Keeping an eye on the kids,To snoop or not to snoop?

nsuring the safety of children when they go online or outside is a problem all parents now face - but how far should you go, asks Fionola Meredith

TEENAGERS HATE being watched. One of their top priorities is avoiding the beady gaze of parents, whether that means lurking moodily in their rooms (door firmly shut), or making a lightning-fast dive for the minimise button on the computer screen at the sound of a parental footstep.

God forbid that a disapproving parent should catch a glimpse of any online conversation they might be having. As the mother of a 14-year-old boy, I'm familiar with this adolescent lurch towards shiftiness and evasion. But it leaves parents with a dilemma. If our kids aren't telling us anything about their lives, how can we keep a protective eye on their activities?

Given the lack of two-way communication, some parents are going undercover, turning to decidedly sneaky ways of monitoring their monosyllabic offspring. Quick perusals of unattended mobile phones (scrolling hastily through stored text messages) are common, and some parents register with sites such as Bebo or Facebook, with the specific purpose of checking out their children's personal pages.

One couple I know came up with the idea of secretly installing baby monitors in their 15-year-old daughter's bedroom, so they could listen in on her telephone conversations from the comfort of their living room. There they would sit, G and Ts in hand, eyes out on stalks, eavesdropping on their daughter's lurid, expletive-riddled confidences.

Why did they do it in the first place - and did they find out anything disturbing?

"We were worried because our daughter had fallen in with a rough, boozy older crowd," says mum June. "We never discovered anything dreadful, but it was horrible hearing her swear, and talking away about sex in this cocky, loudmouth tone that wasn't really her. And we did feel a bit ashamed of ourselves, a bit sordid, to be spying on her like that."

Desperate times, desperate measures. But with all the high-tech surveillance options increasingly open to worried parents, such behaviour is starting to look old-fashioned. Why mess around with cumbersome baby monitors, or random phone checks, when you can secretly monitor your child's online activity with surveillance software, retrieve deleted text messages with a dinky little gadget, even follow their every movement with GPS tracking, or - in the case of older teenagers - a hidden camera in their car?

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