The Parents Who Refuse To Track Their Kids

When author Edan Lepucki’s son was in the fifth grade, his Los Angeles school went on lockdown. Through his Gizmo watch, he left a voicemail for his mom that pains Lepucki to remember even now. Everyone in the story ended up safe, but that kind of worst-case scenario can haunt a parent, driving us to reach for any lever of control we can find. Lepucki hadn’t enabled location-tracking on his watch back then, a common feature of the device and others like it. But she doesn’t see how that would’ve helped anything. She knew where her kid was already; there was nothing she could’ve done.

Today, Lepucki still doesn’t use location tracking for her kids, even though her son is now 13 and roams around on his own more and more. “My husband and I have really tried — and it’s not always easy—to be super protective about phones and internet use, and less protective of him being in the world,” she says. “I can drop him off somewhere with his flip phone and he can call me, but I don’t really know where he is. Sometimes that can make me uncomfortable, but that’s how it has to be so he can truly be independent. I don’t want him living in a parental police state.”

These days, Lepucki’s stance puts her in the minority. A 2022 survey found that more than half of parents tracked their children’s locations using technology—sometimes without the kids’ consent or knowledge. One of the most popular family tracking apps, Life360, has more than 50 million active monthly users and is in the top 10 “social networking apps” on the App Store, behind Facebook and Threads. A recent survey by the company reported that in families where Gen Alpha kids had cell phones, 91% of parents used location-tracking apps and features. And according to another study, 36% of parents still keep digital tabs on their kids’ locations at college. That is a lot of tracking. And compared to only 16% of parents tracking their kids’ locations per a 2016 Pew report, these numbers are rising fast. The exact percentage of parents who track today is hard to pin down, in part because it requires families to self-report on a complex and personal topic (some of the parents quoted here asked to use first names for privacy). But chances are, if you have a preteen or teenager, you’re checking on their movements with technology — or you’ve strongly considered it. My kid’s only eight, and it’s beginning to cross my mind.

I found out my daughter rode in a driverless car for the first time when I overheard her tell a friend. An uncanny sensation crept under my skin as I listened. I wasn’t really concerned about my daughter’s safety (although I have thoughts about those cars). She’s with her father half the time since we recently divorced; he sat next to her in the back seat. That itchy feeling I was feeling was just regular old anxiety, with a touch of FOMO. My kid had been somewhere doing something without me, beyond my — until recently — omniscient watch. And I wasn’t ready.

I’m experiencing a common parenting experience a few years ahead of schedule: the longing to pull back on the metaphysical tether when your kid moves toward independence. Usually, the shift begins in middle school (when gravity reorients toward friends), and accelerates in high school (when they regularly navigate the world on their own). For our family, because of the divorce, it’s happening now. I’m glad my kid gets to stretch her legs (even if it’s in a Waymo). But like Lepucki says, it’s uncomfortable. That itch, the illusion of safety, and how easy and available the tech is, is why so many parents are deciding to track their kids. But the fact that location tracking can break the trust between parents and kids, and inhibit developmentally appropriate independence — with few real-world safety benefits — is why others are opting out of location tracking, even when that makes them outliers in their communities.

“I remember the first time I looked at it, and I could tell where in her dad’s house she was at any given moment. It freaked me out a little bit, but at the same time, it felt fantastic.”

When Jennie Ottinger’s daughter started taking the San Francisco city bus to middle school, Ottinger got her a smartphone. She immediately started watching her daughter’s location through the built-in app because the option was right there. “It was a 45-minute ride and I was really nervous,” Ottinger says. “For three days, I would watch her little dot get to school, and then after school I’d watch her go to ballet. And then she’d call me and say, ‘I’m at ballet.’ Pretty quickly, I wasn’t nervous about it at all anymore.” The tracking felt redundant when her kid was settled in her routine and checking in. “I didn’t really decide to stop tracking,” says Ottinger. “I just stopped being worried.” Ottinger wants her daughter to feel confident on her own in the city, and she trusts her to call if she needs something. After all, that’s what the phone was for in the first place.

Ottinger is certainly not alone in looking to GPS to ease her worries. “Parents tell me location tracking reduces their anxiety,” says Devorah Heitner, who spoke to hundreds of parents, educators, and kids to write Growing Up in Public, which explores how families are handling this era of extreme online-ness. “But some describe stories where it sounds like it increases their anxiety.” For some parents, a location-tracking app can become just another thing to check. There’s a reason Life360 is categorized as social media.

Katie, a high school teacher in suburban Ohio, got her 13-year-old son a phone a few years ago so that he could reach them when they were out of the house. Now he usually has it on him, but Katie and her husband have decided not to track his location. She says sometimes she has a moment of concern when he’s out for a long bike ride, but she keeps in mind the concept of “risky play”: the type of exploration that comes with a little danger but enormous opportunity to practice decision-making. “When he was younger, I wasn’t going to tell him exactly where to put his foot on a climbing wall,” she explains. “I can’t really be in control now.” But Katie also doesn’t want to be overwhelmed by the compulsion to keep checking her phone. “I’m not going to have an app open all the time when he’s out. That would make me go crazy — or at least, feel crazy,” she says.

But even in cases where tracking does soothe the inevitable parental anxiety, can it actually make kids safer? Sarah, who lives in a woodsy ex-urb of Seattle, has been location tracking her now-16-year-old daughter since she was about my daughter’s age. Like me, Sarah is divorced, and like me, she got the itch when her kid was first out of her sight. Sarah quickly realized that the new smartphone she bought her daughter came with the option to track her location — and Sarah was thrilled.

“I remember the first time I looked at it, and I could tell where in her dad's house she was at any given moment,” she tells me. “It freaked me out a little bit, but at the same time, it felt fantastic.” Seven years on, Sarah still checks the app to make sure her daughter is at the place she said she’d be, or made it back to a friend’s after a night out. It helps her sleep at night. She knows other parents in the neighborhood who do the same.

Even in cases where tracking does soothe the inevitable parental anxiety, can it actually make kids safer?

But when Sarah’s daughter fell off her electric scooter last year and suffered a traumatic brain injury, tracking proved useless. Sarah got the horrible call from her daughter’s friend, who relayed their exact location not far from home. Sarah says that as soon as she saw the ambulances, she jumped out of the car and ran to her kid. Looking at a little dot on a screen never crossed her mind.

There are certainly clear cases when having a way to locate your kid is the obvious choice: If they have a disability that requires frequent assistance, or severe autism with a tendency to run. Another case may be when kids aren’t yet integrated into or familiar with their community. Krystle Maestas is a therapist who counseled newly immigrated kids in a Maine public high school for two years. She wonders if location tracking could’ve helped some of the vulnerable families she worked with there, who were dealing with inappropriate romantic relationships and even trafficking. But tracking didn’t come up as options for those parents. They weren’t wrestling with the decision because they didn’t have the same access to technology education and cultural conversations around devices as more privileged families. The parents who are tracking may not be the ones whose kids actually need it.

The upsides of location tracking may be murky, but the negative impacts of an overly-monitored childhood are clear. There is more and more evidence that kids are more anxious than in previous generations, and especially so in high-achieving communities with a lot of parental oversight. The influence of parental anxiety on kids may be primarily… anxiety. For most kids, physical and social exploration is a critical developmental step. Even hiding information can be developmentally appropriate, says Heitner. All that is harder to do under a microscope.

When kids see their parents keeping tabs on them and their friends, it can also confuse their ability to understand privacy boundaries — a necessary skill when so much of the tech we all touch is tracked already. And some teenagers are using location-tracking apps and features on their own, like Snapchat’s Snap Map as a way to stay in touch with friends, which can open its own can of safety and privacy worms. In fact, in a recently released report of digital best practices, the Kids Online Health and Safety task force recommended that teens do not share their geolocation except when necessary. If parents are already tracking their kids, it may be harder to explain why teenagers shouldn’t be allowed to check in on each other. (By the way, the risk mitigation suggestions in the report include ongoing family conversations, strong community ties, and a family media plan. Not parental location tracking.)

“Ultimately, trust is the most important thing to build. Because if your kid is in trouble, they need to be able to come to you.”

It’s hard to know exactly how kids feel about being tracked when data is the water they’re swimming in. In her research, Heitner found that location tracking was actually the least upsetting for the kids she talked to out of all the types of tracking going on — schoolwork, browser history, screen time, text messages. And a recent article even highlighted teenagers who were glad to be tracked by their parents — sometimes because of their own anxieties. Still, the majority of the kids Heitner spoke to across the country found being location tracked problematic or very annoying. “Some were just willing to deal with that for the price of having a phone or having access to the car,” she says. But maybe there doesn’t always have to be a trade.

When her son started driving at 17, Erika Ebsworth-Goold asked him how he’d feel about her using Find My Friends, the Apple location-tracking app. He asked her to let him be. “I took a step back and thought, ‘This young man has never given me any reason not to trust him. He just hasn’t,’” Ebsworth-Goold says. “At that time in his life, he really was at a crossroads. So when he asked me not to do that, I took it as a sign of him asserting a different kind of independence. And it was one that I wanted to give him, even though it made me a nervous wreck — and it still does.”

Trust is why Ebsworth-Goold’s son was able to express that he did not want to be tracked, and trust is why she respected his wishes despite her discomfort. Establishing clear channels of communication and openly discussing the balance between safety and independence may be the best risk mitigation strategy of them all and requires no tech. “Ultimately, trust is the most important thing to build,” says Heitner. “Because if your kid is in trouble, they need to be able to come to you.” Ebsworth-Goold’s son calls or texts her regularly to check in. Ottinger’s daughter and Katie’s son do, too. Lepucki has an ongoing dialogue with her kids about technology. Sarah — whose daughter is doing well after her accident — is now considering how to start the conversation with her daughter about her feelings around tracking. In the seven years Sarah has been checking that little dot, they’ve never really discussed it.

For most parents with access to technology and the privilege to consider how to use it, these decisions are hard, ongoing, and personal.

Of course, the parents I spoke to made sure to say that every parent’s experiences and choices are valid. Some who didn’t track suggested that people could call them negligent parents for opting out. Others offered that if their kid were less reliable or if something really scary happened — one of those worst-case scenarios, maybe — they might fire up the GPS in the future. For most parents with access to technology and the privilege to consider how to use it, these decisions are hard, ongoing, and personal. But like all parenting conundrums in this country, it’s not simply a matter of individual choice. The ubiquity of technology and the lagging government regulation around its use by and for kids heavily influence the options that parents even get to choose from. Not to mention the overwhelming cultural pressure to be perfect when parenting already feels like playing a never-ending game of catchup. A year ago, did I think I’d be wondering about tracking my 8-year-old around the city? No, I was too busy worrying about screen time, friend triangles, and the mountain of other decisions required to parent in this world.

Location tracking is unlikely to go away anytime soon, but an eternal upward trend isn’t inevitable. The broader outlook on tech in this country has been shifting over the last few years, and some parents I spoke with say they were grateful for a growing trove of studies around kids and devices. As for Lepucki, she’s aware that families around her in LA use location tracking, but she doesn’t feel any pressure to change her perspective on it — or on smartphones, either. (None of Lepucki’s kids, including her 13-year-old son, have one.) She believes she won’t be in the minority for long.

“I feel like the tide is turning a little bit,” she says. “I do get the sense that it’s going to become a privilege not to have technology so young. That is going to be seen as a thing that allows you to have this full, rich childhood, and develop properly.”

Regardless of what happens with the tech or parent sentiment toward it, the fact is that kids will always take steps toward independence. They’ll push boundaries and explore new places and ideas. That’s what they’re made to do. And maybe as parents, we’re made to get a little bit itchy about it.