Teens Want Parents to Track Their Phones and Monitor Their Every Move
wsj.com
wsj.com
It's technically true that some of those 1200 respondents may be 18 or 19, but the survey was limited only to those who have actively chosen to continue using the app after they reached adulthood.
The voices of those under 18, and of those adults who reasonably said "hell no" to location tracking by their parents after they reached the age of majority, are simply not reflected in these results. This makes the survey hilariously biased and not in any way reflective of general teen sentiment towards location tracking.
Honestly, I think so much of the attitudes towards tracking apps has to do with how they're used/abused. I don't have a stalker nor crazy authoritarian parents, but I do have a nosy family member that I don't share my Find My location with. I will look up my kids' location if they're traveling, to make sure they've arrived safely. That's pretty much it.
Our parents are more comfortable with us drinking and having sex than prior generations of parents.
And we drink less, take fewer drugs, and have less sex as a generation, so there is less for parents to object to in the first place. Anecdotally, I didn't hang out in unknown places or late at night. Many didn't see the need to learn to drive, simply because we were fine with our parents driving us everywhere.
I would have been fine with this simply because as I did none of those things at all and my parents are not overbearing, so I would have nothing to lose from being tracked.
When they're traveling, one lives several hours away from home, I check in from time to time to see where they are and ensure they're still making progress. Doesn't require them to interact with a phone while they're driving.
And yes, this works in reverse too: they also have my location data. My youngest is 21 and still has the occasion to use my taxi services. They check my location to ensure I've left. If I haven't left yet then they send a text reminding me to come get them.
This article does not portray the trend as positive. It paints a picture of a generation of terrified, anxious—maybe even traumatized—kids who aren't looking for freedom or responsibility, but to extend their adolescence into adulthood. Maybe it's a natural reaction to the times, maybe not, in any case it does not seem good or healthy.
Parents and kids are much less adversarial than they once seemed to be.
Add in both increased societal acceptance of certain activities (sex, drugs, and drinking) as well as enormous reductions in those activities among teenagers and you get happy life integrations and life support such as this, rather than your parents wondering whether you are in an unpleasant situation and you wondering how to get out of it.
Not my experience, not what I see in my family and not what I see in neighbors' kids either. Every single parent I associate with has a kid that has weaponized CPS or other false abuse claims to keep parents in check. I've even been duped into calling them myself. Now when the neighbor's kid takes a domestic dispute into the street, I know what game he's playing.
They're also fragmenting their families with "___ makes me uncomfortable" verbiage that vaguely alludes to molestation or other crimes that they never seem willing to expand on when pressed. I swear this is a shared playbook or something (Casey Anthony? Freddy Got Fingered?); everybody started doing it all at once.
"You're not respecting my feelings" is another popular guilt tactic they exploit on gullible parents. Your feelings never matter quite as much as theirs though. Textbook example of mini-spouse syndrome.
Thankfully people started seeing through the "give me $40k for a sex change or I'll kill myself" hostage-taking ruse, especially when they didn't follow through after fundraising.
Some turn to just killing their parents to inherit early and avoid accountability. But "they say this never happens."
Hard to be much of a parent when you constantly have therapists, social workers and idiot grandparents hounding you about why you did ___ to smol babby Uwu.
The best part of course is getting fed up and kicking them out...once they moan about that on social media and blast the rest of the family, now you're even more of a villain. Every kid is an oppressed LGBT these days...a free mob comes with every membership.
It's real easy to get along with people once you've crybullied or humiliated them into submission.
These days every single kid knows of another kid that had a video taken of them doing something dumb. They see this content can end up online. They are warned by their parents that this could follow them forever.
This issues are not reconcilable. You cannot both grow up and make mistakes and have your mistakes potentially documented to the world forever. So what gives are the young generations behaviors.
I will say that it started when there was a gun scare at her school. She used the watch to text me that they were in lockdown, and I used it to track her as I rushed to school. So I guess it’s a lifeline connection for her? That’s something my generation didn’t have to deal with (Columbine was during my last years in school).
It's as much about understanding as it is about helping them feel like they have some measure of influence, control, and responsibility over themselves.
And then I see the kids of parents who take a more traditional approach, and those are the kids that are dodging their parents' oversight, and acting out at school, and generally trying to find a way to assert or discover some feeling of control and responsibility in their life.
As a teenager, I wouldn't have wanted to be tracked, except when I went on long (20+ mile) bike rides through the countryside, and that would only have been because I went alone. On trips to town or spending time with friends, that would have felt like a millstone.
There's definitely more to it than parenting style.
Your parents most likely watched the news at 6 and 10, it wasn't long after this news became a 24 hour thing for almost everyone. Then a personal thing as you were getting news on a device on your body at all hours.
Toss in a little 9/11 of America getting attacked, and between the two we've created a culture that is a lot more afraid.
Then again, I grew up in Wisconsin, which had to go through all the coverage of Jeffery Dahmer. Stranger Danger was a very real thing for a lot of people.
Then the internet showed up, and it brought news, predators, and predatory news directly into our homes. Then social media on cellphones brought all of that to us 24/7 on our bodies at all times. The phone screeches a kids been kidnapped (thanks Texas). An alert comes up that your in danger. Some tiktok for kids shows kids that have been kidnapped. Media portrays they are in a horrifically dangerous world. When I was young I had to use my imagination to make up threats, these days kids don't have to.
Of course both adults and children don't realize the actual statistics put the actual likelihood of most of these events closer to getting hit by lighting, but that doesn't get clicks.
My son is away at College. We usually check his location before we give him a call. If he is in the dinning hall, class or gym we hold off until he is someplace more convenient. We have also found his lost iPhone a couple of times. He doesn't seem to care too much. We generally try and use the privilege when it is too his benefit. We don't really really track things like where he slept that night etc. That would not go well:)