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?

Sorry you were attacked.and you make a very good point.

Ergo, those of us that don't track our children are not 'close, very close'.

Curious to know how tracking your child creates any benefit from a risk and security perspective. If they got into trouble, what would you do? You'd freak out, try to get the emergency services involved. Broken telephone would likely ensue.

You would be far far better to equip your adult child with the skill, devices and resources to protect themselves. A personal protection device, linked to the their phone and emergency services for starters.

Tracking adult children is doing bugger all, except disabling them from taking proper responsibility for themselves. It's more about the parent than any actual safety benefit. In my opinion.

So much this!!! The Internet is a real danger for kids but so many give them free reign, often unfortunately not realising that even seemingly harmless apps like Spotify and WhatsApp can have hidden dangers. It's so backwards.

All the family are on 360 - including two adult DC who are both studying overseas.

it’s a hangover from when they were young teens and I paid their phone bills (I still do).

they know they can switch it off/remove it at anytime and years of history tells them I don’t actively track them - it used to be more for convenience: are they actually on their way home for dinner etc.

my eldest DC says she finds comfort in knowing where we all are and it makes her feel connected to home. I think they’ve just grown up in an era which makes tracking totally normal, they always know where their friends are via snap etc.

This is true!

When my son turned 18 he was a little down that his friends weren't doing anything - although he'd declined to have a party - but they all turned up at midnight to surprise him. Only it wasn't a surprise because he could see on Snapchat that they were all gathering 50 meters down the road!

Never mind parents being able to see their offsprings' locations on Find My or Maps, every teen who uses Snapchat can see where all their friends, aquatintences and frenemies are! Suggesting the ship has rather sailed and parents thinking they're virtue signalling by not knowing their child has driven off the lonely country road in the night and been stationary in a ditch for the last hour have forgotten that 87 of the 18/19/20 year olds Snapchat contacts do know their location...

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My concern with tracking is it normalised stalking and controlling behaviour for young people so they could get in to a relationship with someone who is controlling and not even realise.

i work in young people’s mental health and can’t tell you how many friends have fallen out because they all track each other and realised X spends more time with Y than they do with them so they feel rejected. It’s obsessive and another way for young people to feel left out.

I also stand by the massive rise in anxiety in young people being (amongst other things) a direct result of anxious parenting. If you are tracking your adult child you are unconsciously telling them the world is a dangerous place and they cannot cope in it without your overview which makes them anxious. By letting them go and be independent and live their life you are setting them up beautifully for adulthood.

I get it, I’m a mum and the anxiety is always there but we have to contain it for the good of our kids.

plus as others have pointed out tracking doesn’t stop bad things from happening and takes the responsibility for keeping oneself safe away from the individual as tracking is a false sense of safety

My kids all joke that I can track them but I never turn my tracking on for them to track me! It’s not a control thing in our house - it’s more of a ‘are they home safe? Good I can relax now’ and I think they like it as it means they know we are not worrying or texting so much.

As long as everyone is aware and happy about it, then it’s nobody else’s business.

I agree. If your mum can use Snapchat to see where you are, so can a stalker.

I never tracked either of my children while they were at uni. I never would have dreamed of it as respect their privacy and autonomy.

Think I slept better not knowing their every move. But always had my phone on loud beside me at all times, in case they needed to talk to me at any time of the day or night. That was enough (for all of us).

if you are tracking your adult child you are unconsciously telling them the world is a dangerous place and they cannot cope in it without your overview which makes them anxious. By letting them go and be independent and live their life you are setting them up beautifully for adulthood.

I completely disagree. My mum and I have each other on life360. It means that we don’t need to be constantly texting (because, unsurprisingly, my mother does worry if I get on a flight and don’t text, because she cares about me). Not once have I felt like she’s implying I can’t cope. Quite the opposite.

I do this, but then my DD is epileptic and disabled so I'm checking to see if she's managed on the bus okay etc.

Is she worried that youre being trafficked? Worrying about flights seems a little niche

Completely agree. I don't track my children as it's not the way we roll. My worry is that tracking an adult child gives them a false sense of security, so if God forbid the worst were to happen, they would freak out and expect Mum and Dad to send in the cavalry, which is not always practical.

Self defense classes for me and my 18 year old will be going into our Xmas stockings this year (something we need).

Not just your mum. Snapchat is a privacy disaster. If teens haven't figured that out themselves, it ought to be made very clear to them. I don't understand the cry 'well, they use [this terrible harmful app] so tracking them is only a minor evil nothing'. Fix the first wrong, don't compound it.

We have got FindMy on devices here and I can see all the devices linked to my account, including AirPods and such like. This by default tells me where DC are, including the one who has left university now. I don’t know how to unlink this as I pay or have paid for the devices and I don’t think of this as tracking per se, as I am not checking what DC are doing regularly. They tend to text me when they are on their way home and suchlike anyway. I use it more to locate AirPods than DC.

DS put my location on his phone and his on mine, which is actively location sharing. This became a bit of an issue for me when I was dating someone after many years of being single and neither wanted to explain my random locations or switch location sharing off and there be questions. So I get the privacy issues from a different angle.
Unrelated to this, I did ask him to switch off location sharing with his dad when he was not with his dad because otherwise his dad would also know where I was when I was taking DS places. Like, tracking by proxy.

As long as both parties are happy with it, it isn’t stalking.

Stalking.

a course of conduct directed at a specific person that would cause a reasonable person to fear for their safety or the safety of others, or to suffer substantial emotional distress.

She’s a mother who cares for her child, who isn’t always the best at sending a “landed!” text. I’m sure a lot of people will say we’re enmeshed, codependent and so very strange for even doing that, but it’s totally normal to check in with the people you love

I remember resisting getting a mobile phone when I was at university and they were quite new for the masses because I didn't want to be contactable all the time. I definitely wouldn't have wanted to be tracked.

That's the rest of us told that we don't love or care enough about our children/parents thrn 😂

I find that planes never landing isn't a thing and if I do want to check for unreported plane crashes I can use any of the online live trackers

I never once said that.

But the fact of it is, it’s natural for parents to worry about their children even when they’re adults and they’ve left home. It’s not about plane crashes, but just a little layer of reassurance.

You don’t need to track them as such via a tracking app, though. I pay for both my kids’ phones, so technically they are mine. They are all on our ‘family’/shared profile and I can use ‘find my’ to locate them - very useful if they’ve lost their apple earbuds or ipad.

So, technically, I’m not tracking my child, I am checking on the location of their devices.

However, both my DCs are ND. One has a history of MH issues and self-harming. It’s her first term at uni. So, yes, I nip on to the ‘find’ app and double check she has had the courage to leave her room in halls and head to classes. It means I don’t have to text (which she is rubbish at replying to unless she needs money or pictures of the pets) multiple times a day to check if she is okay. It’s just a way of keeping an unobtrusive eye on a vulnerable young person. It’s wonderful when I can see she has popped into Nandos or the Spoons near college afterwards as I can infer she is with new friends.

I checked daily at first. Now maybe just a couple of times a week as it’s clear she is settled.

For transparency, my DH and I both share locations on all our devices, too. Also marvellous, as he can see I’m stuck in school/college traffic and I can see if DH managed to catch the 623 train and time his dinner accordingly.

It also teaches YP that bring tracked is normal. So when they get that controlling partner, they don't spot the red flags. Ugh. Just no.

The rates of violent crime have dropped significantly since the 1990's. But the fear of crime is limiting lives and causing significant mental health issues for many people.

I also foresee a big rise in controlling relationships because so many young people view having their every move tracked as perfectly normal.