'Mom cams' on campus?!

When I first glanced at this story, I was almost as depressed as I imagine a college student would be. Thinking it was about Webcams on campus for parental surveillance, I thought to myself, kids' lack of privacy and parental fears really have gone to extreme! But when I actually read this story in the Christian Science Monitor, I realized it's not quite the imposition on students I thought it was – at least not in the Monitor's lead about Mom calling kid and saying, "I'm on the Web site now - could you just look up at the camera atop Barnes Tower [on the Cornell University campus] and wave?" Used in this way, there's an element of free will on the kid's part. Whew! (And I was all ready to recommend The Blessing of a Skinned Knee to the Monitor writer and any parent who reads the piece!) But some of the Web cams/Mom cams shoot a little more close up, and their use can definitely be abused, as we all work out the boundaries between child protection and privacy. "The [Mom cams] trend coincides with a crop of students who are in far more frequent contact with parents than earlier generations," the Monitor reports. What got us here?, one wonders. Maybe it's the fact that many kids start having cellphones in elementary and middle school, so kids and parents are used to being in constant touch (see this about MIT professor Sherry Turkle's thoughts on "the tethered self"). The Monitor also cites the view that some parents may be monitoring their investments in expensive college educations! I'll leave that one alone. But tell me your view on this latest form of parental monitoring. You know where I am.