Phone tracking while at university

[Fenimore]

Astonished that so many parents I know are tracking their kids by phone. These are 18/19 year olds. I guess the young people don’t mind or they’d turn off the tracking. I just don’t think it’s healthy.

One parent I know is checking every day to see if their son is at lectures as well as what time he’s home from a night out.

i don’t track DD. One, she really wouldn’t like it and two, I think it would be stressful as well as being an invasion of privacy.

Does anyone do this?

My friend is doing the same with her son. I wouldn’t even know how to do this or what benefit it is knowing this information.

Not for me!

I think it's weird that young people activate the tracking device on their phones. Turn it off!

We do, but then we all track each other and it’s useful. We said when kids turned 18 that it was their choice and they both chose to leave it on. As DS has mental health issues we check fairly often as worried about DS never leaving room. With DD, I usually only check on the one evening that she has to walk back on own from a society that she’s made it home safely or, if want to call her, whether she’s home so likely to be convenient. Also very useful if we are meeting up to find each other / check for delays.

I don't have a proper tracker app but I can see where sons were when they last checked in to Snapchat, and yes I do look!!! My 2 sons are both at uni. I don't check all the time but sometimes look to see where they are. They know we check and don't care.

Do you know how many innocent 18/19 year old have been attacked, stabbed, r*ped? Do you know how many have not made it home? We don’t live in 1990 anymore. We live in 2025 and it’s a very scary world. Remember the 2 uni students that got stabbed on way home??

my point is.. I track my daughter. She also doesn’t mind & totally gets that I’m protecting her. If anything was off.. or god forbid happened I know right where to go, to save her. We’re so close. Very very close.

for you to be “astonished” at anyone of uni age tracking their kids I think your pretty astonishing. Strange person.

@omgno222 how does tracking a young person avoid a rape or a knife attack?

We don’t track our teenagers & I would have found it really weird if my parents had when I was a teenager. I was well behaved as a teenager but would still have hated it. Kids get no privacy nowadays - you can track what lesson they are in on ClassCharts, see what they had for lunch on ParentPay, track where they are on life360.

I think its weird. They are young adults. I understand when they are younger. Its an invasion of privacy and and controlling. I don't track my 18 year old daughter.

Trying to normalise the abnormal.

I think it's creepy and overbearing to track DC at university. I definitely wouldn't have wanted my parents to track me and I'd rather not know what my own DC are doing all the time. I think it's unhealthy and shows a lack of trust. Let them live their lives independently.

Other than the parents knowing that the students had stopped moving what benefit woukd tracking them in Nottingham have had?

How would it have made them safer? Stopped rhe attack? Helped anyone?

Do you know the actual numbers? The chance of being attacked, raped etc is vanishingly small. You're probably far more likely to be run over in the street or fall down stairs at home. Find the real statistics and learn to understand probability. Tragic cases get into the news because they are so rare.

I track my children, the older one is 18 (nearly 19). She has such an active social and college life, I barely ever see her.

I check to see where she is if I am, for example, making dinner. If she is in work, she'll be late home and will eat there. If in college, ill make her a portion.

The youngest two, Im forever picking them up so this makes it easier.

They say they keep an eye on me too!

Mine asked me to! i think because she'd moved from a country town to the city, she feels safer some how knowing i can see her. She also drives 4 hours home and it's good to make sure she's still moving or like last weekend...she got tired after late nights at college..so i said we'd meet and i'd drive her home while DH drove her car. I wouldn't care if she said she wanted it removed..but as i said she seems to feel safer i think having it.

Unless you are physically by their side you will not be able to stop anything happening to them. How long do you propose to track them for, the University years or continue for the rest of their lives and whom therefore will track them when you die will provision be made for somebody to take over the role of chief tracker.

It is overbearing parenting that stunts young people. At various stages in our lives we all had to make good decisions and risk assess situations.

i am very close to DC who is at University however if I suggested tracking the response would be a firm No and I support and admire that stance.

The one person I know who does this has a very anxious personality and a grown child who is very similar. I feel sorry the child has not been able to make mistakes, find a solution and learn from it.

My daughter uses Snapchat and I got it too when she went to uni, at her suggestion, I could see where she was on the map. I didn’t track her but if I knew she was out the night before I would check the map when I woke up to make sure she had made it home safely, it was reassuring and she didn’t mind at all, in fact we still have it now she’s back home doing a PGCE so we can see where eachother is.

Apparently a surprising number of partners track each other too

It just really weirds me out for some reason, I'd really hate that to be the default with my partner or parents. I do sometimes share my location for a limited time (if I'm out alone after dark somewhere unknown and feel a little unsafe) but only a few times a year.

Won't it be more worrying tracking them as if you don't see them on the tracker for any reason you will worry. I was glad when DS went to university and I didn't need to worry anymore about if he was in or not at night.

I think it's crazy.

That’s the sort of thing an abusive partner would say and by doing this you are setting her up that this is the norm. What it is in fact, is your anxiety. At some point parents need to step back and let their adult children live their lives. They are going to make mistakes but society has become so risk averse.
As pp have said, how does you tracking your daughter stop bad things happening to her? You would be better teaching her the skills to keep herself as safe as possible, rather than monitoring what she is doing.

Now I think about this further didn't the parents of the one of the murdered students speak about tracking the phone and seeing it the area of the attack?

Please come back and explain the safety aspect to tracking

The New York Times Modern Love podcast did an interesting episode on location sharing (to share or not to share) which helped me understand more why people might want to, as well as the potential issues.

DD1 is at uni and would never let me track her even if I wanted to, which I don’t. It’s frightening how tracking is becoming normalised even for adults, because then you get all the ‘oh I just want to know when to put the tea on’ people, and ‘why would you mind if you didn’t have anything to hide?’

DD turns the location tracker off on Snapchat because she thinks it’s creepy, I agree with her tbh.

If she's stopped at a house or bar, how do you know if that's good or bad? Is she needs saving or is enjoying herself? How would you save her? I'm interested in the practicalities of using location sharing all the time.

I only use it in limited circumstances where I'm near who I'm sharing with and they know my specific concerns (walking home in unknown town in dark, should be home by x; running this route, expecting home by x).

I don't know how I'd use it if it were on all the time.

We all have each other on ‘Find My’. I don’t think I ever once looked up my kids when they were at uni though.

Our youngest suffers a bit with anxiety relating to a very bad accident I had, and he does look up our whereabouts as he finds it reassuring.

I don't believe that tracking keeps people safe. So a parent can see where their adult teen is, in a city hours away. That doesn't prevent or protect them from violence. It will still happen if it is going too and the police can access the data if there is a need anyway.
I think it is intrusive, a false sense of security and it feeds anxieties.