Am I showing my age and my app ignorance? Well, I certainly felt the former and learned a lot about the latter from a Carolyn Hax column. The column dealt with a reader's query about tracking her young adult children--children who are in college and no longer living at home.
The parent wrote that "EVERY single one [of her friends] still tracks their 'kids'! Including one with a married 24-year-old daughter."
The tracking is done via a phone app and/or by airtags (I had to look it up; in case you do too, they're the tags you can use to track where your keys, laptop or lost airline luggage are hiding.) The Hax correspondent writes that when her oldest child (now 20 years old) went to college, "we took the app off their phone but could see where they were through AirTag/item trackers." Now the 18-year-old wants their phone to be tracker-free. The parent's question for Hax:
"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."
Readers, am I the only one shocked by this tracking of adult children, of being able to see where they are every minute, of this intrusion on their independence and privacy?
Evidently not. So was Hax. The opening sentence of her answer was this:
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.
She also makes this important point that underlies almost everything we do vis-a-vis parenting our children:
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.
Hax summed up her long answer (which tackled the role the reader's anxieties play) with this bit of perspective:
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.
Hax is a sensitive writer attuned to her audience. I picked up a similar sentiment on an impersonal Q/A post about tracking apps. It, too, said all there is to say about tracking our adult kids.
AirTags Can Negatively Affect Parent-Child Relationship
Things can also get tricky when it comes to older kids and teens. While it can reduce your anxiety as a parent, tracking without consent can erode trust.
painting: Emma Amos, Self Portrait
