How GPS Tracking of Teens 24/7 Affects Parent-Child Relationships

Megan Rumney, an executive at a financial services company in Severna Park, Maryland, an affluent suburb of Baltimore, decided to buy a smartphone for her eldest son. She made the purchase knowing she would use it to track his location and social media use. Rumney was hesitant to do this for the fifth grader, but admits she felt a lot of social pressure and eventually gave in. All her friends gave their kids smartphones, and Rumney didn’t want her son to feel left out; his friends communicate almost exclusively through their devices. Still, she worried about the risks of social media and cyberbullying.

At the time, Rumney thought this was a good compromise. It enabled her son Harrison, now 14 years old, to cycle to school, sporting events and friends’ houses, giving him a sense of autonomy. A few years later, her youngest son Weston, now 11, got an Apple Watch for much the same reason. However, sometimes tracking has become something of a burden.

When her children are not with her, she uses apps like Life360 and her youngest son’s Apple Watch to track their location. Rumney says once you have the technology, it’s hard not to use it all the time. “It’s good to know where they are and be able to contact them, but it’s also a double-edged sword,” she says.

About supporting science journalism

If you like this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribe. By purchasing a subscription, you help shape the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Rumney says she would like to know where her children are, but her family isn’t as dependent on devices. She adds that she’s just not sure if it’s worth it to be able to track Harrison when he has a phone he spends so much time on, and she doesn’t know how this kind of monitoring will impact him in the future. future. “If I could do it all over again, I’m not sure I would,” Rumney says. In fact, she has refrained from giving her youngest son his own smartphone.

About half of U.S. parents say they monitor their adolescents’ movements through location-tracking apps, according to a study published in June 2023 in the Journal of Family Psychology. Another 14 percent of parents who participated in the study claimed to use a tracking app while their child reported that they were not being monitored, indicating that the monitoring occurred without the child’s knowledge.

Experts worry that tracking teens’ locations can become a slippery slope that can sometimes hinder teens’ relationships with their parents and damage their developing sense of autonomy, as well as create a false sense of security.

With so many things for parents to worry about, from school shootings to fentanyl overdoses and child trafficking, it’s no surprise that they’re looking to location monitoring apps like Find My iPhone and Life360, which use GPS, and Wi-Fi location. Fi networks nearby. -Fi networks and cell towers, to track their children and keep them safe, says Sophia Choukas-Bradley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, whose research focuses on the mental health and well-being of adolescents and emerging adults. “That said, for adolescents, this is a stage of life when children are seeking autonomy and independence from their parents,” she says, “and a time when privacy is very important to children for good developmental reasons.”

Choukas-Bradley adds that part of normal teen development involves the desire for privacy and the ability to maneuver their first romantic relationships or hold their own with peers while just hanging out. This stage of seeking independence during the teenage years remains crucial for them in fostering a sense of personal responsibility, learning to make their own decisions and establishing their own value system. “There are some tricky gray areas around what child tracking can tell parents and what that does to a child’s sense of autonomy and privacy,” she says. Research published in August 2019 found that some children understood their parents’ concerns about their safety, but at the same time, many felt their parents often went too far by constantly contacting them in ways that felt interfering.

When parental supervision is too intrusive, teens’ natural tendency is to rebel. “This can lead to feelings of resentment, which can put a strain on the relationship,” says Judy Ho Gavazza, an associate professor of psychology at Pepperdine University.

A study published in November 2020 in the journal Computers in Human Behavior found that perceptions of privacy invasion are linked to defiant responses. Teenagers find ways to avoid their parents by turning off their phones, letting the battery die, or refusing to respond to text messages. (Friction over tracking is less common among young teens, who need more supervision and expect less privacy.)

Location apps also give parents a false sense of security because they know where their teens are, but they don’t know what they are doing, says Kaitlin Tiches, a medical librarian at the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Part of normal teen development requires them to understand the need to take responsibility for their safety. “We equate location awareness with safety, but we don’t know how quick the response would be if a parent noticed something was wrong,” Tiches said. She adds that instead of repeatedly returning to a dot on a screen map, we need to equip young people with safety strategies so they understand what to do if they find themselves in uncomfortable situations or feel threatened.

Another concern is that giving children a phone at a young age just to track their location could have unforeseen consequences, as many of the risks for children and adolescents – such as cyberbullying, social media addiction, inappropriate content, targeted marketing and body image distortion – are found on their phones rather than in their immediate physical environment. “There is an important discussion going on right now about whether we have restricted children’s physical freedoms too much while not restricting their online activities enough,” says Choukas-Bradley.

In recent decades, the prevalence of certain overt threats – ranging from rape to excessive alcohol consumption – has decreased, the paper said. At the same time, the incidence of mental disorders such as depression and anxiety has skyrocketed. This is evident from research published in the March issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, The number of cases of depression in adolescents has doubled in the past decade. Other research has shown that teens who spend the most time on social media are at the highest risk for depression. Parents are also feeling the burden and reporting high levels of anxiety as they attempt to monitor the online threats their children face. Last August, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on parental mental health, highlighting “new challenges such as navigating technology and social media (and) a youth mental health crisis.”

Many parents don’t know how to proceed. For Pamela Wisniewski, a youth online safety researcher and director of the Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab at Vanderbilt University, it all comes down to balancing competing priorities. If you choose to use location apps, you should also have regular open conversations with your teen about expectations. She recommends that parents discuss what level of location tracking is acceptable for their children and for themselves. “It depends on how parents use the information. If it’s a tool for safety and open communication, that’s one thing,” Wisniewski says, “but if it’s a tool for punishment and policing, that’s another.”

The right balance, Choukas-Bradley argues, requires a certain degree of restraint. The privilege of giving a teen a device, she says, comes with the realization that their parents will track their whereabouts — but only if those parents are given a reason to believe the child is not where they said they would be. of an emergency, such as a natural disaster or a school shooting. “This way, parents can easily know where their child is without invading their privacy,” says Choukas-Bradley. (There is an obvious cutoff point: Parents would be wise to stop following their teen in adulthood, even in situations where it might be tempting to continue following them, such as when they go to college.

Rumney is still unsure about the effects of tracking her children, but she says it has opened a line of communication with them about topics she didn’t discuss with her parents growing up, such as bullying and mental health. as well as alcohol and sex. Parents know more about their children’s lives because technology lets them peek in, even if it also brings a whole new set of problems. “In some ways you can’t hide from anyone anymore,” Rumney says. “Whether it’s good or bad, almost everything is public.”