Is It Okay for a Parent to Spy?

Dr. Steven Parker, who runs the (darn good) pediatrics blog on WebMD, brought up the issue of parents spying on their kids a while back in a couple of posts (post 1, post 2). He doesn’t cover anything especially new, but he sums up a lot of the issues surrounding this topic concisely and intelligently and makes a useful distinction between “monitoring” and “spying.”

It’s a thorny issue, which will only get thornier as

1. New technology emerges that will allow parents to monitor their kids’ behavior ever more closely
2. New technology emerges that will allow child predators more access to kids in unsupervised settings

I’ve got a few years to go before having to make any decisions about secretly planting GPS devices in my daughter’s backpack, but I’ve seen those Dateline specials and they sure do freak me out. I want to give my kids the freedom to make choices and to learn from their mistakes, but are the consequences of certain mistakes so great in this day and age that that all goes out the window? I really don’t know.