High-Tech Hide and Seek

"Parents have a choice: Do you give kids autonomy or do you [watch] them," said Danah Boyd, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley who studies adolescent use of social networking sites.

Parental access to this kind of real-time knowledge about their children is relatively new. Before cellphones, text messaging, social networking sites and school Web portals, parents simply had to trust that their children were where they said they were, doing what they were supposed to do.

Three years ago, 14-year-old Hunter Phillips called his father to say he was at a friend's house -- but several minutes later his father spotted him roving around the center of town. That incident became the inspiration for a GPS tracking business, called ULocate Communications Inc., founded by Alan Phillips in Framingham, Mass., and used by multiple cellphone carriers to track kids.

"It's a given that parents should know where their kid is," said Hunter Phillips, now 17. And the service doesn't work when the phone is off -- something that gives him the occasional flexibility to tell his parents he's on the road home when in fact he might not have left his friend's house yet, Phillips said.

More onerous and restrictive is Hopkinton High School's Web site, which recently allowed Phillips's parents to see that he'd scored a poor grade on a test -- landing him in hot water before he even reached home. To circumvent such incidents, "some kids have neglected to tell their parents that the site exists," Phillips said.

For the most part, it's a fallacy -- or maybe a fantasy -- to think the average parent can outsmart teens when it comes to technology.

One classmate who "never does any work" once showed off a report card showing all A's and B's to an astonished Phillips, who said he asked how he'd finagled such a fine performance with no apparent effort.

"A little Photoshop helped," his software-savvy classmate informed him.

Often parents find it's the child who uses the tools to seek out Mom or Dad.

"They are the ones that call me more often than I call them," said Victoria Strohmeyer, an attorney who lives in McLean. Nevertheless, she plans to send text messages to her 17-year-old daughter, Sarah, if she decides to attend the prom. "I'm always there; I'm watching over you," she plans to tell her, so she won't be tempted to join in with classmates who might be drinking and driving.

Child psychologists say monitoring children is ethically and socially acceptable to kids if it is fully disclosed.

"You need to tell your child," said Marc Skelton, a clinical psychologist in Laguna Niguel, Calif. "Ultimately, parents have a say in the end, but there's a process to it. The reason kids object to [secretive spying] is they're not part of the process."

Boyd, the Berkeley doctoral candidate, said that for decades, teenagers have looked for places to hang out with their peer groups, whether at a community center, a mall or a social networking Web site. If a parent walks up to a child's group of friends at a mall, they might stop chatting or suddenly change the subject. But in a virtual space, a parent can enter anonymously, and the child has no warning that anyone is listening in on his conversations with friends.

Although some parents may chose to lurk in the background, others try instead to keep up with their children's activities by joining their kids' social circles, by establishing their own blogs or Web pages on sites such as MySpace and linking with their kids' blogs.

"I've seen messages where kids will leave comments like, 'Yo, Mrs. Whatever,' " on their friends' parents' blogs, Boyd said. "Those are parents that teens really do respect."