How 24/7 GPS Tracking of Teens 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 her older son a smartphone. She made the purchase with the understanding that she would use it to track his location and social media usage. Rumney was hesitant to do this for the fifth-grader, but admits she felt a lot of social pressure and eventually gave in. All of her friends got their kids smartphones, and Rumney didn’t want her son to feel left out; His friends communicate almost exclusively via their devices. Still, she was concerned about the risks of social media and cyberbullying.

At the time, Rumney thought this was a good compromise. This allowed her son Harrison, now 14, to ride his bike to school, sporting events and friends’ houses, giving him a sense of autonomy. A few years later, she gave her younger son Weston, now 11, an Apple Watch for the same reason. However, sometimes tracking has become somewhat of a burden.

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

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Rumney says she likes knowing where her children are, but she doesn’t like that her family relies too much on devices. She adds that she’s just not sure if the opportunity to track Harrison was worth having a phone that he spends so much time on, and she doesn’t know how that kind of surveillance will affect him emotionally later will affect him. “If I could do it all over again, I’m not sure I would,” Rumney says. In fact, she has held back from giving her younger son his own smartphone.

According to a June 2023 study published in the Journal of Family Psychology, about half of parents in the U.S. report monitoring their teens’ movements through location tracking apps. Another 14 percent of parents who took part in the study reported using a tracking app, while their child said they were not being monitored, suggesting that the monitoring occurred without the child’s knowledge.

Experts worry that tracking teenagers’ locations can become a sensitive exercise that can sometimes damage a teen’s relationship with their parents, damage their developing sense of autonomy and create a false sense of security.

Given the many things parents have to worry about, from school shootings to fentanyl overdoses to child trafficking, it’s no surprise that they’re turning to location monitoring apps like Find My iPhone and Life360, which have GPS as well as the Location of nearby Wi-Fi networks and cell towers to track and protect their children, 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 adult focused. “Still, for adolescents, this is a time of life when children are seeking autonomy and independence from their parents,” she says, “and a time when privacy is really important to children for good developmental reasons.”

Choukas-Bradley adds that part of normal teenage development has to do with the need for privacy and the ability to pursue first romantic relationships or assert oneself with peers while simply hanging out. This period of striving for independence during the teenage years remains crucial for them to develop a sense of personal responsibility, learn to make their own decisions and establish their own value system. “There are some tricky gray areas when it comes to what tracking children can say to their parents and how that affects children’s sense of autonomy and privacy,” she says. A study published in the journal in August 2019 found that some children understood their parents’ concerns about their safety, but at the same time many felt that their parents often went too far by constantly contacting them in ways that seemed intrusive to them.

When parental control is too intrusive, teens have a natural tendency to rebel. “This can lead to resentment, which can strain 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 the perception of a privacy invasion is associated with rebellious reactions. Teens think of ways to avoid their parents by turning off their phone, draining the battery, or refusing to respond to text messages. (Adolescents who require more supervision and have less expectation of privacy are less likely to experience conflict over tracking.)

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

Part of the normal development of teenagers is that they understand that they must take responsibility for their own safety. “We equate local knowledge with safety, but we don’t know how quick the response would be if a parent noticed something was wrong,” says Tiches. She adds that we need to provide young people with safety strategies so that they understand what to do when they find themselves in uncomfortable situations or feel threatened, rather than always returning to a point on an on-screen map.

Another concern is that giving children a phone at a young age just to track their location can have unforeseen consequences, as many of the risks that exist for children and teenagers – such as cyberbullying, social media addiction , inappropriate content, targeted marketing and body image distortion – are found on their phone and not in their immediate physical environment. “There are currently many important discussions about whether we have restricted children’s physical freedoms too much and not sufficiently restricted their online activities,” says Choukas-Bradley.

In recent decades, the prevalence of some overt threats – from rape to excessive drinking – has declined, the study said, but at the same time the prevalence of mental disorders such as depression and anxiety has skyrocketed. According to a study published in the March 2022 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, The rate of depression among teenagers has doubled in the last 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 strain and reporting high levels of anxiety in their attempts to monitor online threats to their children. Last August, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a guide on parenting mental health that highlighted “emerging challenges such as navigating technology and social media.” [and] a youth mental health crisis.”

Many parents are unsure what to do next. For Pamela Wisniewski, youth online safety researcher and director of the Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab at Vanderbilt University, it comes down to balancing competing priorities. If you decide 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 themselves. “It depends on how parents use the information. “If it’s a tool for security and open communication, that’s one thing,” says Wisniewski, “but if it’s a tool for punishment and policing, that’s another.”

Finding the right balance requires a certain amount of restraint, according to Choukas-Bradley. The privilege of giving a teenager a device, she says, comes with the understanding that parents will track their whereabouts – but only if those parents have reason to believe the child is not where they are This would be the case or in the event of an emergency, such as a natural disaster or a school shooting. “This makes it easy for parents to know where their child is without invading their privacy,” says Choukas-Bradley. (There is an obvious limit: Parents would be wise to stop monitoring their teenager in adulthood, even in situations where it might be tempting to continue monitoring them – for example, when they go to college.

Rumney still isn’t sure what impact the persecution has had on her children, but she says it has opened a line of communication with them about issues she didn’t discuss with her parents as a child, like bullying and mental health. as well as alcohol and sex. Parents know more about their children’s lives because they have insight thanks to technology, although this also raises a whole new set of problems. “In a way, you can’t really hide from anyone anymore,” Rumney says. “For better or for worse, almost everything is out in the open.”