of what's happening in homes across the nation, as the pressure mounts on parents to equip their kids with cellphones at ever younger ages. Some 75 percent of American teenagers ages 13 to 17 have cellphones, according to a 2008 survey by the research firm Yankee Group. To see where things are headed, look to the Nordic countries, the leading edge of telecom trends. In Norway, according to Telenor/Statistics Norway, 87 percent of 10-year-olds now have their own cellphone.
In part, that push is coming from the kids, who feel peer pressure to keep up with their Razr-toting friends or risk social irrelevance. But it's also coming from the parents, who've seen all the media reports of kids texting home when their schools have gone into emergency lockdown and want that same ability to be connected in a crisis.
It's not surprising that safety concerns would drive down the average age when kids get cellphones, says Leysia Palen, a University of Colorado computer science professor who has researched teens and texting. A similar pattern happened with adults. Fears of breaking down on the highway persuaded many people to add a new monthly bill to their stack. As much as they may have vowed to use their cell only for emergencies, once they saw how it could make life easier, they integrated it into their daily routines. In research parlance, the technology was "domesticated."
It is surprising, though, that texting has taken off the way it has. When you think about it, it's a pretty crude technology, all that fumbling and thumbing to convert numbers into letters. But, Palen says, it took hold among teens in Europe and Asia first (followed years later in the United States), because it was cheap and private. Cheap because under overseas mobile-phone plans, text messages were priced a lot less than voice calls. And private because it allows direct, adult- circumvented communication at any time, whether under the desk during class or under the covers at home after lights out.
Yet teenagers have a very different concept of privacy. MIT's Turkle began her teen research with this question: How can you find intimacy without privacy? But she soon realized her premise was wrong. "It's kind of an old-think question," she says. "For grown-ups, intimacy involves a kind of privacy. For teens, they're coming up with a kind of intimacy that doesn't depend on privacy."
That explains how they can feel intimate IMing a dozen friends at once. It explains the fast-growing appeal of Twitter, a Web application that allows people to broadcast a real-time play-by-play of their every mundane move, as though our great democracy will be strengthened with the knowledge that Jenna from Spokane is now about to brush her teeth. And it explains why most of the teenagers I know, whether they're from Roxbury or Sudbury, have no use for the private message feature on Facebook, preferring to post comments on their friends' Facebook public "Wall." The thought hardly seems worth expressing if it isn't expressed to a large audience. (Two other things most teens I know increasingly have little use for: e-mail and voice mail. They see e-mail as something akin to the rotary phone in an elderly neighbor's house: usable if necessary, but why would you choose it when there are so many better options? And they see leaving or checking voice-mail messages as a waste of time that only parents seem to indulge, since caller ID makes it clear who called you, and texting makes it easy to transmit information.)
It's not uncommon to see two teenage pals riding in the back of a car, each one texting a friend somewhere else rather than talking to the friend sitting next to them. It's a throwback to the toddler days, when kids engage in parallel play before they're capable of sustained interaction. To many adults, this behavior is rude, suggesting to the person you're traveling with that there has to be someone more interesting somewhere else. But few teens find any cause for offense, since they all do it to one another.
Much has been made of how this interconnectivity is making teens more independent. But Turkle has come to the opposite conclusion. "The parent is always on speed dial," she says. Until recently, if a teenager was on the subway and saw someone who didn't look quite right, or became lost or frightened, she would have to work it out for herself. Now she just texts her mom. Turkle stresses that as a mother, "I'm certainly not glamorizing frightening experiences for teenagers." But there was something about having to work things out yourself "that was important to being a teenager."
In the past, being a teenager wasn't just about getting to stay out later, she says. "It was about people not knowing where you were, and what that felt like."
Jackie sites barefoot on the leather couch in the family room of her Stoughton home, replying to the stream of instant messages coming through the Dell laptop she keeps balanced on her knees. She twirls her dark, curly hair during the brief breaks when she is not typing. It's around 7:30 in the evening, and because it's her 13th birthday, the volume of incoming IMs - from Jeremy and Becca, Jenn and Kobi, Leah and Bobby - is even higher than normal. Jackie's been online only for a year, but she has no trouble keeping up her pace of replies, even as she carries on a conversation with me and occasionally glances up at the TV.
She's not the only one paying close attention. Sitting 15 feet away in the living room, her mother, Susan Komisar Hausman, is working on her own laptop.
Since Jackie is just beginning the teenage journey, Susan feels it's essential that she chaperone the ride. Despite all the stranger-danger warnings she gave her daughter about life online, not long ago Jackie gave her first name to someone who randomly e-mailed her but who she assumed was a friend of a friend. When he sent back a crude reply, Jackie knew she had made a mistake.
"My biggest concern," Susan says, "is her safety - people getting access to her."
Susan has no desire to jeopardize her daughter's trust, so she is upfront with Jackie about how closely she is watching. She uses the AOL parent controls to their fullest strength. No one is added to Jackie's IM "Buddy List" without Su- san's approval, and that list includes Susan, so she can always tell when her daughter is online. Jackie is allowed to visit only those websites that Susan has approved, and Susan receives a daily report of Jackie's online activity. About once a week, she logs on to Jackie's account to eyeball her e-mails and any instant messages her daughter has saved.
"A lot of my contemporaries are reluctant to police their children's activities," Susan says. "I don't stand over her with a shotgun, but I do believe in being diligent."
She hasn't allowed Jackie to get her own cellphone yet. But when she gives in, she'll likely be a prime customer for the clever service called My Mobile Watchdog, which sends parents real-time copies on their own cellphones of every text message and picture sent or received on their child's phone. The volume can be overwhelming, since many teens traffic in hundreds of texts every day. (That's why so many parents have switched to plans that cover unlimited text-messaging.) To make things more manageable, parents can elect not to receive copies of texts from people they "approve."
Bob Lotter created the service through his Southern California-based software development firm eAgency. He says that in his volunteer work with the Orange County Sheriff's Department, he's found that predators "are moving from the PC to the cellphone" because carriers generally expunge text messages after a week or two. That makes it easier for predators to avoid getting caught.
But there are at least two problems with the Mobile Watchdog-type approach. First, it presupposes that the biggest risk to our kids is the kind of creepy middle-aged predator pretending to be a 13-year-old that has kept NBC's Dateline on the air. Second, it sidesteps the reality that teenagers who know they are being closely monitored by their parents are going to find ways to elude detection.
I don't mean to suggest that sicko predators don't exist, but statistically speaking, they shouldn't be a parent's biggest worry. Teenagers have gotten pretty savvy at sussing out who is a complete stranger online. In the age of Facebook and MySpace, the biggest risk seems to be the false sense of security both teens and their parents can get from the friend of a friend: Kyle goes to a different school and I've never met him, but he must be OK because he's a friend of my friend Ashley. In fact, Ashley may have never met Kyle either, but that doesn't stop her from listing him as a friend in her hunt to rack up a friends list that tops 500. And it may not have stopped her from IMing with him either, since there's this fascinating way in which teenagers have regular IM relationships with kids they don't even talk to in school.
Jackie is at the front end of the teen experience, and so far Susan's active involvement in her daughter's wired world seems relatively hassle-free and prudent. But it will likely become a lot tougher to sustain in the next few years. That's because there's a natural desire, and a need, for teenagers to have their own parent-free zone as they get older.
As a graduating senior at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, Sam McFarland is grateful his parents trusted him to make the right decisions once he had established himself as worthy of the trust. A few of his friends had parents who were exceedingly vigilant. The result? "You don't hang out at those kids' houses as much," Sam says.
He also saw firsthand the perils of parents spying on their children. When one of his friends was 14, the kid's parents reprimanded him for something he had talked about online. Immediately, he knew they had been spying on him, and it didn't take long for him to determine they'd been doing it for some time. "He was pretty angry," Sam says, "He felt kind of invaded." At first, his friend behaved, conscious that his parents were watching his every move. "But then it reached a tipping point," Sam says. "He became so fed up about it that, not only didn't he care if they were watching, but he began acting out, hoping they were watching or listening so he could upset them." And things only got worse from there.
So how should parents walk that line, between the ostriches in the sand who don't have a clue about what their teenagers are doing and the hot-on-their-tail private eyes who know an unhealthy amount? Like so much about parenting, the answer seems to be knowing when to step in and when to walk away.
For a snapshot of this progression, come inside the white split-level home in Norwood that Maura and Greg Heckmann share with their three kids, Tim, 16, Hayley, 14, and Chris, 10.
The lower level essentially belongs to tall, sandy-haired Tim, who is in his sophomore year at Xaverian Brothers, the competitive Catholic boys high school in nearby Westwood. On an average weeknight, Tim has Facebook and IM sharing screen space on the Mac outside his bedroom as he keeps connected with dozens of friends simultaneously. His Samsung Slider cellphone rests nearby, ready to receive the next text message. (The typical IM or text exchange begins with the haiku of "WU," "NMU," "JC" - shorthand for "What's up?" "Not much, you?" "Just chillin'." Every once in a while, he'll strum his guitar or look up at the TV to catch some Ninja Warrior on the G4 network. Playing softly in the background is his personal soundtrack that shuffles between the Beatles and a Swedish techno band called Basshunter. Amid all this, he is doing his homework.
Although Maura and Greg come across as youthful parents - she's a 40-year-old nurse practitioner with reddish hair, he's a 43-year-old creative director with a goatee - they've long been mystified by Tim's miasma of multi-tasking. Yet they've come to accept that it's just the way things are with his generation, which has refashioned the concept of time into a series of interruptions so constant that they hardly seem like interruptions anymore. As long as he's keeping up his grades, they figure he's handling things fine. And they always know exactly how he is doing in school, thanks to Edline, the service that Xaverian Brothers and schools across the country use to give parents continual e-mail updates on their children's academic performance. Just the mention of Edline is enough to provoke a Pavlovian groan from Tim.
When they gave Tim his first cellphone at age 12 and he also began spending more time on the computer, Maura and Greg had the usual concerns. Every time Maura walked by the computer, she would ask Tim, "Who are you talking to?" But they had some advantages other parents don't, namely Greg's deep technical knowledge. In addition to his regular job, he freelances as a computer consultant, so, as Tim says, "he knows too much about computers" for his kids to expect to pull anything over on him.
Calling it his "fear of God" speech, Greg warned them, "I can know everything you're doing online. But I'm not going to invade your privacy unless you give me a reason to."
By relying on the threat of intervention rather than intervention itself, Greg has been able to avoid the drawbacks that several friends of mine told me they experienced after monitoring their teenagers' IM and text conversations. These are all great, involved parents who undertook limited monitoring for the right reasons. But they found that, in their hunt for reassurance that their teenager was not engaging in dangerously bad behavior, they were instead worn down by the little disappointments - the occasional use of profanities or mean-spirited name-calling - as well as the mind-numbing banality of so much teen talk. (Technologies change, but it seems as though the endless loop of he-hates-me, did-you-see-the-look-that-b****-gave-me chatter has been dominating teenage conversation since mean-girl hominids were first walking upright, calling out Lucy for being knock-kneed.) Moreover, these parents came to the conclusion that it would be impossible for them not to think less of their kids if they continued to listen in, and that would be unfair, because their own parents never had transcripts of their teen conversations and were no worse for not knowing.
Leysia Palen, the University of Colorado professor, says the work of social theorist Erving Goffman is instructive. Goffman talked about how we all have "front-stage" and "backstage" personas. For example, ballerinas might seem prim and perfect while performing, only to let loose by smoking and swearing as soon as they are behind the curtain. "Everyone needs to be able to retreat to the backstage," Palen says. "These kids need to learn. Maybe they need to use bad language to realize that they don't want to use bad language. If parents are always going to be monitoring, their kids are always going to be front-stage."
That's not to say kids should be let loose from the start. All the parents I spoke with said they were happy they had been actively involved when their kids were wading into wireless waters, both because of the serious dangers out there for young teens and because in the IM world, things can get out of hand quickly. Maybe it's the lack of face-to-face contact that allows people to type things they would never say in person. Or maybe it's how easily sarcasm can be mistaken for seriousness, or vice versa. When teens get into uncomfortable territory online, they need to turn to parents for guidance and perspective. And the parents who seem connected to technology, rather than advertising their disconnect like an ever-blinking 12:00 on a VCR clock, are going to be better equipped to help.
It's no coincidence that Greg and Maura monitor a lot more closely the IM and texting activity of their 14-year-old daughter, Hayley, than they do 16-year-old Tim. The Mac that Hayley uses sits in the high-traffic dining room, allowing them to keep tabs on her just by walking by. They've seen how quickly things can flare up. Someone says something about someone, it gets back to that person, and there are angry feelings all around. Seeing how much the discord can distress their daughter, and even affect her behavior, Greg and Maura enforce cooling-off periods. They'll turn off her IM, letting her back on only after things have settled down.
"It gets taken away fairly frequently," Maura says.
Hayley offers a knowing shrug.
Tim tells his sister it will get easier once she gets out of the eighth grade. "Everyone hates each other, says stupid things, `Oh, you're retarded.' They're just laughing, but you think they're serious."
Hayley concedes, "Online, you don't know if people are serious or trying to be funny."
Tim reassures his sister that the scrutiny from their parents will ease up for her in a few years. To a degree.
For all the ways technology opens the door to an uncertain world, Maura and Greg have to admit that it gives them more control by keeping their kids more tethered to home. I ask them if they know more or less about what's going on in their kids' lives than their parents knew about their teenage lives. They don't even hesitate. "More," says Maura. "A lot more," says Greg.
Because kids can remain in the loop with whole groups of their friends without actually being next to them, the urge to always be out of the house isn't as intense as it was in the days when kids roamed the town, unpoliced in packs, until curfew.
"It's hard for parents to let go," Maura says. "We've had such tight control over their lives."
She points out that when she was an 11-year-old growing up in Hyde Park, she was hopping on the Orange Line alone.
Tim's eyes widen. "You'd never let me do that!"
"You're right," she says.
As much as she and Greg have learned to give Tim more slack, it's not nearly enough for his liking.
"I've thought about why am I so strict when my parents weren't?" Maura says.
Tim jumps in. "For that reason exactly! You do the opposite of what your parents do. I'm so angry at how strict you guys are, I probably won't be half as harsh on my kids."
I decide to leave that comment alone for a while. But much later in the conversation, I ask Tim how, knowing what he knows about teenage life, he would handle things if he were the parent of teenagers right now.
He thinks about it for a minute. "I would do what my parents are doing," he says finally. "Have the ability to monitor and know how to do that, but have at least some trust in my kids so I could let them have their own privacy. But I'd want to have the ability to know."
Maura flashes a surprised smile. "Thank you, Tim."
