Parents tracking their children

[intrestedvic]

I am always reading on threads how people know where their children are due to apple air tags or, apps, or location sharing on a phone.

Not just on mumsnet but in my circle I know lots of parents who use maps or share location with children.

I am a parent to small children currently but I was wondering opinions on this situation. If you track your children and why and if not why not?

I don't think we are taking anything away from them @Flamingogirl08 as the app is used by consent. If they don't want you to know where they are then they switch it off.

But they don't know any different do they? Will they ever know true freedom? Maybe not, maybe that's the world we live in now.

They don't.
Hence the posts about 11 yr olds who don't know how to cross a street and 16 yr olds who can't can't a bus.

Such infantilization is not beneficial to anyone but the overly controlling mummy.

In the , thankfully unlikely event of a kidnap, the first thing they would do would be to throw away the phone. Women are sadly much more likely to be abused by partners than strangers

Kids are more tech savey than us, they are also more aware of controlling relationships than we were at their age. Mine are teenagers and we live rurally, so if anything the app gives them more freedom, not less.

It also bugs me that so many things to do with transport like maps and train timetables and even money now on phones. You can’t go anywhere without them even if you want to

Apple tags and similar trackers were originally developed to tag items such as bikes, handbags etc..
People using them on other humans is quite worrying. And the way they normalise it is frankly, ridiculous. They build a whole philosophy around why they tag their children, spouse, mum or niece.
I have a friend who is a nanny and told me the parents she works for tag their 6 year old children who are constantly supervised. They are either with their parents, their nanny or with some other trustworthy parent on a play date, or are in school. So the parents inadvertently (or advertently?) track these people too. As an adult I would have none of it, I even told her I would walk out on the job. The kids have no idea of being tagged as the tags are sawn into their jacket pockets.

Agree with this. One of my DC has type one diabetes. I get an alert on my phone if he has a hypo and I can also see where he is. Mild hypo with friends near the shop (so can access glucose if he has run out) - no need for intervention. But if he is walking home down the country road from town and has a severe hypo, I can call him to see if he wants me to come and pick him up. He only has a vague time that he needs to be home. If he didn't have Find My Phone and his continuous glucose monitor, I think I would need to be more restrictive.

We have family life 360 as teen DC do extreme and solitary sports which take them far from home sometimes. We have told them they can turn it off when they're not doing said sports (we have all agreed they need it on for that) but as a rule I don't think they do - have never noticed but then I don't often check - their choice, no consequence from us if they wanted to.

I think Liorae is wrong - it absolutely does not necessarily lead to infantilisation - my kids have a huge amount of freedom to roam the countryside and city alone and with friends, on public transport and their own transport (bikes, running, car for the eldest). With misuse from parents maybe it does.

I seldom look at it when they're not doing said sports - only if I know one of them is trying to get a late/night bus home (dodgy here - loads of cancellations) - once I see they're on the bus I go to bed and not wait for a call for a lift. Again I think it means more freedom for them as I don't have to phone to ask them, or text and nag for a reply.

We don't have any alerts but I noticed they have alerts for when DH and I approach home - presumably so they look busy/do chores etc - I laugh at them and say they are very obvious.

Do I mind being tracked by my family? No. And I go wherever I want to go without worrying that DH 'disapproves'.

I'm not defending it wholeheartedly as I realise there are issues around being tracked but definitely disagree with the infantilisation claim.

No absolutely not. I couldn't bear to live like that.

I have shared location with my daughter. She's 15 now and going out more, I don't watch her or monitor her, I just like knowing that if she didn't come home I'd know where she was. I probably just watch too much true crime.

I would never look through her phone or computer though like I know some people do, that's not on.

And I've never had location tracking or anything on with DH, he's either at work, at home or fishing so I don't see the need!

My kids are only small, 5 and 2 so the thought of them being out of my sight currently fills me with dread. But when they are allowed, I will track them for as long as I feel uncomfortable being away from them.

I dont see the issue. When I am out without DH I share my location with him. Just feels safer.

I also believe that tracking and being tracked doesn't alleviate so called anxiety. Instead it just feeds and enables it.

We have the life 360 app. I like to check it when my son is out on his own, I don’t sit with it on the whole time watching his every movement that he is out but I do check it regularly, maybe once an hour. He has just turned 13 and only started going out the last couple of months.
We live in a busy city where there has been many problems with gangs of older kids mugging the younger ones, also knife crime in the area is up so if any thing did happen and I couldn’t get hold of him I would roughly know the last area he was in and could drive down there.
I don’t know any parent friend with a teenager who doesn’t have some sort of phone tracker on their kids phones.

i love people saying 'the teens can turn it off at any time, it's their choice' yeah with you waiting at home ready to quiz them on why they turned it off and punish them for even daring too

also i agree with @Flamingogirl08 part of being a teenager is rebelling and going places you shouldn't i find parents think that their kids aren't 'ready' to do things like walk home or go to the shopping centre alone but then their kid is perfectly fine

So you are determined @lailamaria that every parent using the app, even though I and others have explained what a mutually useful tool it is in the right context, is an anxious, controlling, abusive mess raising pathetic wimps of children? 🤣🤣

No kidding. The sort of parent who obsessively tracks might pretend to be ok with that, but won't be in practice. Control is all to them.

To what? I find it very useful.

There's a huge difference between tracking a teenager without them consenting or knowing, and having location activated on a phone that they are fully onboard with.

Why wouldn't you want the option of knowing where your kids are? I think a lot of people against it here don't realise how kids feel about this stuff now, or the advantages of it. Plus in families that do this, many of us adults share our loaction with them too. It's a mutual thing.

I don’t ‘track’ my child but we do have family sharing in so in theory we can look at where everyone is. I don’t think we use it very much but as DS is only 12 I don’t feel bad for leaving it in either.

@Newyeardietstartstomorrow but like they don't get to have their teenage sneakiness, like 'oh my god i just went to so and so's house mum will never know' like it's fun but no i don't think that kids who are tracked are pathetic wimps at all, if it's used in the right way and not to punish and parents aren't staring at the app 7 hours a day then i don't think it'll harm anyone, teenagers deserve privacy too

But @lailamaria this is why I said it's about consent, not control, and having the option to switch it off. Using it as a weapon not a tool is abuse.

I know where my teens are because they tell me.
If they didn't want me to know they won't tell me and will get round the phone tracking system.

I also think there is a difference between having location enabled for use in an emergency only, and sitting and watching your child's every move (which some on here admit to doing).

Teens feel differently about sharing stuff with friends than they do with parents, so what they do routinely with friends is going to be different to what they do with their parents.

I'm yet to be convinced of the advantages of tracking in most cases (there was an example upthread of a child who might collapse due to medical condition, which would be a good example of an exception).
Most of the examples on here are because the parent is anxious or the child doesn't communicate with them. I don't think either is a good reason.

Wish this had been available when our kids were young. We wouldn’t have tracked them but knowing that we could had we needed to would have given great peace of mind.

I'm in the 'makes me uncomfortable' camp but I understand there are degrees of 'spying' so I don't judge people who find it convenient for family life.

But I don't even like being 'tracked' by our own Ring doorbell. When DH first installed it he would say things like 'Oh where were you off to when you left the house at 2.17pm?' and I would reply 'Mind your own fucking business'.

This makes DH sound quite sinister when he was only showing off about what wonderful things his new gadget could do. But it is sinister. Not being able to leave my house without someone miles away knowing about it made my skin crawl. He soon stopped the 'spying' and nowadays he frequently forgets to charge it and I don't remind him so it's often not working anyway.

My friend who tracks her DC, including 17yo DD, does follow them obsessively. She's completely overinvested in what her DC are doing at all times. It even gets in the way of our nights out or weekends away because she's never 'in the room' with us, she's always watching her DC on her phone, or they're phoning her, or she's phoning them. I do wonder if she will still being doing it when her DD is 30.