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Believe me, I understand why some folks want it. You spend the first few years constantly aware of your child's location, and you get that bright pang of poison uh-ohs when you don't know where they are. The fears stay with you so long you find yourself calling the police to report that you saw your child get in a van with a man and head north, and then you remember that she's 32, and that's her husband's vehicle. Still, he looked suspicious.
You may think: What have we come to? Are we so ruled by fear that we believe the streets are choked with filthy-bearded perverts who lasso kids into their rusty vans? And I don't mean Rusty Vans, that nice man down the block, but the kind the pervs drive. It's a union rule. Or are we so intent on controlling our children that we must know where they are all the time? Whatever happened to letting 6-year olds tromp off on an adventure, join the circus, come home a year later with great stories about befriending elephants and escaping the wrath of alcoholic clowns? Do we not fear that children will turn into perpetual infants, unable to conceive of a moment without the hovering presence of a parent?
You may also think: How much, and when are they available? I'd add "Can they be implanted in the skin?" but that's asking too much -- er, going too far.
Downside: Some mean kids will steal it from the backpack and attach it to a car in the parking lot during recess, preferably one with out-of-state plates. One day the parent gets out of a long, long meeting, flips open the phone and hello: The dot's in Tomah, making good time. I'd leave work so fast there would be a me-sized hole in the wall, Wile E. Coyote-style.
But they've thought of that. The device is programmed to send you a text message as soon as your kid leaves a prescribed area at the wrong time. If only it could send more specifics, such as "Subject has left school grounds accompanied by Child ID #035M, who is goth and smokes," so at least you'd know it was just a ditch between classes, not a sprint for the border.
This would be the place for the obligatory coot-rant, prefaced by WHY, IN MY DAY, complete with tales of walking for a mile to kindergarten with a Bowie knife in one hand to keep the coyotes at bay, or stories of lazy unsupervised afternoons down at the ol' Drownin' Hole with your pals. I think we've changed more than the times have changed, and I'm as guilty as anyone.
It takes a while to unclench, to let go. To let your child go off in the morn and believe the kid will come home after school is a simple, elemental act of faith in the ordinariness of the world. Just because they're late doesn't mean you should stab some buttons to see if the bus did indeed leave, as it's left every day for 10 years. Doctors have a saying about searching for rare, complex diseases when it's most likely something simple: Don't always hunt for zebras when it's probably a horse.
BUT WHAT IF MY CHILD WAS ABDUCTED BY A MAN ON A ZEBRA? I really have no answer for that.
jlileks@startribune.com --612-673-7858 More daily at www.startribune.com/buzz.
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