How Does Tracking Children's Devices Affect the Parents Who Monitor Them?

Her daughter must be dead. This is what Archie Gottesman concluded when checking the location of her middle daughter, who had claimed to be out with friends on a warm summer night in New York City.  The phone tracker, and phone, and phone owner—a young woman in her mid-20s—was positioned right near the Hudson River, unmoving, for hours. “I was sure she was in trouble,” Gottesman told me. There was nothing she could do, other than call and call and rouse her husband to join in the worry. (The young woman’s companion answered his phone. They’d been having drinks.)

Like many parents, Gottesman keeps tabs on her kids’ location through her phone’s tracking app.  It’s a widespread practice: about half of parents track their teenagers, while a quarter continue doing so when those children become young adults. According to Pew Foundation research, females dominate the space: young women (31%) are tracked more often than young men (21%), and mothers do more surveilling than fathers. Google Maps and regular Apple watches and phones allow parents to locate their children’s whereabouts instantly. Life360, another popular app, includes extra features, like crash detection in car accidents over 25mph, and driving summaries that provide a “weekly snapshot of everyone’s driving behavior.”

Much has been written about the drawbacks of tracking on children. Following adolescents electronically may thwart their independence and undermine trust when it’s carried out in secret. It can muddy accountability for the young person’s safety: an adolescent who knows he’s tracked may absolve himself of any personal responsibility to mind his whereabouts; Mom will save him.  And kids who resent their parents’ surveillance can find ways to circumvent the digital intrusion by parking their phone at home, allowing the battery to die, or otherwise outsmarting the technology. According to Lisa Damour, clinical psychologist and author of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, “When it comes to knowing what is going on with a teenager, having their location cannot take the place of having a sturdy, working relationship.”

But how does child tracking affect the parents who monitor their offspring? “(U)sually people are using it to replace uncertainty with certainty,” Meg Jay, an author and clinical psychologist, wrote me in an email. The more anxious the parent, the more likely they are to check their kids’ locations. “Therapists call people like this reassurance junkies, because instead of living with the discomfort of uncertainty for a while, they look for data or information that things are OK,” she added. That reassurance can be short lived. Observing their kids partying into the wee hours, dining at a fast-food joint for the seventh time that week, or spending the night in a mysterious location provokes parent anxiety—and often generates friction between partners on what to do, Jay added.

And to the extent that tracking provides a flash of security, that feeling may be misguided: location tracking is a blunt instrument that can be easily misread; one child “trapped” in at an unfamiliar place may be carrying out a harmless project, while another apparently secure in an apartment or dorm can be taking foolish risks.

Regular surveillance also slows the growth of something subtler, said Lenore Skenazy, the president of Let Grow: a trust muscle. Before location tracking was possible and information ubiquitous, it was normal for parents to be ignorant about their kids’ every move, and mothers and fathers learned to believe in their children and the community; the default state for sane parents was typically “everything is OK.” But with location devices, that mindset shifts to “everything might not be OK”—so I’d better check.  Despite declining rates of violence against children, Skenazy said, “everything goes to death,” she told me. “Fear is winning.”

Experts have tips for parents who want to cut back on location tracking. A part of the answer is striving to tolerate uncertainty, Jay wrote. “Have faith in your child and how you raised them,”  and remind yourself that it’s natural for adolescents to separate from their parents. If easy access to digital surveillance is too tempting, limit the technology to one person’s phone, that of a partner or sibling, she added. Skenazy reminds parents that kids build confidence when they figure out how to fix their own troubles. If parents swoop in at the first sign of trouble—a tire goes flat, a ride doesn’t show, people at the party seem sketchy—young people don’t develop the self-reliance that comes from solving their own problems. Improving parent-child communication, and learning how to manage uncertainty, is healthier for both generations

Of course, not all child tracking is grounded in distrust, especially when it involves young adults. Some parents report that they track for practical reasons: knowing where their kids are helps them decide when to call. “For fun. Curiosity. To know when they’ll show up,” said Sue Greenberg, a mother of three adult kids whose location she follows. And these adult kids reciprocate, so that they too can “keep an eye” on their distant parents. “Our kids like tracking us more than we like tracking them,” explained Lisa McGahan about her four children, adding that it helps them figure out where their frequently on-the-go parents have disappeared to.

But their offspring’s status as adults doesn’t eliminate parents’ worry when the location tracker behaves suspiciously. Just ask Gottesman, who “absolutely loves” the technology despite the panic it caused when her daughter had apparently expired by the Hudson River.  “It’s not all fun and games,” she told me.