The high-tech parent trap

TECHNO-PARENTING is daunting. At 8 p.m., I find myself yelling from my home office, where I am frantically answering e-mails, to my son, who is in the kitchen playing “Star Wars” on his computer, that it’s time to get off the computer and do homework -- on the computer.

Meanwhile, I’m wringing my hands over whether to allow him to play the online videogame “RuneScape,” in which imaginary characters battle against other imaginary characters, who just happen to be real kids with screen names. Cyber kids he’s never met. We used to call them “strangers.” For all I know, they could be pedophiles or sexual predators with hip Web personas.

“But don’t worry, mom,” he assures me. If anyone does anything “offensive” during the game, he says, the game people knock you offline and ban you from playing. Great! And just who, exactly, are these new parent police from the game industry? Is their definition of “offensive” the same as mine? And how do I restrict the use of technologies that blur the lines of entertainment, learning and work? Especially when I’m just as deeply mired in the overlap as my kid?

Let’s face it, technology has its parental benefits -- and therein lies the hypocrisy trap. We respond to office demands around the clock, e-mail from the carpool line and talk on the cellphone while watching the soccer game. Of course, our kids are watching us not watch them. And we are so exhausted by day’s end that we are secretly happy to give our kids screen time while we decompress -- or answer e-mails.

Ambivalence is the techie parent’s constant companion. I want my son to be able to fix my computer -- but not to learn how to webcam a photograph across cyberspace. I want him to be up on the latest crazes, so he can relate to his friends ... but what do I do when he insists that everyone is playing “Robot Rage,” a game that allows him to eviscerate his playmates online?

And what about cellphones? In an age of terrorism, we want our kids to have mobiles so we know where they are. But we panic when we read that middle-schoolers are using their cells to take dirty pictures to e-mail around. Here’s the latest scandal in my neighborhood: girl flirts with boy, girl e-mails him a photograph of herself in the nude, freaked-out boy shows it to his mother, who reports it.

My local paper runs daily exposes on cyber crime and e-invasions of privacy. My friends and I e-mail the stories to each other on our BlackBerrys while shuttling our kids to music lessons, play dates and sporting practices. This week, as I was scanning my BlackBerry while waiting outside my 8-year-old’s guitar lesson, the dad sitting next to me was refusing to let his young son play a videogame on dad’s laptop. Dad kept saying, “Let’s talk about your day,” but all the kid wanted to talk about was the control panel. I couldn’t tell if the dad wanted his laptop back so he could talk with his kid -- or to check in with the office.

And how are we supposed to monitor instant messaging, the new sandbox where our kids play unsupervised? Our parents used to lament the hours we spent on the phone. Now our kids are “IMing” each other throughout the evening. Not only does it prevent coherent thinking, but the acronyms are indecipherable to any parent who has tried to sneak a peek. (For the uninitiated, POS means “Parent Over Shoulder!”) Worse yet, parents usually have no idea what was messaged; it disappears instantly.

My answer to all these techno-woes is as old as the Bible: Set forth commandments and stick to them. Stress the merits of democracy, to a point. Free thinking and free speech are all very well, but no, you can’t get on the electronic superhighway with a learner’s permit. Why not? Because ... I said so.