Is It Okay to Snoop on Your Kids?

A show of hands please: Who hasn’t looked through her kids’ things — opened a tempting e-mail, rifled through school papers, maybe even peeked at a diary entry or two? If an informal survey of my friends is any indication, a lot of moms are bigger sneaks than they’d ordinarily care to admit. “It’s not that I don’t trust my children, it’s that I worry about them,” says one mom, who, like others in this story, didn’t want me to use her real name and risk blowing her cover with her kids.

And now you can add to the mix all the ways kids give and get info — between texting, e-mail, and social networking sites, tweens and teens