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News just in: the sky is blue, water is wet, and tracking our kids’ every move with phones or AirTags is causing a “deeply concerning” increase in anxiety among young people, according to more than 70 psychologists, doctors, nurses and health professionals who have come together to urge parents to “reconsider whether the surveillance childhood we are sleepwalking into is really benefiting our children”. They add: “We are implicitly telling them that the world is unsafe,” and warn that constant monitoring prevents kids learning the skills and developing the autonomy necessary to navigate real life.
“It’s so normal to want to keep our children safe,” says Clare Fernyhough, co-founder of campaign group Generation Focus. “But there is no evidence that tracking makes them any safer.”
It’s also a staggering invasion of privacy. I would never track my son – I’m his mother, not his Big Brother. I tried it once and that was more than enough. In the penultimate year of primary school there was a class trip to Lille. Some mums suggested going in together on a multipack of AirTags, and without really thinking I agreed, and put one in his backpack. On the edge of my seat I watched, more gripped than by every Traitors final ceremony combined, as his little dot inched painfully slowly towards St Pancras station … where it remained, for ever. Technology is great, until it isn’t.
Rationally, I knew the chances that he’d been separated from his class, unnoticed, and was just politely waiting at the Eurostar terminal all day long, were slim. I had an irrational breakdown anyway, and needed to be physically restrained from calling the police with one hand while driving at screeching top speed to the station with the other. Genuinely perplexing why anybody would willingly inflict that torture on themselves 24/7. If you’re scrutinising your child’s every step, and they stop walking, how do you know if they’re tying their shoelace, stroking a cat they’ve met in the street, or are hurt or in serious danger? It’s a maddening mix of too much and too little information at once – although a friend showed me her Life360 app, and she could not only see where every member of her family was, but also how long they’d been there, how much battery was left on their phone, and what they were thinking about at that exact moment. (OK, not the last one, but that’s probably coming in the next update.)
My son, now 11, recently started secondary school and he gets the bus alone, so we’ve given him a dumbphone for emergencies. Over the summer, before he’d ever undertaken the epic journey 15 minutes up the road, we asked if he’d mind us tracking him. He wondered why we would do that. “If you want to know where I am, you can just ring me,” he said. The logic was hard to argue with.
I’m well aware I’m the odd one out here. I’m one of the only parents I know who doesn’t track their child, and at a recent dinner with friends, it transpired that they track their partners’ locations, too. I don’t do that either. It had never come up before, and then suddenly an entire table were staring at me in shock and disbelief. They all thought I was weird, and vice versa.
I share my location with my best friend – in case I’m ever kidnapped, murdered or late to meet her – and that’s it. I would consider having my husband under surveillance a violation of trust; plus, it simultaneously forces a relentless level of honesty that no marriage really needs.
Also, ugh, get off me. I want to feel independent, not microchipped, like a pet, and I want the same for him. Keeping a constant eye on the person you’re sharing your life with is snooping, in the ballpark of secretly reading their emails or looking at their phone while they’re in the shower. As soon as you get the urge to do it, you have your answer.
So much of what people do online they’d never dream of doing in real life, and that’s usually the problem. You wouldn’t physically follow your kids around, sidle up to them behind a newspaper with eye-holes cut out, tail them like a private detective. They need freedom as they grow; teenagers not being entirely honest about what they’re up to is a rite of passage, an essential stage of development on the way to adulthood. The experts raising the alarm about tracking describe it as an “invisible umbilical cord between parent and child”. Perhaps their warning will encourage some to make the snip.
Polly Hudson is a freelance journalist
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