Last week, Sprint Nextel Corp. introduced a new service called Family Locator that lets parents track their kids' whereabouts, using the GPS capabilities in each child's cellphone. For $9.99 a month, you can get a fix on your little ones' locations as long as they are on your Sprint account and carry one of the 30 Sprint or Nextel phones that allow this monitoring.
This is a great idea . . . if your kid is a delinquent. If you can't trust your kid enough to let them leave the house without GPS tracking, you're nuts or you have a bad kid. It's not, after all, a safety thing. Every child abductor will know that he needs to get rid of the cell phone ASAP. I could see limited uses for such technology--the child is driving to an unknown area and wants you to be able to help with directions, the child is hiking in the mountains, you need more beer and you want to make sure the child doesn't dawdle on his way back from the 7-11 at 1:30 in the morning--but barring such things, this new technology is for the obsessive.
It's also for today's parents who, I've pointed out before, don't have enough children, so they stuff all their child-rearing energy (which is naturally spread over at least three, maybe ten or more, children) into one or two kids.
