Move over Big Brother, hello Big Mother - will monitoring devices for mobile phones keep teenagers on track, asks Kate Holmquist
Fancy spending your evenings watching your child as a dot on a website map, moving about from place to place? Keen to catch her out when she's not where she's told you she will be? Now you can. A new mobile phone tracking service, planned to be launched next month, will allow parents to monitor their children's movements over the internet, as long as the child is in possession of a mobile phone.
So move over Big Brother and hello Big Mother, if that isn't how your children see you already.
Mobile phones have, so far, been fantastic for parents of teenagers. Who'd have thought that we could have a monitoring system that enables us to keep in constant touch with our children wherever they are - and that the children would actually use it voluntarily, enthusiastically even? Nine out of 10 Irish 12- to 18-year-olds now own a mobile phone and for many it's their most valued possession.
When we were teenagers, roaming with friends and going from one place to the next, we had only landlines to rely on. And considering that most public callboxes didn't work in those days, we always had the excuse of "couldn't find a phone" at the ready. And our parents certainly couldn't call us without prior arrangement that we'd be in a specific place at a specific time. In some ways, we were actually more independent in the pre-mobile phone days - but don't whisper that to the kids.
Today, we have the comfort of knowing where our teens are at all times, or do we? Your daughter could call to say she's at a girlfriend's house when in fact she's at the boyfriend's and his parents aren't home. In the worst case scenario, she could have found herself stranded in the local den of iniquity, passed out on a date-rape drug, perhaps, and unable to call anyone.
For parents who fear such a scenario, Top Security, based in Dublin, will be offering a monitoring service at a cost of €100 per year. The child must agree to the service and the child's phone will be texted with reminders that they are being tracked.
"I think it's a brilliant idea," says Alan Brown, father of two teenage sons in Blackrock, Co Dublin. "There's always the worry that a child will say 'I'm in John's house' when they are really in a field drinking cans of beer. Your child may be responsible most of the time, but when a child is in a crowd it takes only one leader in that crowd to convince everyone else to do something they know they shouldn't be doing. If you had the service, it would take only one or two times catching your child not where he's supposed to be to be effective. It would be a good deterrent too. I would explain to my sons that I was using the service out of worry, concern and love. I want them to be safe and where they are supposed to be."
A parent in Killiney, Co Dublin, who doesn't want to be named, says she'll be getting the new monitoring system. Last year, her 16-year-old son rang her in the middle of the night so drunk that he didn't know where he was and she had to tell him to walk to the nearest street sign, read it aloud to her, then stay there until she arrived to collect him.
"Monitoring my child's location would be a good alternative to grounding him completely, which doesn't work," she says.
From a teen's point of view, however, the monitoring system amounts to a devastating breach of trust.
"It's really bad - horrible! Because if parents trust their children enough for them to go out, they should trust them to be back at the agreed time and to be responsible enough to be somewhere safe," says Lucy Montague-Moffatt, a student at Our Lady's School in Templeogue, Dublin. "If they don't trust their children, they should have some other way of ascertaining the child's whereabouts. A monitoring system isn't teaching the child anything or letting the child grow up and learn about responsibility."
She also thinks that there's a privacy issue at stake. "My relationship with my mother is very open and honest, but I do have a right to have secrets. At 16, you feel you are nearly grown up enough to be an adult and you need privacy. Parents tend to warn you of a lot of dangers, when really you want to find these things out for yourself," Lucy adds.
Seán McGovern (16), a student at St Mel's in Longford, agrees that parents using the system would be making a statement of mistrust.
"It's a 1984 kind of thing. It's depriving you of the experience of independence. How can you learn to survive in the real world if you can't go out unsupervised?"
The monitoring service "would do more harm than good by causing friction in the relationship with your parents, showing that they don't trust you. This would worsen the angst that teens already feel," Seáadds.
Ciaran O'Rourke (14), a student at Gonzaga College in Ranelagh, Dublin, agrees that the monitoring system would be "encouraging a lack of trust between parent and child. From the kid's point of view, it would seem the parent was suspicious, which would put a divide between them and raise tensions. It would actually defeat the purpose of a mobile phone, which is used on a trust basis so that children and parents can contact each other. If they were to be monitored instead there would be no trust there."
Kevin O'Connor (18), elder of two teenage boys in Rahoon, Co Galway, fears that "it could be abused by parents. It would help parents be even more controlling. It would be a good idea only if your kid was in trouble in the past, otherwise no."
Kevin's father, Gerard, says: "I think it's a good idea but personally I don't need it. I trust my sons, but that's not to say I wouldn't use it a year down the line if circumstances changed."
Catriona Moore (15), from Raheny, Dublin, had a strong reaction when her mother, Mary, posed the notion of the monitoring system this week. "Next you'll be putting leads on us. You should trust us," she said.
But Mary, a national school teacher with older children in their early 20s, is more circumspect: "You can trust a teenager up to a point. Catríona is a good kid who is paying for her older siblings' sins. She's not allowed to go to discos or anything. If the system had been available a few years ago I probably would have got it."
She sees the pitfalls, though: "Originally, my reaction was 'what a great idea!', but then I realised that a troublesome teen is going to find a way around it. He could give the phone to a friend to keep at the location he says he'll be at, while he goes off somewhere else and you could be left looking at the screen thinking he's in one place when he's in another. So, on reflection, I think the monitoring system is a waste of time. A good kid doesn't need a tracking device and the ones who do need it would find a way to get around it. For those kids, the tracking device is a waste of money unless it can be implanted in their brains."
Mary also sees the potential for worried parents becoming even more fearful. "You could become obsessed, sitting there all evening tracking your children on the website. At some point you have to accept that your children are trying to grow away from you and that they have to make their own mistakes."