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?

I have a friend who still tracks the phones of her adult daughters, both mid twenties, one of whom is married with a child!
She also still pays the phone bills.
As others have said, it feels very intrusive and bordering on passive control.

We have three DC aged from 19 to 30, and all of us have tracking on. We travel a lot, so it means they can see where we are and what we are up to, and we find it reassuring to see where they are. Everyone finds it useful to check out arrival times when we are meeting up and so on. None of us see it as stalking. Anyone who did would turn it off!

That's what we do.

Also had other issue though that was MIL.

Our mid 70s DGP also prefer what app messaging with the kids - wish IL did with us rather than ring expect us to drop eveything and do long talk even if out for dinner or busy with life.

I think it's just what becomes normal for a family.

I do think it's normalising tracking other adults and mostly that will be benign it's clearly a potential slippy slope.

I find tracking werid to start with because we've never done it but when an adult requires permsision to stop it it's hard to see it as anything but a form of control. I am biased though as parental anxiety was something I had to cope with - but however constrained my life got it was never enough in end had to do what sibling did and just ignore - their anxiety their issue to deal with - upshot it slowly stopped being my issue.

They might be an adult. But they’ll always be my baby.

When are you going to stop insisting that they share every detail of their daily movements with you, then?

My mum’s still very much alive and certainly I am still ‘her baby’ in the sense that no mother ever stops having maternal love for their child. She loves me just as much now as she did the day that I was born, and just as much as she did when I was at university. So should I, an adult woman who doesn’t live with her, be letting her know whenever I’m going out and texting her when I get back safely? I’m going to a gig tonight - should I send her the details along with an estimate of when I might get back? What about every time I go for an evening run? Or when I go to work? Or for a weekend away with my partner?

Because frankly, that would be absolutely fucking mental. And it would also have been mental when I was a student.

I respected her choice to join Life 360 along with the rest of the family - it was entirely her decision. Just as I would respect her choice to leave the app, or turn off tracking, if that's what she decided. It's always been entirely her decision. I respect her choices.

I don’t track - never have never would.

If they are injured the is around them would help.

They have friends who track each other - I find it a bit weird!!

They have phones and can ring, they have money in their accounts, we had 10p for the phone, no money so had to walk home!!

It’s ridiculous to think they would come to less harm being tracked.

Are they your kids?
If the answer is no, then it’s none of your business.

How about you parent your own instead of making judgy posts about other parents or do you have nothing better to do?

And no, I don’t have uni age kids so I don’t do this, but I don’t know how I’ll parent at that point so I won’t judge anyone for caring about their kids safety and whereabouts when there are genuinely awful parents out there who actually do deserve judgement.

Meh, my mum tracks me quite often and I’m now in my 40s! She will quite often send me a text along the lines of “oh I see you’re home now, what were you getting in marks and Spencer?”. If it bothered these teens they would surely just turn off the tracking app? Perhaps they view it as a simple way to keep their parents happy. I couldn’t imagine tracking my children when they are at university, but to be fair my youngest is 11 and just got a phone as he has started at secondary school, and I don’t track him when he’s cycling to his friends house. I mostly use tracking to establish when family members are on their way home for supper.

We all have our trackers on in this family, no one is arsed because non of us use it to criticise or question where someone is or what they’re doing it’s just a helpful tool. It came into its own this week when my DD had her phone snatched and I was able to track it down and reported the journey to its last known location to the police.

If you use Find My, you are sharing location so both have to agree to it.

Anyhoo, conversation today. DD messages “hello food question incoming. I was going to call but I can see you’re not home, shall I message?” I’d just got to the gym so told her to call but it made me smile.

It’s bloody ridiculous. My colleague still tracks her adult children who have now left uni. She freaked out the other day because her 25 yo dd turned her phone off so she couldn’t see where she was. Meanwhile, I let my 10 year old DS go to the park with his friends without a tracker and people think I’m being irresponsible !

Yep. Or they don’t take any phone with them at all because they know they’re being tracked. Which means they’re less able to call for help if needed…

I wouldn’t dream of tracking my DSs - I actually wouldn’t want to know where they were! DD and I do track each other though. She has no issue with me knowing where she is, and likes to know where I am.
I do find it weird that parents are checking up to find if their student child is attending lectures. But I guess these parents are paying out quite a bit to financially support their adult child
and want to be sure their money isn’t going to waste. I do wonder if they’ll be checking int he future to see if their 22 yo is turning up for work on time.

We have life 360 as a family. DS yr 4 (masters ) uni is part of it. I rarely check it , he uses it at times to see where we are when we visit him, or when he is home he uses it to see if I've left work. I use it periodically to check if DH is on way home so I know when to have tea ready. Eldest DS refuses to be part of life 360 …. Says he doesn’t want to be checked up on but a has nothing to hide 🙈. It works for us but as I say we don’t check up on each other.

It's great that works for you, I think the problem is when young women are being told they are being kept safe from rapists and murders because their mother is tracking them. Potentially they are at more risk if they believe this instead of sensible advice.

So DD is, in the style of Will Smith, 'getting jiggy' with a boy/girl at their (not her) halls/house and Mum turns up, banging on the door because their baby doesn't live here and should be home, so 'must' be in danger...
How do you know if something is 'off'? How close by are you to 'save her'? Genuinely, how are you protecting her? Realistically if anything really bad was happening you wouldn't know just from the location of her phone

I have my yp on Snapchat but I rarely use Snapchat so don't track them. However if they are out in the city and getting an Uber home etc they like me to check and then they message me to say they are back safe so I can switch it off. They are aware I am a while away and cannot rescue so they always make sure they use a registered Uber and walk back with friends if possible as well as the usual safety checks and listening to their instinct. That's not a regular occurrence though and it's not something I check without being asked as they have a right to privacy. They have me on Snapchat too but never track me as far as I am aware (not that I go many places).

I dropped my son’s bike off at his university yesterday - when I arrived he was outside waiting for me as he’d tracked me coming on Life360. It works both ways!

Also I always like my family to be able to track me when I go out on long runs or bike rides. And I like to track my kids on long bike rides too. Only 1 of my 3 adult kids have turned off their Life 360. It’s their decision.

She didn't tell me because she didn't want to worry me, not because she wanted to hide it from me.
I really think it's odd that some ppl think that parents should automatically stop caring when thier children turn 18.
It isn't about control at all. She could stop her location sharing if she wanted to but she chooses to keep it on.

We’re all signed up to life 360, it was my DDs idea she’s 25, my oldest 33, and youngest 20 plus me and DH are all on there. I don’t obsess over it but it’s so useful to know where everyone is for cooking dinner etc

It's not putting someone under surveillance though, these people are happily sharing their location so that people know where they are.

We have location sharing. I rarely use it for DH or 18 year old DD. I think it just causes more anxiety, doesn’t help. I do use it for DD14 as she only started going out more recently; I hope to stop doing soon as she is nearly 15.

Our parents didn’t have a choice, they have to trust us.

This is how we use it as a family and no one abuses it. I'm at risk of serious medical events so they can find me if I don't make contact. Some us go to remote locations alone - if they don't show up we can provide info to emergency services. I sometimes look to see where family is when on their way so that I can time dinner to be ready. It's a tool, though I can see how some people might misuse it.

The importance of tracking was brutally reinforced when my dd's friend who was travelling stopped contacting everyone. Her mother tracked her phone to a police station and called. She had been dead for several days and they hadn't id'd her. Yes, tracking didn't prevent the accident but was instrumental in locating her.

I track mine, with her knowledge… but then she’s autistic/ADHD with a history or mental health issues including suicidal ideation and is living away from home for the first time. Couldn’t give a monkeys what anyone else thinks and also feel that ensuring her physical and mental wellbeing, in fact, trumps privacy rights. I’m happy for her to be mad at me checking on her so long as she is alive. As it is, using the ‘find my’ app just means I don’t have to text her repeatedly so she is happy. I only check that she has made it to lectures every other day now, though, and did check that she had actually left her room this weekend (not doing so may indicate a MH crisis, so I don’t apologise for that either.) Hoping the need to check in on her will lessen as she settles in.

Within my network of friends most of us have YP/DCs with similar needs, so it’s accepted practice for us. All our family members participate, so she can check when her dad is up in town and nearby, too, which she finds useful as she can usually cadge a free meal.