Privacy can be as dicey an issue within the household as it is out on the Web itself. There are thousands of families in which reading the kids' e-mail, monitoring their chats and tracking their Web travels is a solemn parental obligation. "I have every right to read their e-mail," says Bruce Cohen, a Reno, Nev., father of two. "Legally, I'm responsible for them until they're 18." Yet many others believe that invading an e-mail file is no different from opening a pen-and-paper diary that your daughter keeps under lock and key in a dresser drawer. A lot of parents--not to mention kids--find that a breach of parent-child trust.
But even if e-mail is considered inviolate, there are tactics by which the alert parent can control it. America Online, the Internet service provider used by nearly 17 million households, allows parents to limit incoming e-mail to a finite list of correspondents. In any e-mail program, a scan of the senders' addresses can give you a good idea of the nature of your kid's correspondents. The proliferation of mailing lists being such a Web commonplace, what's coming in can sometimes tell you what's been going out: even unsolicited e-mail--from, say, a Ku Klux Klan site--can be a clue that someone's been surfing some pretty scary pages.
In fact, this sort of Web transparency can actually be a boon to worried parents. If your teenager is going places in the material world and doing things that you wouldn't approve of, you may never know it. If he's connecting with the world's ugliness on the Web, you may have a chance to track it down. Some parents make a regular practice of typing their kids' names and nicknames into a search engine, which gives the parents a shot at discovering what the kids are saying on their own websites or on message boards and what others are saying about them.
Everyone agrees that the most effective way to monitor kids' online activity is...to monitor it. Literally. To stand beside the computer from time to time when your son is at the keyboard, watching his every mouse click, mindful, of course, that when he starts typing numerals--1,2,3,4--he could be using the chat signal that says "parental unit nearby." If the count reaches five, he's telling his chat partners there's a parent reading the screen.
Every parent should also take advantage of the wonderful excuse the Web has given us to keep credit cards from our teenage kids. Entry past the first or second level to most porn sites--and to other beyond-the-pale operations of hustling Web entrepreneurs--is governed by the ability to key in a valid card number.
But beyond random shoulder surfing and convenient-credit-card denial, we parents have a more potent range of options than we may be aware of. "A lot of parents might be somewhat computerphobic," says Ed Donnerstein, co-director of the Center for Communication and Social Policy at the University of California at Santa Barbara, explaining why we seem so undone by the perceived threats of the Web. But it doesn't take a degree in electrical engineering to know, for instance, that your kids should be admonished never to reveal personal information to anyone online without your permission--the digital equivalent of not taking candy from strangers. Or that something as simple as the computer's placement in the home can be an effective way to keep an eye on where your kids are going. One of my colleagues has put his family's computer on a balcony atop the stairs. Whenever the kids are surfing, Dad can see where they're going from his reading chair, and Mom can check in by leaning out the door of the upstairs study, where her computer lives. And the kids can see them.
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