(FORTUNE Magazine) – Most FORTUNE 500 companies don't really loathe their employees' children--they just act as if they do. Firms that couldn't fathom funding on-site day care for staffers don't hesitate to subsidize beepers and cell phones to assure 7/24 access to their managers. Intranets that can be dialed up from home? Of course; that promotes "flexibility." Daddy will help little Erin with homework the moment he's finished editing his e-mail--promise! Damn those slow ISDN lines.

Throughout the '90s, hard-driving companies have aggressively used technology to annihilate traditional distinctions between office and home. The deal was supposed to be that these tools would give people greater freedom in balancing their personal and professional lives. The reality has been that the workplace has ruthlessly parasitized and colonized family time. This Invasion of the Personal Life Snatchers has been so artfully and deviously managed that employees who aren't technically tethered to their work feel somehow undervalued and out of the hip new-technology loop.

But networks, like knives, can cut both ways. The same technologies used to relentlessly export the office into the home can be employed to creatively import the home into the office. So-called "family friendly" firms--and even their "family hostile" counterparts--will soon find their most ingenious family-oriented employees smuggling their loved ones into the workplace whether management likes it or not.

IBM Business Solutions sells I See You--a service that lets parents with PCs at work tune in to their children in day care. IBM cleverly markets this Web-based system to day-care centers to make them more appealing to parents. As a financial sweetener, IBM gives the centers the added ability to sell advertising on their site. Videocams give Mommy trackers and doting Dads near-real-time imagery of their kiddies--simply by typing in a password. Sweden's KinderCam, whose video cameras double as Web servers, offers a comparable service. In barely three years the tabloid television practice of suspicious parents' monitoring their babysitters with hidden cameras has effectively been turned inside out and gone mainstream.

Now, what company in its right mind tells 38-year-old guilty-as-all-get-out Working Mom who has always gone the extra mile for the Firm that she can't visit little Johnny's day-care site more than twice a day? Will the Firm put anti-day-care filters on their intranets to block access?

Suppose Working Mom wants to dedicate a post card-sized corner of her PC to the site: Should that be celebrated or forbidden? What if 50 or 100 executive moms band together on the intranet to tell their company that since it's too cheap to offer a real day-care center on-site, it had better provide a digital day-care site to let them check up on their kids? There'd better be compelling reasons to turn them down. By the way, men are parents too. That mandates equal-opportunity toddler TV. Companies reluctant to grant lengthy paternity leaves might find nouveaux fathers sated by the digital daddy route. Please don't forget to provide child support for the Road Warrior's laptops. Companies whose networks won't support these kinds of interaction will be seen as guilty of emotional child abuse. All of a sudden, "personal calls" seem a much less daunting corporate bugaboo.

This pro-family technology creates precisely the sort of personal-professional conflict that most companies desperately try to avoid. Working moms with four children would arguably tend to require more bandwidth than moms with two. Monitoring children in day care, and even in kindergarten, seems reasonable. But what happens when wired schools offer this option for third and fourth graders? Some parents wouldn't hesitate to schedule virtual lunches with their 10-year-olds in the school's digital deli. Instead of yet another working lunch, why not chat with your child? It's easy to imagine why this might not sit well at a competitive firm.

Then again, it's equally easy to imagine that at least a few of your more touchie-feelie executives might wonder why some of their top people aren't spending more virtual time with their children. There might be peer pressure to be seen as a good father or mother at the office. Parents might end up having to fake interest in their children. Would that be a good thing? Or would it further strain an unhealthy relationship? What does "quality time" mean when we're talking about time spent together via big-time bandwidth?

The problem is that talking only about children online is so ageist. Most of the peeping execs we're talking about are part of the "sandwich generation": these managers often spend as much time and effort on their parents as on their children. Eldercare is an increasingly important lifestyle issue as boomer parents live longer and more active lives. Perhaps an ailing father in a rest home merits that post card-sized corner of the PC as much as his darling grandchild. Companies take a huge risk by defining "family" as children only. When Working Mom wants to network her young daughter and her elderly mother into a 15-minute videochat during an afternoon break because a last-minute assignment from her childless boss will make her miss dinner, does that represent a genuine benefit for a hard-working employee or an unacceptable abuse of the company's network?

Most companies hate dealing with these shades of organizational gray. But they've brought this problem on themselves. The tools they so love for their ability to encourage organizational productivity across departments can also promote familial relationships across generations. That's about to create a managerial nightmare for human resources departments and emotionally oblivious executives worldwide. Good. Turnabout is fair play.

MICHAEL SCHRAGE is a Merrill Lynch Forum Innovation Fellow and a research associate with the MIT Media Lab. He may be reached via e-mail at michael_schrage@fortunemail.com.