New era of snooping parents

Over three-bean salads and wheat-grass smoothies, mother and daughter Peltier are debating tough love.

"I'll come out and say it: I read my daughter's e-mails and I check to see what websites she's visited," says Dorothy Peltier, as her 17-year-old suppresses a "don't embarrass me" scowl outside the Baja Fresh Cantina here. "I think the times demand it," says Mrs. Peltier, an unemployed broker.

It is a trend that is growing. Mothers and fathers, barraged with accounts stretching from Columbine murder plans to post-9/11 copycat terrorism, say they're becoming more watchful of children in a new millennium where the standards of "normal" parenting can become shorthand for "negligent."

In fact, experts say that strategies like Mrs. Peltier's, while not necessarily the norm, suggest the emergence of a tougher approach to discipline by many parents - particularly baby boomers. Ironically, this is the group that, as adolescents, was among the most promiscuous and libertine.

The shift toward more surveillance and Sunday-school strictness could lead to a redefinition of privacy for some minors - from scrutinized diaries, to regular bedroom searches, to taped phone conversations. To detractors, it just reflects an age-old impulse by parents to overcontrol and micromanage their children's affairs - the parent as staff sergeant.

"There is a movement afoot by parents trying to deal with the issue of their children running free and parents not being aware," says Michael Obsatz, a sociologist at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., and author of "Raising Non-violent Children in a Violent World." "In a world of increased availability of guns, drugs, violence, and media messages that normalize them, parents have gotten scared and are being more vigilant."

This week in California, a new university study of parents who came of age in the 1960s found that many parents say they have rejected the values of experimenting with sex and drugs that they grew up with. They are unapologetically resorting to snooping tactics they would have abhorred in their youth.

On one level, the about-face isn't surprising. Many parents naturally become more conservative as they grow older. The country, too, is more temperate today than it was in the tie-dyed '60s.

Plus technology - from the ubiquitous cellphone to instant messaging - has given youths an infinite number of ways to communicate and parents an infinite number of reasons to play I Spy.

Yet much of the change in parental attitudes also reflects the dangers of the times, from AIDS to club drugs. Warning signals trickle out with regularity: the exposed drinking habits of Prince Harry of Britain, the Marin County youth who joins the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Florida teen who crashes a private plane into a Tampa high rise.

"These parents are reading e-mails and diaries, searching rooms for drugs and any clue that indicates their child is leading a secret life," says Elaine Bell Kaplan, a sociologist at the University of Southern California who conducted the study. "They are constantly questioning and rethinking their parenting techniques. The increased scrutiny of their teens is more out of fear for their safety than nosiness."

One mother says she hugs her son upon his return from school to smell for marijuana or alcohol. A father regularly eavesdrops on his teen's telephone conversations. Still other parents say monitoring personal writings is not off limits.

"I guess my son didn't realize what you look up [on the Internet] will automatically be saved," said one mother. "I mean, it was mind boggling what he looked at. Some of the stuff was really sick stuff. They had pictures of the O.J. murders."

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