If monitoring (parents keeping track of their children’s activities and whereabouts) is conflated with safety across the board, among the more elite parents the notion of safety is frequently expanded to cover a wide spectrum of situations that become defined as “emergencies” and therefore are thought to require parental responsiveness. Much as the sounds made audible through a baby monitor might enhance the perception of an infant’s vulnerabilities, so might the connection made possible through a cell phone enhance the perception that an older child is in need.13 Parents who stand at the ready to respond to infant whimpers choose also to stand at the ready to respond to adolescent angst. Technology and parenting styles go hand in hand and mutually reinforce each other. Hence, professional middle-class parents talk about how children can use cell phones to reach a parent if they need help with—or simply want to get out of—a broad range of what children and parents alike consider “difficult” situations.
One white, professional middle-class mother told a story about her daughter being “hit on” by a boy at a party and then sending a text message to her mother (who the daughter seemed to assume would be available at that very moment). When the mother called back, her daughter made it clear that she wanted to be picked up:
Recently she could text and let me know she wanted me to pick her up because a boy was hitting on her in a way that made her feel very uncomfortable. She texted and said, “call me.” So I called, and she [pretended that I was insisting that she come home]. She started to say, “What do you mean I have to leave right now?” And I said, “I get it. I will be right there.”
So she saved herself from a situation that was very uncomfortable, by first texting.
Another white mother, Beth O’Brien, a psychologist with four children (who described herself and her husband as “overachievers”), taught one of her daughters how to use a “code word” on the telephone to indicate if she needed to be rescued from a party:14
Heather was going to a party the other night where there were going to be older boys there, and these boys had been known to [play the drinking game] beer pong. And it was, “Heather, if you’re feeling uncomfortable in any way, here’s the code word: use the code word ‘mother.’” … So if she says, “mom,” everything’s okay, but if she says, “mother,” I know that’s code for [getting her]. I said, “You can blame it totally on me. Use those acting skills.” She felt like she had a tool in her back pocket if she was in an uncomfortable situation.
Parents also appreciate knowing if a child is released from some event earlier or later than anticipated. Parents also enjoy being able to respond (with “totally immediate service”) if a child has forgotten something needed at school. A white, professional middle-class woman living in Pennsylvania noted with enthusiasm that although phones aren’t allowed to be on during school hours, if her daughter has forgotten something, she can find a way to contact her mother: “If she has an emergency, she can go to the bathroom [in school] and call me. There’s certain things—something she had forgotten, a project or something at home—and she didn’t want to go to class without it.”
Although all parents perceive cell phones and baby monitors as sound investments to secure safety in the face of children’s vulnerabilities, there are class differences in the breadth and immediacy of perceptions of danger: professional middle-class parents are more likely to expand the notion of danger to include imagined crises and routine problems. They may worry about psychological overindulgence, but they readily give way to their children’s slightest anxieties. The working-class and middle-class parents, who often live with more present, concrete dangers in their daily environments, impose sharper limits on the definition of a crisis. Indeed, they believe it is necessary for their children to toughen up and deal with the world around them. These differences show up when parents explained why they initially purchased a cell phone: whereas a white, professional middle-class mother said that she got her son a cell phone because he ended up sitting outside a school and waiting for her for two hours when they had crossed signals about the pickup time that day, an African American, working-class mother said she got her daughter a cell phone because that child had been followed from the school into a store by a stranger who was harassing her.15
In short, parents from a wide variety of backgrounds mentioned that cell phones promise the advantage of enhanced safety. For professional middle — class parents, however, cell phones take on an additional meaning. Referring to times when their children might need a cell phone for reasons of safety, the professional middle-class parents rapidly shift into a language of responsiveness that sounds very much like the language of responsiveness used in conjunction with baby monitors. In turn, this responsiveness emerges from the desire to create close bonds with their children. Overall, the more privileged parents were far more likely than the other parents to speak about intimacy and about the significance of being on call for whatever they defined as “legitimate” needs.