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 18 year old son reminds me to go to bed if he comes down to put his phone on charge before going to sleep (we all leave our phones downstairs overnight for good sleep hygiene, adult DC maintain the habit even after it stopped being a "rule", and parents do too) and sees I'm still up!

He's quite right and I do usually go to bed when he reminds me of the time and that it's a work night 😂

I'm so glad I'm old (well, in my 50's) and didn't have to put up with this craziness when I was young.

Tracking a 13 year old is fine.

But your ILs panicking because they were monitoring their adult son's movements is exactly why there is no need for tracking in adulthood.

You may disagree i dont, people can stick whatever label on they want to it, I stand by it

This. What if someone gets into her Uni room and attacks her? How would tracking make the blindest bit of difference? Because all you can see is that she is "safely" in her room.

This thread reminds me of the "eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves" phrase.

When I was at Uni / in my 20s, I lived a completely normal "young persons" life. Going out in town, going to after parties at friends (or random people's) houses / Uni accommodation (!), stopping off for a kebab on the way home, chatting to strangers we'd just met at the bus stop, having to walk home because we'd spent all our money on drinks.... If my mum had been able to track me then she most likely would have had a nervous breakdown.

As for all the "oh it let's me know if they're on their way home for tea" crap, that's absolute rubbish. You ring / text and ask. Pinpointing their location doesn't prove a single thing. It's weird and obsessive behaviour.

We check. Not religiously! But I do check.

Mine are 19 and 21.

@Nestingbirds I agree it’s important to talk to adult kids, as it is with any adult family member or close friend. Show an interest, ask what they’re up to but not like you’re prying to check up on them or dishing out unsolicited advice. Better to share your experience.

You have to shift from speaking to them like a parent to a child (e.g. “be careful you won’t be too tired at the wheel”) to an adult (e.g. “blimey, I wouldn’t want to be driving all that way back after a rave. I’d be getting a train”, then leave it).

Tracking is so invasive. And normalising it really leaves young people vulnerable to abuse and control. We don't need to know where other adults are 24/7.

No, you are straight up wrong - it’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of fact. Read the definition of “stalking”. It includes the word “unwanted” and has nothing to do with adults happily consenting to using findmy.

Do you know how many innocent 18/19 year old have been attacked, stabbed, rped? Do you know how many have not made it home?*

How would tracking prevent any of that happening, @omgno222?

So how do we determine who is actually "happy" to be tracked?

The only relationship that matters is between you and your teen/ young adult. It can be used for coercive control so talk to them about what isn't a normal use.

This ^

It's important that people aren't tracked in order to exert control and that we teach young people about how to respond if that starts to happen.

Tracking a young person at university and challenging them if they miss a lecture normalises coercive control. That's a problem.

If someone feels unable to do something because a family member or partner may see that they've done it on a tracker is a problem.

Having tracking apps that are just used occasionally and openly and everyone is happy to have them isn't a problem. It's not controlling or an invasion of privacy.

The issue isn't the tracking: it's how it is used. This is a part of our everyday life now and young people need guidance modelling so they know how to use it safely.

Yep.

I can’t imagine tracking anyone for any reason and I would never accept anyone tracking me - it’s a complete invasion of privacy. I often work until 9pm in some unsafe areas of south London and just give my husband a quick ring to tell him when I’m leaving; he knows where I am and how long it should take me to get home so would know when to be concerned if anything happened to me. But the idea of him being able to track me is completely unacceptable. I often don’t have my phone on me anyway, and my husband has only got his first mobile phone fairly recently.

This is a rare example but has always stuck in my mind as a sad tragedy, but years ago in the 2000’s a fresher student died on a night out in Exeter. They had drunk a lot and passed out somewhere in the city and tragically died of exposure. I think the body was found the next day (after the night out). So very sad, it happened during that first ‘fresher’s week’ of uni if I remember right.

I’m not advocating for tracking or not tracking but has always stuck in my mind that young people are still vulnerable in many ways and inexperienced about life’s dangers.

Perhaps if a parent had had a tracker they would have seen them stationary in some alley and called for help. Or I guess maybe they would assume they had just dropped or lost their phone somewhere?

It’s no worse now than it used to be. It’s just more widely reported. You’re not tracking kids, they’re adults.

same way as any consent - happily, continuing, verbal or written.

If my ds didn’t want to be tracked, he could just say don’t track me, and I wouldn’t. But he actively wants to be tracked. I actively want to be tracked by my kids, husband and mum.

Presumably they've given consent it's not for me though.

You say that, but not everyone is as reasonable as you think you are.
Using the example of uni students - which ones are "happy" to be tracked, vs which ones are going along with it so mum doesn't get anxious and stop paying their rent?
How do you know your DS wants to be tracked, vs thinks its better than you being nervous and on his case?

It's only invasive if you use it that way.

If you pay for your child's phone, you probably have access to their call logs. You could use that information to track who they interact with at university.

Having access to that information does not normalise coercive control. Accessing it and asking them questions based on what you have seen absolutely does.

You only know where someone is 24/7 if you're looking on the tracker to see where they are 24/7.

There's a lot of tech that can be used to exert coercive control these days. We need to guide young people on how to use it safely and manage boundaries in relationships.

This is a really good point.

Victims of coercive control would give consent.

This is where we have a responsibility to educate our young people about safe use and how to recognise when tech is being used to control us.

I've noticed this come up on a FB group for parents that I'm on and wondered if I'd do it next year. I think - probably not. It's a bit overdependent and I want to show him that I trust him to be sensible and careful (he's absolutely not going to be a drinker, in any case!). We chat a lot on WhatsApp and I'm fairly sure that'll remain the case, though I know behaviours change when a teen goes to university. But he's meant to be flexing his independence and I think knowing I'm checking in on him and his whereabouts isn't going to help that.

I'm sure most parents who do this are only doing so for positive reasons - love, care, concern - and would justify it by saying that at least they'd know where their child was if they'd passed out somewhere, or been injured, or the phone had been stolen - but in actual fact I think mostly they just want to be able to check that their child has made it back home for the night. I really do understand that urge but I think it's an unnatural thing to expect to be able to know when we're talking about 18, 19, 20 year olds. And I know myself well enough to know that if I had this enabled (with DS's permission) I'd check it far too often and it would become something else to be anxious about.

My own mother once jumped in her car and drove halfway to my own university town (about 2 hours away) just because we'd been on the phone one evening, the line had a fault and the call broke up, and then she couldn't ring me back. Absolutely mental. She was catastrophising all sorts - I was furious when I found out that she'd automatically assumed I was lying, raped and dying, in my student bedroom after a miscreant had climbed through my bedroom window, mid-call, and attacked me.

That's the sort of crazy I come from. I do everything I can to avoid falling into that hole, because basically, I don't want to live like my mother!

There were 70,000 rapes reported last year. 700 people died falling down stairs. So you are a hundred times more likely to be raped.

But as sad as it is, accidents happen and people die all the time. Imagine the guilt the parents would have felt if they did have tracking but didn't look at it that night? Even if they'd have checked it, how on earth would they know that they were in an alley? It could have looked like they were in a house / at a pub.

The whole thing is creepy and unjustified and monitoring a grown adult's movements 24/7 to try to prevent crime is just insane.

Most rapes aren't by strangers though. So tracking wouldn't prevent them.