Her daughter must be dead. That’s what Archie Gottesman concluded when he checked the location of his middle daughter, who claimed she was out with friends on a warm summer night in New York. The phone tracker and the phone, and the owner of the phone — a young woman in her mid-20s — was positioned right next to the Hudson River, motionless for hours. “I was sure he was in trouble,” Gottesman told me. She could do nothing but ring and ring and wake her husband to join in the alarm. (The young woman’s companion picks up the phone. They’ve been drinking.)
Like many parents, Gottesman keeps track of her children’s location through a tracking app on her phone. This is a widespread practice: approx half of parents track their teens while a quarter continued doing so when these children become young adults. According to the Pew Foundation research, women dominate the space: young women (31%) are followed more often than young men (21%), and mothers do more monitoring than fathers. Google Maps and regularly An apple watches and phones allow parents to instantly locate their children. Life360another popular app, includes additional features such as crash detection for car accidents over 25mph and driving summaries that provide a “weekly snapshot of everyone’s driving behaviour”.
Much has been written about disadvantages of tracking children. Electronic surveillance of adolescents can interfere with their independence and undermine trust when carried out covertly. This can blur responsibility for the young person’s safety: an adolescent who knows he is being tracked can abdicate any personal responsibility to attend to his whereabouts; Mom will save him. And kids who resent their parents’ monitoring can find ways around digital intrusion by parking their phone at home, letting the battery die, or otherwise outsmarting the technology. According to Lisa loveclinical psychologist and author of The emotional life of teenagers“When it comes to knowing what’s going on with a teenager, their location is no substitute for a stable, functioning relationship.”
But how does child tracking affect parents who monitor their offspring? “Usually people use it to replace uncertainty with certainty,” And Jayauthor and clinical psychologist, wrote to me in an email. The more anxious a parent is, the more likely they are to check their children’s location. “Therapists call people like this sedation junkies because instead of living with the discomfort of uncertainty for a while, they look for data or information that things are okay,” she added. This reassurance may be short-lived. Watching their kids party until the wee hours, eating fast food for the seventh time this week, or spending the night at a mystery location provoked parents’ anxiety — and often creates friction between partners about what to do, Jay added.
And to the extent that tracking provides a glimmer of security, that feeling may be misguided: location tracking is a blunt tool that can easily be misread; one child “stuck” in an unfamiliar place may be doing a harmless project, while another, apparently safe in an apartment or dormitory, may be taking foolish risks.
