Lenore Skenazy
“One time when I went to pick up Sean from wrestling, I wanted to figure out which door he’d be coming out of at the high school,” my friend Nancy McDermott told me when I asked whether the phone had changed her as a mom. “We had Find My iPhone and he popped up like two blocks away, and I went, ’Oh My God—what is he doing there?’ I sort of went to this place in my brain like, ‘He’s being held in a basement!’ And then, of course, what had happened was he had turned off his phone when he was running and it showed the last place he’d been. And I knew he wasn’t being held in a basement, but in my head, it was, ‘What if he is?’”
Nancy is the author of The Problem with Parenting, so she thinks a lot about the parenting zeitgeist. Unfortunately, she concluded, “Even those of us who try to be normal cannot be normal when we have the technology.”
Parents have always worried, of course. But until about 15 years ago, we had no option but to learn to live with it. When my mom let me walk to school as a kindergartener—I know, call the cops—she could see me until I turned the corner. After that, she had to wait till about 3 o’clock before she would see me again. In between, she had no contact. No tracking. No alerts from the school. She didn’t even pack a note in my lunch, because during school, I was sort of off her radar, and she was sort of off mine. That didn’t mean she loved me less. But it did mean that she assumed I was fine without her watching or contacting me.