Cyber Parents, Accessing Perhaps, TMI

Nowadays, if you are the parent of a 14-year-old, you can see him guzzle beer, flirt with a girl who squeezes her bosom in every “selfie” she posts on Instagram, and describe a fellow ninth grader in language saltier than any you ever used at that age.

Of course, your parents never even heard you swear. They had no idea where you went after you slammed the front door behind you. They couldn’t begin to fathom what you were really up to on a Saturday night.

Today, parents are just one click away: buddied up on Facebook, logging on to Tumblr, peering over cryptic text messages and trying to get a glimpse of Snapchat images before they dissolve into the ether.

Parents who wouldn’t be caught dead reading their teenage daughter’s diary are stuck in a bind. Who really wants to be privy to all this? Karen Sanders, a 49-year-old mother of two in Scarsdale, N.Y., finds herself reading comments made on her 15-year-old daughter’s page. “She’ll post something about someone else, and I find myself stalking her friends — not even mine! By then, even I’m creeped out — by myself.”

Sandra Tsing Loh, 51, a writer, radio personality and the mother of two tween daughters in the Los Angeles area, said: “All the boundaries have broken down. Facebook is constantly sending alerts of what they’re up to: liking and commenting and posting and sharing, like squirrels pecking away. But when their mothers are reading, it’s way too much information.”

For many adults, the Internet poses a vast array of potential privacy infringements, not all of which are readily defined or understood. But for teenagers the threat is clear: Big Mother.

And Big Father. The author Dan Savage refers to it as “the burden of knowing.” He and his husband are what he calls “very heavy-duty monitors”(“kind of the fascist parents”) of their 15-year-old son. “Children leave a digital trail, and you feel like a negligent parent if you’re not monitoring,” Mr. Savage said. “What we’re trying to balance is not knowing everything we can know, which is everything, and giving our son some leeway to make mistakes without dying in the process. It’s horrifying.”

Yes, we know contemporary parents are hyperinvolved in their children’s lives. But the term “helicopter parent,” with its menacing tones of parental omniscience, has nothing on the intimate reach of the cyberparent. A helicopter hovers above, at a safe distance, with lots of insulating air between. Cyberparents, on the other hand, are squished right up next to their offspring.

Some parents use the “fly on the wall” approach, monitoring regularly or checking in periodically, without comment either online or off. Others prefer the “pick your battles” method, reserving action for moments when a sister says, “Hmm, I saw that picture your daughter posted” or an impolitic slang phrase is flung online in an iffy manner. Then there are the polar extreme tactics of “head in the sand” and “not until you’re 18.”

Schools across the country constantly run workshops, often with a range of perspectives, to help straggling parents. A growing number of companies have also popped up to assist parents in navigating the landscape, whether it is supervising their children’s online behavior or maximizing their privacy settings. The home page of one of these “parental intelligence” firms, uKnow.com, states its role as: “Helping mom and dad understand their child’s use of technology, and protect their safety, privacy and reputation.”

Such programs are not about digital spying, said Tim Woda, a founder of uKnow.com and its senior vice president for strategic growth. “That would just teach children that being sneaky and underhanded is O.K. as long as it’s for a good reason,” he said.

Instead, children see the app installed on their devices, which helps them self-censor. “Our customers just want to understand what’s happening in their kids’ world,” he said, “and so much of it is online that unless they get inside, they’re in the dark.”

A majority of parents of teenagers have at least tried to maintain some degree of control. According to a 2012 study of 802 parents of teenagers by the Pew Internet Project, 59 percent of parents of teenagers on social-networking sites have talked to their child because they were concerned about something posted to their profile or account, and 42 percent have searched for their child’s name online to see what information is out there.