I track my daughters with an app. Good parenting or weird?

Sometimes, Life 360 gives me too much information. Recently, I checked the app and noticed my 22-year-old “running” (yes, Life 360 is alert to speed) towards home. Running? I was concerned. Was she being chased?

“Chill, Mum,” she told me when she arrived. “I was just late!”

Another day, I noticed that my teen was at Starbucks. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the library?” I texted.

“I met some friends,” she texted back. “Stop watching me! It’s weird!”

And it is weird! I think of myself as a 15-year-old, and how I used to head out in the morning with my friends and come home late afternoon or evening. Sometimes we’d sneak into pubs when we were underage; once or twice we ducked out of school during free periods and went to the park. I would have been appalled at my parents tracking my location; I certainly would have railed against the breach of my privacy. (I also would have missed out on a very formative New Year’s Eve, when I was in a park drinking West Coast Coolers when I was supposed to be sleeping at a friend’s.)

I have never tracked my son (though not from lack of trying) and, as a consequence, I am far more relaxed about him. He is currently backpacking overseas, and I only know where he is when he chooses to tell me. And honestly, it’s better that I don’t know. The other day, he narrowly avoided an assault in Argentina in the middle of the night, and I am deeply grateful that I only found out the next day. Imagine if I’d watched him roam the streets of Cordoba in real time, and seen him “running” at full speed at 1.30am.

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Of course, my son is surveilled, even if not by me. We all are. We are surveilled through our devices, through our data, through the purchases we make, through security cameras, and through other people’s phones. But I do not need to add to the surveillance. I know that my incessant checking on my daughters is not serving them, nor me. And so, I am doing my best to stop.

My parents survived my teenage years without a tracker, and I shall survive my kids’ years, too. But then it’s 11pm, and my daughter isn’t yet home. Just one glimpse, I think. Just to know she’s safe.

She’s in the car. I breathe a sigh of relief. I’ll give up the app tomorrow.