Megan Rumney, an executive with a financial-services firm in Severna Park, Md., an affluent Baltimore suburb, 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 use. Rumney was hesitant to do so for the fifth grader but admits she felt a lot of social pressure and eventually gave in. All of her friends were getting their children a smartphone, and Rumney didn’t want her son to feel left out; his friends almost exclusively communicate using their devices. Still, she was concerned about the risks of social media and cyberbullying.
At the time, Rumney thought this was a good compromise. It allowed her son Harrison, now age 14, to ride his bike to school, sporting events and friend’s houses, giving him some sense of autonomy. A few years later she got her younger son Weston, now age 11, an Apple Watch for much the same reason. At times, though, tracking has become a burden of sorts.
When her kids aren’t with her, she uses apps such as Life360 and her younger son’s Apple Watch to track their location. Rumney says that 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 get in touch with them, but it’s also a double-edged sword,” she says.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Rumney says she likes knowing where her kids are but doesn’t like her family’s overreliance on devices. She adds that she’s just not sure that being able to track Harrison was worth him having a phone that he spends so much time on, and she doesn’t know how this type of monitoring will affect him emotionally down the line. “If I could do it all again, I’m not sure I would,” Rumney says. In fact, she’s held off on getting her younger son his own smartphone.
About half of parents in the U.S. say they monitor their adolescents’ movements via location-tracking apps, according to a study published in June 2023 in the Journal of Family Psychology. An additional 14 percent of parents who participated in the study claimed to use a tracking app while their child reported that they weren’t being surveilled, indicating that the monitoring was done unbeknownst to the child.
Experts worry that tracking teens’ locations can turn into a slippery slope that can at times hinder a teen’s relationship with their parents and harm 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 shooters to fentanyl overdoses and child trafficking, it’s no surprise that they look to location monitoring apps such as Find My iPhone and Life360, which use GPS, as well as the location of nearby Wi-Fi networks and cellular towers, to track and keep their children 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. “With that said, for adolescents, this is a stage of life when kids are seeking autonomy and independence from their parents,” she says, “and a time when privacy feels really important to kids for good developmental reasons.”
Choukas-Bradley adds that part of teenagers’ normal development has to do with the urge 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 teen years remains crucial to them for fostering a sense of personal responsibility, learning to make their own decisions and establishing their own system of values. “There’s some tricky gray areas with regards to what tracking kids can tell parents and what that does to a kid’s sense of autonomy and privacy,” she says. Research published in the August 2019 issue of the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth found that some children understood their parents’ concerns for their safety, but at the same time, many felt that their parents often went too far by contacting them constantly in ways that felt meddlesome.
When parents’ scrutiny is overly intrusive, teens’ natural tendency is to rebel. “This can lead to feelings of resentment, which may 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 perceptions of privacy invasion are associated with rebellious responses. Teens devise ways to evade their parents by turning off their phone, letting their battery go dead or refusing to respond to text messages. (Friction over tracking happens less with preteens, who need more supervision and expect less privacy.)
Location apps, moreover, provide parents with a false sense of security because while they may know where their teens are, they don’t know what they’re doing, says Kaitlin Tiches, medical librarian at the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Part of the ordinary course of teen development requires that they understand the need to take responsibility for own their safety. “We equate knowledge of location with safety, but we don’t know how fast the response would be if a parent noticed something was wrong,” Tiches says. She adds that instead of just returning repeatedly to a blip on a screen map, we need to be providing young people with safety strategies so they understand what to do when they’re in uncomfortable situations or they feel threatened.
Another concern is that giving kids a phone at a young age just to track their location may yield unforeseen consequences because many of the risks posed to children and adolescents—such as cyberbullying, social media addiction, inappropriate content, targeted marketing and body image distortion—are found on their phone rather than in their immediate physical surroundings. “There’s a lot of important discourse going on right now around whether we’ve restricted kids’ physical freedoms too much while not putting enough restrictions on their online activity,” Choukas-Bradley says.
Over the past several decades, the prevalence of some overt threats—ranging from rape to excessive use of alcohol—have decreased, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but at the same time, the incidence of psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety has skyrocketed. According to research published in the March 2022 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, rates of adolescent depression have doubled in the past decade. Other research has shown that teens who spend the most time on social media are at the highest risk of depression. Parents are also feeling the burden, reporting high levels of anxiety in their attempts to monitor online threats facing their children. Last August U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy released an advisory on the mental health of parents, highlighting “new challenges like navigating technology and social media [and] a youth mental health crisis.”
Many parents are uncertain of 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 do choose to use location apps, you should also have regular open conversations with your teen around expectations. She recommends that parents need to 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 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 suggests, requires a measure of restraint. The privilege of letting a teenager have a device, she says, comes with the understanding that their parents are going to be tracking their whereabouts—but only if those parents are given a reason to believe that the kid isn’t where they said they would be or in case of an emergency, such as a natural disaster or a school shooting. “This way parents have the ease of knowing where their child is without invading their privacy,” Choukas-Bradley says. (There is an obvious cutoff point: parents would be wise to stop tracking their teen in adulthood, even in situations where it could be tempting to continue monitoring them—for example, if they go away to college.)
Rumney is still unsure about the effects of tracking her kids, but she says that it has opened up a line of communication with them about topics that she didn’t discuss with her parents when she was growing up, such as bullying and mental health, as well as alcohol and sex. Parents know more about their kids’ lives because the technology lets them peek in, even if it also raises a whole new set of issues. “In some ways, you can’t really hide from anyone anymore,” Rumney says. “For better or worse, just about everything is out there in the open.”