Selling to Paranoid Parents

The NYT calls the adoption of technology to monitor your teenage drivers “piece of mind” but I think companies are using all available technology to cater to paranoid parents (and make some serious cash).

It is unfair to label all parents paranoid. I apologize for that, but seriously sometimes they go too far.

One thing is protecting your five year old from things on TV and on the internet: block what they can’t watch and the websites they can’t visit. But when they are 16, 17, 18… we are pushing it here.

I’m not saying that parents should let their teenagers run wild (and trust me you can run so much faster when driving a car).

Kiss trust away, who needs trust when you’ve got the fancy gadget? It can tell you their speed, were they are, or if they are wearing their seatbelt.

The statistics aren’t helping teenager’s case but they are definitely not helping the parent's cases. The number of teenage driving deaths is high. But lower than they have been in past years and much lower than when their parents were teenagers. Could it be that teenager's nowadays are safer-drivers than their parent's were when they were their age? It couldn't be.

Maybe the gadget that sets a maximum speed limit isn’t such a bad idea. They are keeping the roads safe.

But setting a car-curfew alarm, a limit to how far it can go (please picture those invisible dog fences), remotely disable the car’s starter, and even honk the horn from your own house?

I thought my mom was overprotective. She somehow managed to wake up with the sound of a car, get out of bed, find the front door keys and open the door, all of this before I got to the door. No wonder I never got keys to the front door: I never needed to open it myself.

Companies will supply as long as there is a demand. And we all know paranoid parents make amazing consumers. The greater the number of insurance companies giving discounts for gadget using families the more fuel this paranoid consumption will have: now they have a rational (i.e. financial) reason to disguise the fact that they are [a tad] paranoid.

Who ever said that the tech savvy youth was controlling the technological movements of businesses?

Though I’m pretty sure somewhere out there someone or many have figured out how to disable these fancy gadgets without tipping someone off. You know it has happened. The NYT should write about that: give parents a reason to be paranoid.