In touch too much?

Technology and parenting can be a wonderful marriage, but too many cellular phone calls, text messages and Internet checks can sour that relationship, eroding trust between a parent and child and stifling independence. Every month, parents get a new high-tech gadget to help manage their family: school Web sites with daily updates on grades and attendance; GPS-enabled cell phones; tools to stealthily check their children’s instant messaging.

Such techno-parenting can be a slippery slope into micromanagement, some psychologists say, creating a bond so incessant that teenagers struggle to think for themselves and miss chances to grow.

The problem is that technology is evolving faster than the ability of some parents to balance its benefits and drawbacks.

“I don’t think people realize what the effects are. It’s like the road before there were stop signs and stoplights. You need them,“ said Hara Estroff Marano, an editor-atlarge at Psychology Today and author of the soon-to-be-released book, “A Nation of Wimps.”

“They are just dazzled by the technology.”

To state the obvious, technology can be a big help for harried families. Cell phones help find a child who is lost, sick or forgotten at the bus stop.

Software keeps an eye on Internet use and e-mail. Kits even allow parents to conduct their own drug tests.

But technology also allows parents to investigate their child’s freshman year roommate on Facebook, decide she isn’t appropriate and demand the university change the assignment.

Sally Kidder Davis is a recovering micromanager. Four years ago, Davis sometimes called her teenage daughter’s cell phone hourly after school, driven by fears she says were stoked by media reports of the dangers teenagers face.

The calls didn’t help.

“All it did, quite frankly, was erode the trust between us,” said Davis, a parent coach on Bainbridge Island.

It also offered Davis a false sense of control. These days she relies heavily on face-to-face conversations with her three children, ages 15, 17 and 20, particularly about technology.

But technology remains a seductive tool for other parents at a time when they feel helpless in managing their children’s complicated lives, says Madeline Levine, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Price of Privilege.”

Beyond feeding parental fears, hyperawareness also may rob kids of critical opportunities to fail, and to learn from those mistakes, Levine said.

“The goal of parenting is to produce an independent child,“ Marano said.

Parents of teenagers may have the toughest balancing act, since technology allows them to remain close just as their kids need space.

“It kind of feeds that desire to crack into the highschooler world right when the high-schooler is pulling away and wants more privacy,” said Gail Hudson, who lives in Seattle.

In a way, parents are struggling with their own technological adolescence, learning to manage and control ever more powerful tools, the way teenagers cope with their own confusing emotions.