How Much Should You Be Tracking Your Kids?

Source: The Atlantic, Sarah Zhang
Photo: Miguel Porlan

Back when I was childless, naive, and not yet employed by The Atlantic, I read my now-colleague Hanna Rosin’s classic 2014 cover story, “The Overprotected Kid.” I remember thinking, My kids aren’t going to be like that. My kids will run wild and free; they will be smart and gorgeous and eat their vegetables. And I will be such a chill mom.

Well, as they say, we were all perfect parents before we had kids.

I am older and wiser now—I hope, because I am also responsible for two small humans. (They are smart and gorgeous; they do not eat their vegetables.) But the biggest change since I became a parent is that I know the exquisite terror of always having a piece of my heart outside my body. These days, my little kids are trying to zoom headfirst down the slide. But soon they will probably be speeding down the highway or doing God knows what in a dorm room. Yikes.

No wonder that parents these days are choosing to track their kids whenever they go—even in college and beyond. In my cover story for The Atlantic’s December issue, I investigate the rise of location tracking, which three-quarters of parents of teenagers now say they use. I was interested in how we have collectively slipped into a new norm of parental surveillance, without actively interrogating the consequences, good and bad. (The societal inflection point came in 2015, when Apple began installing location tracking by default on iPhones.) “Once we had that tool, it felt like we were irresponsible if we didn’t use it,” one mom told me. The impulse to track undoubtedly comes out of wanting the best for our kids—but is it actually the best? The already-overprotected kid has somehow only become more overprotected.

I did not want to presume to know the answers already, so I spoke with dozens of adolescent-development experts, parents, and, of course, teenagers themselves. In these conversations, I came to agree that location tracking can be so darn useful—but also, that there is value in resisting this constant and frictionless surveillance. You can read what I found when you subscribe to The Atlantic today.