Technology can make our lives safer, but it also might be making our lives scarier.

I feel that certain techonologies give us too much information. Do I really want to monitor where my teen is driving and get instant alerts when these devices sense that went too fast, or have gone “out of range”? One parent explains:

“Parents are scared to death,” said Selditz, father of a teenage driver. “There are so many parents who want something like this to give them a little piece of mind.”

Why should parents be scared to death?

Big Mother is watching (Salon) talks about a wide variety of technologies to track your kids and explores what’s going on.

From pajamas with RFID tags built in, to teddy bears that spy on your kids, there are plenty of products to sell to paranoid parents.

One parent is quoted as saying:

“Whether we like it or not,” says David Gomillion, the young Florida parent, “these products are a necessary fact of the kind of world we live in.

But that’s not true at all. Reality doesn’t support that commonly held belief that the world is a more dangerous place. The fear and anxiety is being manufactured in the marketing departments of the companies that sell these products and in the 24-hour news rooms.

The irony is that, although news reports paint a bleak picture, independent statistics show that life has become less dangerous for kids in recent years — with violent crime in particular dropping by 38 percent since 1975. The short spin cycle of cable TV may anoint a new child victim every week, but the actual numbers are far less grim: of the 800,000 kids that go missing each year in America, only 150 cases involve what the Justice Department calls “stereotypical kidnappings,” in which a child is taken by a stranger and either held for ransom, abused or killed. Scores more “missing children” are teenage runaways or “throwaways,” abandoned by their parents. “Truly, the real news story of the last 10 years has been the astonishing decline in crime,” says Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, a New York City child psychologist. “But we are assaulted by a media that is more interested in scaring people, so it is almost impossible for parents to assess the real level of risk. And of course, there is no shortage of people willing to sell products based on those fears.”