Parental Mental Instability or a Genuine Fear

Here's a story offered by Futurity Media appearing in silicon.com carrying the headline Radioactive: Toddler telephony taps parental paranoia.

It's about parents' fears and anxities over the safety of their children and the possibility that technologies like telephony and possibly RFID might at least help us know where our kids are. But the slant here on this is that we're paranoid, or worse.

Quite apart from what our surveillance of children says about our society, it could actually do more harm than good. Systems such as GPS tracking and RFID are all about automating processes. They allow businesses to keep track of their vans or goods so they go to the right places and do the right jobs. If there is a problem with the system then the worst thing that can happen is the engineer is sent to the wrong location.

Automated parenting is a whole different ball game. If parents are lulled into a false sense of security and therefore skimp on their duty of care, then their kids could really end up in trouble.

Just exactly how does wanting to know where your children are move all the way to 'automated parenting?' That's what I want to know.