"Almost all my friends track their college-age kids." This is my daughter-in-law speaking, though she is not among the trackers. She lives in a medium-size city far from the perils of major urban hubs. But her fellow parents, she says, want the reassurance that their young adult child arrived safely at wherever it is they are going--whether they are traveling by bike, a friend's car or an Uber, whether they are away at college or in a workplace.
A few posts ago, I wrote about a mom who was worried about whether she should still be tracking her college-age kids (by air tags, as opposed to smartphone app to which her children objected); she had a friend who was still tracking her married 24-year-old daughter.
I am of a generation that is less familiar with and less attuned to smartphone's abilities to keep tabs on one another. So I was stunned to hear about all this tracking, which is why I blogged about it, why I mentioned it to my daughter-in-law and why her answer was equally surprising. Then I came across an issue of Axios, a newsletter that is usually about politics. This time it was about "parents' unprecedented ability to keep tabs on their kids."
How many parents do it? A lot. A survey by a cybersecurity company (Malwarebytes) found that 84% of U.S. parents use some form of tracking to monitor their kids. One of the most popular apps lets parents know when their child walks into a friend's house, whether they're driving too fast and a complete history of their movements over a weekend. Some apps let parents of college-age kids know whether their child made it to their math class.
A bit of tracking may be useful with young children and even teens, but for young adults going to college or starting off life outside the parental home, leaving is a major step toward independence. By tracking the minutia of our adult children's daily lives we're taking that away, or as Axios put it, "the opportunity to make mistakes, skip class and feel the repercussions and figure it out for themselves."
I asked a 22-year-old about the tracking of young adult kids. "One needs to learn self-regulatory skills and you aren't going to if your parents are monitoring you all the time," she told me, adding, "If you can't get to class without your mom checking on you, you'll never want to go to class and never know how to make yourself do something."
I'll end with the Axios newsletter's concluding quote:
"You're providing your child with training wheels. They're going to have to come off."
painting: "Red Dance," Kenneth Young
