Dear Carolyn: We have two “kids,” 18 and 20. We used an app to track them in high school, when they were driving, etc. We found it simplified our schedules and knowing where everyone was or needed to be picked up. I even liked knowing when my husband was headed home after work. He uses and likes the app.
When our older kid went to college, we took the app off their phone but could see where they were through AirTag/item trackers. I’d wonder if they got back to their dorm okay or what they were up to above and beyond their excellent communication. They refused my request to put the app back on for a car trip, saying they would be fine and in good touch. And they were.
My younger child is about to leave for college, and I’m anxious about removing the app. They don’t have any backup AirTags or trackers. I’ve asked friends for reassurance that it’s the right time, but EVERY single one still tracks their “kids”! Including one with a married 24-year-old daughter.
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Our younger kid wants it off their phone soon. My husband agrees and says our kids are independent and trustworthy young adults who are in close touch. I rationally agree and would have been horrified to be “tracked” in college by my parents. Am I in a bubble with my other midlife anxious friends who are parents of newly launched adults? I will deal with getting rid of the app, but I wonder if we are outliers with this technology.
— Tracking
Tracking: I don’t care whether you are outliers with this technology. Or inliers, downliers or fierypantsliars. Stop tracking your kids. It encourages more anxiety than it eases, at the cost of their independence and your trust in one another. And yourselves.
Pardon my exasperation, but I can’t see anyone typing “simplified their schedules” with a straight face.
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It’s about the anxiety!
Which is natural! But so unhealthy to indulge.
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About Carolyn Hax
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Tracking only prolongs it by promising something you can’t be given. Ever. By anything. The app won’t make your kids okay.
Your knowing where they are, when they arrive and how fast a car gets them there will not make them okay.
Your tracking what they are “up to” is not! okay! Nor will it make them okay.
Because whatever is happening to them at any given moment is independent of your knowing where. Treating location as your early warning system to parachute in with … advice? warnings? law enforcement? sharply worded concerns? is parenting beyond your job description to make yourself feel better.
We can flip that around, too. Learning to sleep when you don’t know where your adult offspring are will not harm them. It will help you relax and trust them, though, which will help you become a better parent of adults.
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Meanwhile: Their being “independent,” “trustworthy” and “in close touch” speaks well of your family and no doubt reduces the risk of their coming to harm — but not to zero, and apps can’t change that except at the edges of the margins, which I’ll get to. So using “They’re good kids!” in deciding whether to app or not to app is merely an extension of the false premise for tracking them in the first place.
In other words, if your kids were screw-ups, boundary pushers or riskaholics with no interest in reporting back to Mommy, then I would still tell you to lay off the tracking — and not (just) because this cohort might risk even harder on principle, but because their whereabouts are not your business and their adulthood is not your problem.
Anxiety is your problem. Counting on false assurances instead of developing healthy detachment and coping skills is your problem. Not taking “would have been horrified to be ‘tracked’ in college by my parents” for an answer is your problem. An anxious worldview is your problem, and it’s contagious.
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In high school, sometimes I was where I told my parents I was. Sometimes I wasn’t. I didn’t track my kids, under or over 18.
Now — your relationship with your kids is always 50 percent your business, and your most powerful tool for that is? Trust.
The part of child rearing where you control your kids starts ending in utero and ends-ends when they’re 18. It just does. Your job thereafter is all relationship, which is equally at your and your kids’ discretion.
If you all mutually consent to location-share in the event of a so-rare, absolute-worst-case, gone-missing-type scenario, then have at it. The edge-of-margin scenarios. But don’t peek, ever, unless needed.
And if you mutually consent to be one another’s crash-alert contacts and monitors of valuables, sure, I won’t judge (your elder kid does know, yes?). And yay to trackers for wilderness adventurers, solo travelers, at-risk minors, people with developmental, cognitive, memory issues that make wandering a serious risk. When trackers help families in hard circ*mstances, great.
But a typical launch isn’t a hard circ*mstance. It’s life. So please stop grasping for access on an it-won’t-help-to-know basis. You all will be fine, or won’t, and it 99-point-whatever won’t hinge on this.
