Does Location Tracking Make Your Children Safer?

As a young adult, my sister was stalked by a serial rapist. Her husband worked nights, and her stalker figured out her husband’s work schedule and broke in through their bedroom window in the middle of the night when he knew she would be alone.

What saved her was the only tool that actually works, every time, in such a scenario: She just happened to be someplace else.

A cellphone, had they been invented back then, would not have helped. An audible alarm might have been a deterrent, but only if a neighbor heard it and responded, or the attacker was convinced they would.  Even a gun or another weapon (she slept with a hammer under her pillow for years after) would probably have been out of reach by the time she woke to a violent attacker.

It was a purely providential case of varying her routine that saved her that night — she’d carpooled out across town, near to a friend’s house, and the friend suggested she stay over rather than them driving her home so late.

This is not to say that other security measures are not worthwhile! I tell the story to emphasize one point in the debate about location-tracking apps: It’s very easy to imagine a given tool will be helpful in situations where no, it just isn’t. You have to layer on the strategies, and nothing is 100%.

Opening this conversation:

• Erika Sanzi at The Breeze: “Stop Tracking Your Kids”
• Amy Welborn: “Life, but not 360”

Thinking Through Effective Emergency Responses

When my kids were little, I shocked one of their babysitters by telling her straight up, “If there is an emergency, I am the last person you call.”

(Note that my children don’t have unusual but non-emergency medical or behavioral needs that I am uniquely qualified to coach a sitter through how to handle.)

I explained to her that:

• I trust you to make pretty-good decisions about basic childcare stuff, we can talk about it later if you weren’t sure about a particular household rule. Otherwise I wouldn’t have hired you.
• I trust you to have basic first aid skills. Otherwise I wouldn’t have hired you.
• I expect you to dial 911 if there is an emergency, and I trust you to know when to do that. Otherwise I wouldn’t have hired you. Do not waste time checking with me, just call EMS if you think EMS might be needed.

Me out at the coffee shop? I’m not going to give the kid stitches. I’m not going to be any faster than EMS at getting home, and I’m going to be far less skilled than a paramedic when I get there. That’s why we call 911.

Yes, I’d like to be notified. Yes I will show up, pronto, to take over the parenting part of the situation. But you the babysitter have been hired because you are a reasonable stand-in for these eventualities, and here’s the emergency power of attorney and the copy of our insurance cards and kids’ full names and DOBs right here on the fridge, urgent care is gonna ask for that.

I think it sobered the babysitter to realize she was genuinely the responsible grown-up on the scene.  Well, I knew she could do it or I wouldn’t have hired her.

Thinking Through Location Tracking Specifically

Location tracking is a very blunt, late-stage emergency response tool. It tells you where your child’s phone is, not where your child is. It does not tell you what is happening at that location.

Is your child safely sitting in the movie theater, as planned? Or has your child evacuated because of a fire and in her haste left her backpack and is now safely headed to her friend’s house because the police said to come in the morning to claim her stuff?

Is your child stuck in that traffic jam, or is he the one blocking traffic because he ran out of gas and couldn’t get over?

Are your teens chilling at the pool, or are they freaking out because one of them just pulled a drowning preschooler out of the water when no one else noticed the kid was in trouble?

I’m sorry to tell you this, but there are very, very few emergency situations where location tracking will make your child any safer.

Your Child Deserves Better Than Location Tracking

Location sharing is indeed good for the one thing it does: It helps you find a specific phone. But let’s think about this.

Your kids are out playing in the neighborhood. What are the real safety measures your children need?

• Knowing their way around, so they don’t get lost.
• Knowing the limits of where they are allowed to go, and having the self-control to stay within those bounds.
• Knowing which homes (if any) or businesses they are allowed to enter.
• Understanding and following important safety protocols like helmets when bike riding, crossing the street safely, staying away from drowning hazards, and so forth (whatever applies to their zone).
• Knowing how to administer basic first aid, and how to identify and get help when needed.
• Being able to stand up to the pressure of adults or other kids who want to talk your children into doing something they know they should not.

These are things you have to teach your child. No amount of cellphones can substitute, ever, for these life-saving skills.

For your teenager going out with friends, or your young adult away at college, the skills are the same, just amplified.

I’m going to get very stern here: You are absolutely lying to yourself if you think your child, teenager, or young adult can forgo the not-getting-lost skills because you have location sharing.

Your teen out on a date isn’t “safe” because you have location-tracking. Safety comes from knowing how to choose friends wisely, knowing how to extract oneself from dangerous situations (drinking, flat tire, aggressive partner, bee stings, you-name-it) and knowing how to function competently within their sphere.

There Are No Guarantees!

You can do absolutely everything right to equip your child to navigate safely through a dangerous world, and yet bad things can still happen. They can happen because:

• We can’t prepare for every possible eventuality.
• Some forces are just too powerful, no matter how hard we prepare.
• We have to make risk/benefit trade-offs.

When our teens first got their drivers’ licenses, I was strict about no friends or siblings in the car for the early days driving alone. Not because I thought they were unsafe drivers — we wouldn’t have allowed them to get their licenses in that case.

It was because the fact is that any driver, no matter how skilled or experienced, can get an accident. That is the trade-off we make between the safety of not using motor vehicles and the convenience and benefits, even life-saving benefits, of having them.

But I explained: If you get in a wreck when you’re older and experienced and your passenger is injured or killed, it will haunt you forever. If it happens when you’ve just gotten your license? It is very likely to absolutely emotionally destroy you in a way you might not ever recover from.

–> Before taking on passengers, you need the confidence of knowing that you can drive safely without someone coaching you, and that if something bad happens beyond your control, it really was beyond your control.

Learning to live with things that are beyond our control is part of learning to be a functioning human in this world.

Location Tracking vs. Location Sharing

I didn’t even have a phone with location-tracking ability when my kids were teens, though I think my husband might have had that (?), and I know some of the siblings  shared their locations with each other.

At this writing, with an upgraded phone, two of my young adults and the spouse have chosen to share locations, and two of my kids do not.

For those that do location-share, it has come in handy for:

• Knowing what time to have dinner ready when my husband’s coming home from a business trip, and how much longer before I really, really have to clean the hall bathroom before my daughter gets home from college.
• Quick researching near-to-her restaurants when my daughter was looking for excellent pizza on her first trip to Italy, because she knows I’m really good at sorting through that kind of stuff and enjoy traveling vicariously.
• Figuring out why the house is empty when I slept in and everyone else has gone someplace (it’s the farmer’s market 99% of the time).

Those are harmless conveniences that in previous generations were dealt with by leaving a note on the counter, bringing along a travel guide, or heaven forbid cleaning the sink in a more timely fashion.

A reality check is: If I didn’t have this goofy new tool, would everything be just fine? If so, you’re on a good path.

Location tracking red flags of a serious mental health or relationship issue would include:

• Constantly checking on a family member’s location because you don’t trust them to be where they said, or don’t trust them to make good decisions about where they went.
• Feeling like somehow it “depends on you” to keep safe people who are old enough and skilled enough to manage their forays away from home.
• Choosing not to equip your child or young adult with self-responsible skills for navigating their environment, because you have deluded yourself into believing that phone-tracking is a substitute for this.
• Believing that phone-tracking is an effective way to protect someone who is recovering from an addiction or violation of trust.

That last one is especially painful because we desperately want to believe that if our loved ones have been through a recovery program and swear they are going straight, that somehow we can “accompany” them enough to keep them out of trouble.

It’s just not true. Someone in recovery may well choose to share locations as a layer of accountability they find helpful, absolutely. That’s great.

But when someone wants to overcome the layer of accountability, it is a piece of cake to subvert the monitoring plan. It is absolutely delusional to believe you the parent of an adult child can “know” your child isn’t binge-drinking or hooking up with that toxic partner just because you slavishly stare at the location of the phone you know about.

Set some boundaries.

Image: Cover art for Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Townsend, 100% recommended for all adult-adult relationships, whether that’s with your teens, your kids, your parents, or your spouse.

Featured image on previews: “Holding Cell Phone” by Mad Fish Digital, CC 2.0.