Do you track your teenager?

[Coffeesndteav]

I have had my dd on the friend finder app. We live about a mile away from her school so being in the park with friends etc it eases my mind.She is 13 next week.

We have had a temper tantrum tonight saying none of her friends parents do this. I am a stalker. We don't trust her. We care too much

Her attitude is very bad at the moment. Wow teens are hard work.

AIBU to track her on the app?

@lydia7986 or they’ve got wise and left their mobiles at home and gone out on the pull / drinking with a burner!

(My dds aren’t into clubbing/nights out, so they’re always home before midnight - I can see that it wouldn’t work so well if they did like those things)

The only reason I was willing to pay for a smartphone was so that we could install trackers.

DD13 can see where we are, we can see where she is. It's very rare I'll check on her, in fact she probably tracks me more but we all like the reassurance that tracking the phone offers.

If she doesn't want to be tracked anymore that's fine. She won't need a smartphone and I can reduce her contract to just texts and calls and downgrade to a dumb phone.

I do trust her, this is just a condition of her having the smart phone that I pay for.

lydia Their phone might be home. Doesn’t mean they are. Give them privacy.

Surely uni students stay out past midnight once in a while though? Even if it’s just messing about at a friend’s house or having a cheeky snog.

Tracking a uni aged “child” by their phone is more about the parents anxiety than it is about safety. If I was getting tracked at 19 my mum would have seen I was at work until really really late but she wouldn’t have know what I was doing (shaggjng my boss)!

@Nicknacky

They choose to have their location visible. I’ve made it clear to them that they can opt out at any point, as I said in my first post - I would never try to emotionally blackmail them into keeping it switched on.

Lydia You have said yourself your will text then if they aren’t home. They will know that by allowing you to track them it makes life less stressful to them. Give them privacy, they are adults!

I think that there are times that it is reasonable to do so, and other times when it is not.

If your child has good form for telling the truth, doing what she says she will and is only going to places that are known to be safe, like a friends house or a local park they know, you know etc then maybe it is a bit much.

Definitely for new places, definitely if you are unsure of where they are actually going

Weve got to the point where if DD was going anywhere she would say, right I know you'll worry. I'm going to be FINE but my location is on. It has the added bonus of when I'm supposed to be collecting her i know where she is, so none of this calling and calling to find out where she is, when shes going to get to the car.

It's a great tool to have for their safety, but she obviously feels bad about it, so there needs to be some compromise

Also, I've got OCD. She gets all sorts of calls from me, all sorts. One day I'd convinced myself when I was driving off a kerb after dropping her off I mustve run her over. If she had her location settings on I'd have known she was moving around instead of being like FUCK, I've killed little tumble! No I havent, but what if I have? That bump. It would have been a kerb. No. Yes. No.

Obviously you're not going to be doing the same as me, but sometimes they realise its infact easier for you to have access to their location as it stops annoying calls when they're out trying to be independent.
And as time goes on, you will relax more because you'll trust her ability to make decent decisions and not get herself kidnapped/murdered/mugged.

I had friend finder on DS until 15 or 16, he could track me too. My deal was, you either have it on your phone or buy your own phone.

He’s lost it twice and we’ve found it that way. Also, in a sense young teenagers need to get over themselves a bit - 13 years then of course a parent should always know where they are. Why wouldn’t you? We are very much their guardians and they are our responsibility.

If she wants to be more grown up - she can start doing her own washing and making dinner.

If the child is on board, whatever.

Otherwise it's really creepy and unreasonable.

I have a 13 and 14 year old, they have life 360 on their phones. I don’t track them as such just check where they are if I’m cooking dinner or something. I trust my 14 year Old, she’s very sensible, not so much the 13 year old though!

It’s not creepy! Ha ha some people are really in a knickers in a twist about privacy. No child of 13 should have exclusive access to the internet, to their phones and shut off location if their parents want it to feel more secure. We should all be able to check out kids phones for internet use at that age too. It’s just the deal with technology.

@LimitIsUp. I’m the same. As long as they’re home before dark, we aren’t too strict. Mine can go where they want within reason. My daughters friends tell her she has too much freedom but shes never given us any reason not to trust her. Funnily most if her friends are regularly in trouble doing stuff they shouldn’t and getting grounded on a regular basis!

@SecretRed

I track my 14yo ds. He's betrayed my trust a couple of times and I worry about him going out. This way I know where he is and I'm not on his back all of the time.

Well you know where his phone is. You don't know if he has his phone with him though, or if he has just left it somewhere, or with someone, who is where you expect him to be.

There will always be some way to get round it, and teenagers are almost certain to lie at times, but I think you are likely to make the situation worse rather than better.

This is reminding me of that Black Mirror episode which ends very badly....

When I was a teenager (a long time ago), the parents that trusted their children implicitly were the ones totally naive to the things we got up to. I’m not saying all teenagers shouldn’t be trusted but for some parents, checking and questioning their children’s whereabouts is a matter of safety.

I’m far from naive. I’m just realistic and until my kids give me reason not to trust them then I won’t track them.

And I certainly wouldn’t track a 19 and 21 year old adult at uni. That’s ridiculous.

No! We do have a phone finding thing on all our phones in case we lose them so i suppose I could check that if I really wanted to but I don't. How shut my teen years would have been if my parents watched where I was all the time!

I'd also been concerned that teens would leave their phone at a friends if they were going somewhere their parents disapproved of. Then they have no way of contacting you if they get stuck or need help.

We all use 'Find my' App in iPhones for both DC, myself and DH.

We are all aware of it, and are completely open about it. It's normal for us.

It's also useful for coordinating things like family mealtimes or meeting up. I can see if DH is still at work or sitting in traffic, or just around the corner. I can see when the kids have left the park and are making their way home. DH can see where I am when we arrange to meet in town after work. I can check on DH when he goes cycling or running and have more than once had to pick him up after he came off his bike, or more recently got caught in a thunderstorm. It's much easier to find him by looking at the map and seeing exactly where he is!

Uni kids being home every single night? That would worry me. Not a single late night out or party?

I hope that’s more that they’ve just taken to leaving their phones behind because young people should be out late having fun

@BrummyMum1

When I was a teenager (a long time ago), the parents that trusted their children implicitly were the ones totally naive to the things we got up to. I’m not saying all teenagers shouldn’t be trusted but for some parents, checking and questioning their children’s whereabouts is a matter of safety.

Checking and questioning is a very different think to outright tracking them

Absolutely. It's a condition of her having her phone (which you pay for) and her having as much freedom as she does.
I can guarantee many of her friends are also tracked via the phone, she's just saying it.
Its also very useful to know how far away they are so tea is on the table when they arrive

Some of these constantly tracked kids are going to turn into adults who think they can, and should, constantly track their partners.