Although family members sometime engage in monitoring as an extension of governmental surveillance, they also monitor each other, other families, and their own borders to preserve norms about what a family should be and what family members should do. Whether it is the seemingly benign surveillance of using baby monitors, the more obviously intrusive use of home drug tests on teenagers, or the way people in public feel free to judge and comment on the family composition of others, monitoring goes on all the time -- and even (or maybe especially) when there seems to be no monitoring going on at all.

Anita Ilta Garey is Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies and of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her book Weaving Work and Motherhood received the William J. Goode Award from the Family Section of the American Sociology Association. She has co-edited three other books, including (with Margaret K. Nelson) Who's Watching?: Daily Practices of Surveillance among Contemporary Families, also from Vanderbilt University Press.

Margaret K. Nelson is A. Barton Hepburn Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Middlebury College. She is the author and editor of several books including, most recently, Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times.