You are legally responsible for your child until they are 18. There is a universe of difference between not trusting your children vs taking reasonable steps to ensure their safety by knowing their location when necessary.
Parents have a legal right and obligation to know where their kids are. The technology used to achieve it is a mere implementation detail.
Also, technically, any adult who owns a smartphone has already consented to be permanently location tracked by their carrier and various entities that can buy location data from your carrier legally.
/s
The obvious question is "what did we do before?" I'm not sure how tracking stops serious mistakes; maybe it resolves them after the fact, suggesting that tracking their phone is not going to help parenting and you need another approach?
And yes, I do have kids of my own ranging from pre-phone to a brand new driver, so I get your motivation.
Agreed, and it's our job as parents to sheppard them. Handing them a skinner box and plonking them into the world doesn't solve that problem. And tracking then 24/7 isn't likely to help. Kids have been finding ways to get around their parents knowing what they're doing throughout all of humanity, and smartphones won't (and haven't) changed that.
And then the argument becomes "when I was young, we didn't have phones, and we still found our way home." Which to me feels a bit like "I never wore a bike helmet, and I was fine." Not entirely the same argument, but along the same lines. Sometimes new technology helps us do things better than it was done in the past. Back in the day, we couldn't keep touch with our spouses throughout the day at work or especially while traveling. Now we can, and in my opinion, that's largely an improvement over what we had in the past.
Sure, some parents use it poorly to track and interrogate their kids about their location 24/7. But just because I track my kids does not mean I am spying on them or "getting them used to a surveillance state" like some arguments I have seen here.
As someone else wrote, a smartwatch may be a reasonable compromise.
I really really wanted to delay them getting a smart phone as long as possible, but when all the other kids have one it's so fucking hard. We held up for a while but the tantrums and crying wore us down.
One of the joys of parenting is knowing what the right thing to do is and then failing to see it through.
Yes, we caved but held out as long as we could. She's turned out to be an awesome young adult and seems to have come out of teen-land unscathed.
My point was that broadly speaking, maturity should be a key factor in _anything_ for the individual child. Some kids can be trusted to ride a motorbike across a propertly at 9. Some shouldn't have a smartphone until 17. Some can fly across the country unaccompanied at 12.
I agree on the maturity factor, but society has gotten weird on allowing that to happen.
Control will not keep them safe, and is in fact counter-productive. The more you control, the less responsibility and trust you give, the less of that, the more prone to catastrophic mistakes.