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On tracking your children
1. I’m moving away to another country for university next year and my mum wants to put a tracker on my phone so she can know where I am and make sure I’m OK. I don’t want her to do this, not because I have anything to hide, but because I’d like to have some independence and privacy.
She’s never been a particularly strict parent but she’s insistent on this one thing. But if I tell her, she might think I’m hiding something, or it might upset her as it may be one of the only ways she feels she could be a part of my life when I go – which isn’t true, because I plan to keep in good contact.
I’m not sure how to tell her I don’t want her tracking me without upsetting her. What should I do?
Eleanor says: For what it’s worth, I share your preference here. Part of what it is to have independence from someone is for there to be information they don’t have, and for that not to violate an expectation. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, it has to become slightly weird for the parent to say: “You didn’t tell me you were going there/seeing them/having that medical test.”
But I suspect your location is just one face of this shift in your relationship. It sounds like your mum will miss you terribly and she might have a hard time with this transition.
You have to be a little careful with how much that weighs on you. If being separate from her starts to feel of itself like a rejection or betrayal, it will be very hard to do what is your most important job at this moment in life: figure out what your own adult “inner voice” sounds like.
You’ll face the structure of your current problem again and again through life: someone you care about will feel sad or pushed away if you make a particular choice, even though that’s the one you truthfully want to make. Plenty of people much older than you get into terrible tangles because they’re so unable to tolerate that consequence, they make choices only by asking what will cause others the least pain. This compromises your ability to make decisions as yourself instead of as the aggregate of other people’s hurts and wants.
This is a good moment to practise tolerating that discomfort: “Mama, I love you, but I’m just not comfortable with this, I’m sorry.” You could offer an alternative that answers her safety concerns without giving round-the-clock information, like a watch with an alert button you could use in distress.
It’s especially hard to do this when the person we hurt isn’t just a nuisance we want to keep at arm’s length. When we genuinely love them, it’s easy for a quasi-angel on the shoulder to say: “Why not just do this nice thing?”
The answer is, it doesn’t do your relationship any favours. You are going to grow up. This can be poignant for a parent, and it’s natural to miss the time when you were smaller, when you needed them more. But minor ways of making your present-day relationship resemble childhood will add up and will start to feel more and more like forcing an adult-child relationship when you’re both adults. You’ll feel it, they’ll feel it, it’ll suck for everyone.
There is a different form of parent-child closeness on the other side of this moment. It’s more like a relationship between equals, with the chance to “remeet” you as the adult you become. Yes, there is grief in losing the relationship with the child version of you. But she can’t get that second kind of closeness without letting go of the first. The more concessions you make to staying in the child space, the more you delay the opportunity for that more grown-up closeness.
Growing up and leaving home is not an unkindness, even though it might cause pain. This is a chance to practise tolerating that feeling. Give her your love, your attention, your kindness, your time. But you don’t need to give her your location.
Link
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2. 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.
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. It’s about the anxiety! Which is natural! But so unhealthy to indulge.
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.
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.
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 circumstances, great.
But a typical launch isn’t a hard circumstance. 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.
She’s never been a particularly strict parent but she’s insistent on this one thing. But if I tell her, she might think I’m hiding something, or it might upset her as it may be one of the only ways she feels she could be a part of my life when I go – which isn’t true, because I plan to keep in good contact.
I’m not sure how to tell her I don’t want her tracking me without upsetting her. What should I do?
Eleanor says: For what it’s worth, I share your preference here. Part of what it is to have independence from someone is for there to be information they don’t have, and for that not to violate an expectation. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, it has to become slightly weird for the parent to say: “You didn’t tell me you were going there/seeing them/having that medical test.”
But I suspect your location is just one face of this shift in your relationship. It sounds like your mum will miss you terribly and she might have a hard time with this transition.
You have to be a little careful with how much that weighs on you. If being separate from her starts to feel of itself like a rejection or betrayal, it will be very hard to do what is your most important job at this moment in life: figure out what your own adult “inner voice” sounds like.
You’ll face the structure of your current problem again and again through life: someone you care about will feel sad or pushed away if you make a particular choice, even though that’s the one you truthfully want to make. Plenty of people much older than you get into terrible tangles because they’re so unable to tolerate that consequence, they make choices only by asking what will cause others the least pain. This compromises your ability to make decisions as yourself instead of as the aggregate of other people’s hurts and wants.
This is a good moment to practise tolerating that discomfort: “Mama, I love you, but I’m just not comfortable with this, I’m sorry.” You could offer an alternative that answers her safety concerns without giving round-the-clock information, like a watch with an alert button you could use in distress.
It’s especially hard to do this when the person we hurt isn’t just a nuisance we want to keep at arm’s length. When we genuinely love them, it’s easy for a quasi-angel on the shoulder to say: “Why not just do this nice thing?”
The answer is, it doesn’t do your relationship any favours. You are going to grow up. This can be poignant for a parent, and it’s natural to miss the time when you were smaller, when you needed them more. But minor ways of making your present-day relationship resemble childhood will add up and will start to feel more and more like forcing an adult-child relationship when you’re both adults. You’ll feel it, they’ll feel it, it’ll suck for everyone.
There is a different form of parent-child closeness on the other side of this moment. It’s more like a relationship between equals, with the chance to “remeet” you as the adult you become. Yes, there is grief in losing the relationship with the child version of you. But she can’t get that second kind of closeness without letting go of the first. The more concessions you make to staying in the child space, the more you delay the opportunity for that more grown-up closeness.
Growing up and leaving home is not an unkindness, even though it might cause pain. This is a chance to practise tolerating that feeling. Give her your love, your attention, your kindness, your time. But you don’t need to give her your location.
Link
2. 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.
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. It’s about the anxiety! Which is natural! But so unhealthy to indulge.
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.
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.
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 circumstances, great.
But a typical launch isn’t a hard circumstance. 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.
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Yes, there's selection bias there: kids whose parents didn't think that was a reasonable idea stayed in neighborhood schools. But the social infrastructure supported it: if my parents were OK with me taking the subway alone to school or the dentist's office, so were the school and the dentist's office and so on. We didn't worry that some well-meaning stranger would make a fuss.