I vividly remember the moment when I first conceived of this project. As I was standing at my kitchen counter, eating a bowl of cereal, and glancing at the local newspaper, I came across one of those small “human interest” articles that described a “smart card” parents could use to track lunchtime purchases by their […]

In the discussion of surveillance technologies, professional middle-class par­ents suggest that they will not impose “draconian measures” such as drug testing because they have good kids who confess to them and whom they therefore trust. Of course, parents are not unanimous in their determination of what constitutes trustworthy behavior. Some parents might be accepting of […]

A parent commenting about the delights of her baby monitor wrote on Epin — ions. com that she had extended its use to engage in concealed observation of her older children: This is also a great monitor to hide in the playroom. I can put the transmit­ter in the room and when I hear them […]

The summary characterizations captured in the phrases parenting out of con­trol and parenting with limits help us think about the breadth and depth of їбз parental influence and how this ultimately shapes the behavior of college-age students. Across the board, parents want children to internalize their values, embody their hopes, and fulfill their dreams. Parents […]

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Some of the professional middle-class parents acknowledged that they know that they might be “naive” about what their children are up to; most of them quickly backed off from an open acknowledgment of ignorance, however, claiming that their relationship with their children builds on intimacy and daily communication. They thus see home drug testing, GPS […]

As with issues concerning devices of connection and constraint, safety con­cerns are paramount when working — and middle-class parents consider adopt­ing technological aids for surveillance. Parents say that if they have reason to believe that a child is in some kind of danger, they will turn to some piece of technology to obtain the information […]

The professional middle-class parents were less likely to be affronted by the mere notion that devices that constrain access to the media could substitute for parental control or undermine parental competence than they were when confronted with the idea of a child locator. However, as they talked about how they decide what their children may […]

The professional middle-class parents would have been the first to nudge me when Katie Couric reported on the RAND Corporation’s finding that watch­ing sexually explicit television programs is linked to teenage pregnancy.3 But these same parents are less likely than their less privileged peers to activate the V-chip on the television.4 They also differ in […]

To be sure, the working-class and middle-class parents are also not entirely accepting of child locators. Fewer than half the parents in these two groups thought that they would rely on this device were it available to them (and when they objected, they often used language similar to that of the profes­sional middle-class parents). But […]