In the digital information age, it’s not hard to know quite a bit about someone just by knowing their name and some other basic demographic information.
However, one mom’s search results raise dual questions of ethics and safety when doing a home-brewed background check on people in our social circles or, more to the point, those of our kids.
Have you ever gone digging for more information about the parents of your kids’ friends?
Knowing The Adults Around Your Kids
Many of us who are parents now remember our parents quizzing us about our friends’ parents.
They wanted to know whether the parents would be home, whether we’d seen them drinking in front of us, whether they yelled, and maybe even how clean the house was. For younger kids, our parents might have even insisted on meeting the other parent before allowing us to play together, and many of us had friends whose houses we weren’t allowed to enter.
Parents would also typically talk to neighbors and friends to learn more about any parent they didn’t know personally.
Now, they have the internet.
A Deep Search Turns Up Troubling Results
One mom turned to Reddit for advice after she ran an internet search on the father of her daughter’s friend.
The two families had spent some time together, and at some point, this mom decided she wanted to know more and popped his name into Google. She said there had been some “red flags,” but whatever she expected from her search, it probably wasn’t pages of criminal history.
The DUIs and even drug dealing might have been possible to overlook, especially since the most recent offense was five years in the past, but the stalking and violent crimes were more shocking. According to the poster, as she dug into the details, she even learned that the man had committed arson and recorded video of women in their homes.
The most frightening part may have been thinking about the one emergency in which the poster had left her child with this family.
A Wealth Of Personal Information
With minimal effort, a person who knows your name can find your address, voter registration information, and criminal history.
Some websites will give phone numbers associated with you, lists of people with whom you have shared an address, and employers. Suppose you have active social media, like LinkedIn or Facebook, where you use your real name. In that case, more data is accessible, such as birthdays, children’s names, employment history, family and friends (and how you interact with them).
Most of us don’t overthink how much information we give the world. Still, some matters, like criminal charges or appearances in news media, are public information, even if you’re being cautious.
Public records are online in many states, and a stranger can look up property tax records and criminal charges easily.
In the case of this Reddit question, it was even more straightforward — the mom said there was a video of the man’s trial.
Other Parents Raise Ethical Concerns (Or Don’t Want To Be Googled)
There are already ethical debates about sex offender registries because of vigilantes who have targeted the individuals listed.
In this case, the mom wanted to know whether she should share what she’d found with other parents, and responses were divided. While many parents said they’d like to know if their child was spending time around this man, others said this would start drama and that the matter should be dropped.
It’s generally legal to look up and share public information as long as it doesn’t rise to levels of doxxing, stalking, or harassment. Whether it’s what we want to normalize in our social circles is more of a question.
Not all parents approve. Not only did this mom get backlash, but so did another mom, five years ago, whose methods didn’t even involve a public records search. She shared on the Imperfect Mum forum that she had a habit of getting to know the families of her kids’ friends, because her own parents had been too uninvolved to notice when she was put in inappropriate situations by friends’ parents.
She said dozens of people had told her this was not only inappropriate but embarrassing for her kids!
What About Child Safety?
We take our kids to school with the certainty that teachers, substitutes, staff, and even volunteers have been through background checks. We enroll them in sports, confident that the local rec programs or YMCA have vetted their coaches. We take them to dance classes, knowing that reputable studios will use caution in their employment.
Even then, sometimes there’s a failure, and we see news stories of teachers and other trusted adults mistreating kids in ways beyond imagination.
So, should we be vetting the other adults our kids may spend time with? If so, how much vetting is appropriate, and when is it over the top?
Do you Google or do criminal record searches or social media investigations on the parents of your kids’ friends?
As long as it’s within legal bounds, every parent will have to decide how much investigation is enough and how much is too much.
