KEEPING A WATCHFUL EYE AND EAR ON YOUR CHILDREN

Fears Of Drugs, Gangs Have Parents Spying On Their Children

WASHINGTON - Scared but determined, Robin Ihara bought the small
telephone-tapping device at an electronics store and had it hooked up to a
phone and a tape recorder in an upstairs bedroom. She tucked the equipment
behind an empty box.

Then came the hard part: Every day, after her son Nathan, 14, had left for
school, Ihara listened to the tape of his previous night's conversations
with his friends.

As details of his secret life poured forth, they confirmed her suspicions.
Her son's explosive temper, his sudden disappearances, his hostility toward
his parents and teachers were not merely signs of a stormy adolescence.

Despite his fierce denials, her son - her inquisitive, restless child who
loved music and art - was a drug addict.

Nathan, usually articulate, sounded vacant and dimwitted on the tapes. He
tripped over his words, repeated himself and wandered through his sentences.

"To hear your son talk while he's high and just all the stupid, stupid
things they say when they're high - it just tears you up," says Ihara, 45, a
substitute teacher who lives in a Washington suburb. "It is a very painful
thing to do . . . I would have given anything not to have to do it."

In a world of dangerous temptations, more and more parents are spying on
their children.

Desperate to know the truth about their teenagers' behaviour, they are
willing to cast aside privacy concerns and risk alienating their children if
they are caught. And it has never been so easy to find the tools to carry
out the surveillance.

Ihara used a telephone recorder that sells for $30. An $89 (U.S.) kit, sold
online by a company called ViaLab (www.vialab.com), detects illicit
substances in urine and hair samples. There are also commercial sprays and
wipes to turn up drug residue in cars and on desktops, and products to test
a child's breath for alcohol.

Parents who worry about their children's safety behind the wheel can buy
Drive Right, a pocket-size, computerized device that records how fast and
erratically a car was driven. Miniature cameras can be hidden
in radios, VCRs and clocks.

Private investigators say they increasingly receive requests to have
children tailed. And in the past 18 months, more than 130 suspicious parents
have paid a Winchester, Va., company to bring in trained dogs to scour their
homes for drugs or weapons.

Businesses, drug counsellors and family therapists say that in the vast
majority of cases, parents resort to these tactics because they suspect
their children are abusing drugs or alcohol, although some parents are
concerned about other dangerous activities, such as gangs.

For some baby boomer mothers and fathers, who once ranted at their own
parents to get out of their lives, and who transformed illicit drug use into
an entire culture, the notion of snooping on their children with dogs and
hidden tape recorders is deeply troubling. It goes against the basic tenets
of '90s parenting: Trust your child, give him his space, explain your
actions and never, ever lie to him.

Lawyer June Gertig, 55, says she struggled with her conscience over
tape-recording the phone calls of her son, then in Grade 9, as she weighed
his right to privacy against her need to know about any drugs he was using.
She decided her son's safety was more important.

"I felt absolutely filthy," says Gertig, who noted with irony that he
belongs to the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's the last thing we
wanted to do - turn into the KGB in our own house."

Other parents are not so torn.

"There is not a guilty bone in my body for doing this," says a parent who is
taping her child's phone calls because of her concerns about substance
abuse. "You get so desperate that you do anything to stop it. That's the
bottom line. You fight fire with fire. . . . You do jungle warfare. That's
what we're dealing with here."

In some cases, spying can have a paralyzing effect. One mother who looked at
her 14-year-old daughter's E-mail last month out of curiosity discovered the
girl was boasting to friends about smoking marijuana.

"I've made phone calls to family and treatment centres and searched the Net,
but I still feel at a loss as to what to do," says the mother, who has not
yet said anything to the girl.

Drug counsellors and psychologists are split on whether such tactics are
helpful.

Some say testing and surveillance devices can become a crutch for parents
unable or unwilling to talk to their children about drugs or to confront
them directly. And they warn spying can backfire, causing a teenager to
become more estranged from his parents if he learns what they've been doing.

"I really encourage (parents) to get professional consultations if they
suspect a drug or alcohol problem, and don't do anything that will further
erode or destroy the communication and the trust that remains in the
relationship," says Ariel White-Kovach, executive director of the Hazelden
Centre for Youth and Families, a drug treatment centre in Minnesota.

But other specialists say that trying to have a frank conversation with a
teenager who is abusing drugs usually fails because young addicts are
skillful liars.

Patrick McConnell, director of youth services for Fairfax County's Alcohol
and Drug Services, believes while surreptitious measures are no substitute
for professional help, they can remove any doubt that a problem exists and
help parents gain information that might help in getting their child into
the appropriate treatment.

"It's important that parents don't buy into kids' trying to keep them out of
their personal lives," McConnell says. "It's not an issue of trust."

- -- Dave Haans Graduate Student, University of Toronto WWW:
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/~haans/