When Is It Time to Stop Tracking Your Kids?

0:00So many families choose to give their kids, especially their teens, their own devices these days, from tablets and smart watches to smart phones. And tracking those devices has become almost a given for many parents. Built-in location-sharing features allow parents to check in on their kids' whereabouts at any moment. Are they where they said they'd be? Did they get to school or home safely? As kids grow up, become young adults head off to college, a new poll from the University of Michigan finds that many parents just keep tracking them. And that raises a question for me. Does all of this tracking actually keep kids safer? When should it end? And how does this feed into the larger trend of adult friends and romantic partners tracking each other's locations too? Sarah Clark, a research scientist in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan, joined me to talk about this habit and what it means for families. This is Terms of Service, I'm CNN Tech reporter Claire Duffy.

1:02My conversation with Sarah after the break. Any superstition? Even a marching bandwink up call at 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that. But for your money. Stop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security and pasquies, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started.

2:04See PayPal.com slash protection terms. Sarah Clark, thanks for doing this. We appreciate it. Happy to meet you here. How and why do you think it became so common to be tracking someone's location? I think on a really broad scale. For the last 10-15 years, we are putting a lot of pressure, sending a lot of some limited messages to parents about being a good parent means always knowing where your kid is and kind of being on the present. And we've lost some of the independence and freedom that kids used to have. Yeah, it's so interesting because I remember being a kid and being like the bicycle gang that went around the neighborhood and your parents are like, come home at 5 p.m. We'll see then. Yeah. I'm sure they could have found us. We weren't that far, but it is interesting just that that has kind of gone away in a lot of respects. And again, I think it's gone away, but what's replaced it is this kind of expectation

3:10that surveilling your kids or always knowing where they are is what it means to be a good parent. I don't necessarily agree with that. I'm not saying neglect your kids, but I think we've kind of lost the message. Some of that might be it's harder to make money off of let your kids have some freedom, right? This is like product driven and the advertising around sort of selling fear, right? And so parents, if you're going to do a good job, you have to have this tool or you have to buy this product to stay on top of things. And I don't feel like we have put as much effort into counteracting that message with like, uh-huh. And we want to balance that out with giving your child across the age band, giving your child appropriate opportunities to learn for themselves, to do for themselves, to have the experiences of, hey, you know what? Figure it out.

4:11You don't have your mom here. You can figure it out. You and your friends together. So we're losing that angle. And I think that's really unfortunate. The University of Michigan report, which Sarah co-authored, involved surveying more than 1500 parents who all had at least one child between the ages of 18 and 25. They were asked if they tracked their kids, why, and what impact they believe that tracking has on their adult children. This actually came about because I was talking with some of our undergrad, like our student research assistants that I have working on my team. And one of the, one of the girls made a comment about her parent had called and said, why are you in an alley? And she and some friends were in the car in waiting in the drive-through line at the taco bell, right? So if you do look on a map, it does kind of look like you're, you know, like you're sort of in this alleyway. But I was like, wait, what?

5:12I was just kind of astounded by the idea that a parent of a successful, well-functioning, happy college girl would be keeping such close to house. And then we got to talking and I said, well, okay, you other guys are your parents tracking you? Now, I went, huh? I said, I gotta find out if this is happening all over the country, not just on my hallway. Yeah, it's such an interesting question. So in your study, you found that over half of parents of young adults 18 to 25, especially those with kids 18 to 20, do use location tracking to keep tabs on their children. What are some of the reasons that parents say they're tracking their young adult kids? So a lot of it is just peace of mind or if there's an emergency. Okay. I'm gonna suspect that a little bit of that is we put that location tracking capability.

6:18We turned that on when the kid was younger and maybe they were just learning to get to in front of school by themselves or things. And they kind of got used to it and they never turned it off. Okay, this is such a question for me. Like if you start tracking your young kids, where does it end? Exactly. And so it sounds like it just never does. Some cases. Well, okay, one of the signals that it never does is that a lot of the parents who have location tracking on for their young adult child didn't give them the option. It wasn't a conversation. That's where I think it's problematic. You know, as a parent, there isn't a big giant thing that happens when your kid turns 18 and that comes down and says, you have to act differently now. It's a process for kids, but it's also a process for the parents. And I think from these results, what we're seeing is that a lot of parents aren't taken

7:25upon as insane. Okay, my kid is an adult now. Well, what does that mean? It has meetings for a lot of the family rules, right? And they stay out till hours or whatever. Can they do what they want? But it also means as we're using technology, that young adult child should have some say into privacy and data sharing and things like that. And what we found is that's really not happening. It's so interesting too when you talk about like, do kids get to do what they want to do because so much of learning to be a young adult and learning to be in relationship, including with your parents, is figuring out how to build trust and how to be reliable and how to show up when you say you're going to show up. And it's almost like if your parents are just tracking you, it takes away the need to learn those skills because you're like, oh, mom knows where I am anyways. Yep. And so when it goes too far, you have things like a parent contacting their kid, hey, it's

8:30Thursday morning at 10, 15, are you supposed to be in English class? I see that you're still at your dorm. That seems like a parent taking on the day-to-day management of that young adult child's life instead of the young adult child. And so I think you're right. It's the ability to learn those things. And I would add one more. I think it's the ability to make mistakes. And that includes sometimes doing some things that, you know, maybe your mom and dad wouldn't approve of. You know, risk taking is part of being an adolescent and a young adult. And I fear that some of what these parents are trying to do is prevent their kid from making a mistake. And that's not allowing them the ability to grow, gain experience and become like independent, confident adults.

9:31You just delay those learning experiences. And honestly, when you push that back and back, sometimes you push it back until the age where the consequences become kind of severe. If you flunk a class in college, okay, if you don't learn how to get yourself up into your where you need to be, while the sudden instead of flunking the class, we're talking about losing a job. So I think we need to help parents remember that broadly speaking, their job is to help their kid grow into an experienced and confident and functioning adult. And that means giving them some space. And you did find that there's a separation between parents who track their children sort of constantly versus parents that do use these tools sort of sparingly. What are the differences that you found between those groups? There was a subset of the tracker parents who had sort of practical purposes for doing

10:32it. Like, I want to know if it's a good time to call. And that's, that to me seems like a pretty practical reason to do that as opposed to just, I feel like I need to know where they're at or where they're up to. So I think that makes sense. Another example would be they are driving in an unfamiliar place, don't want to bug them with callee, but maybe we agree, hey, we'll just keep an eye on you until everybody sure, you know, in fairness to the parents, young adults are often doing things for the first time. They're driving on the highway a couple hours for the first time or they're navigating in a new city. So I think again, having conversations about what are we using this technology for? What boundaries are we putting around it? And then everybody has to stick to the agreement, right?

11:35And sometimes I think what's going on is parents would really like to hear from their young adult kids more often. And they kind of want to know what's going on and they miss them. And I think a step that the young adult kids could take toward the center is, or maybe part of the deal is, okay, I'm going to call you every Sunday and fill you in and what happened this week, right? So you don't have to be monitoring me. We'll do it. It's just, I got my own life and I'm busy and I'm, you know, being here and there. But we'll set aside time to catch up so you can still feel included in my life and you can feel like you know what's going on without kind of taking a surveillance approach to it. Yeah, I really appreciate that. It does feel like a theme that comes up often in the show with all kinds of tech is like just because the tech is there, we use it without really thinking about why and how and being intentional around the use of it. So I think that's such good advice.

12:36There's one other thing that maybe parents could keep in mind because so many of them think about this of incase of an emergency. It's to question whether you're really the person that can take action. So one of the things we talked about with my group of undergraduate students is, hmm, it's Friday night. You're going out. Really, what can your parents do? Instead, maybe we use that same technology to share location with our group of friends and we figure out what's our strategy to make sure everybody gets home safe or we know where we're going to meet up at the end of the night. And what that's doing is saying there's a usefulness to this kind of technology, but we can determine how we bring that usefulness into our lives and which relationships at a particular

13:37time are going to be the ones that provide that support or that safety. And so it's really investing in the young adults themselves. Hey, you figure out what's a good use of this, right? And maybe there are times where it's your parent, but maybe there are times where it's not. When we come back, does location tracking actually keep kids and young adults safer? And when should we consider turning off the tracking apps? That's after the break. College football is back. So Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay.

14:38Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that. But for your money, shop, pay. Manage your account and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See PayPal.com slash protection terms. Did you get a sense of how the young people are feeling about this? About being tracked so often by their parents? You know, it's interesting because this particular study was done with the parents. But I think there are some really interesting questions around young people. And I've actually heard from quite a few of them and talked with quite a few of them around this. And some were acknowledging, I didn't even know how to bring this up because if you say

15:40hey, I don't want you to track me, a parent might automatically jump to a, oh, what are you trying to do? Right? Right. As opposed to, you know what? You're at an age where we should give you a little more, a little more leeway. And that's why those practical tips come back in. I've also had kids say, young adult kids, well, I don't have anything to hide. And I just want to push back on that a little bit and say that might not be the point. Right? You know, I've, you can tell I'm an older person. I've been doing this job for a long time, working at a university. And over the years, kids are coming in less independent, less capable, not able to figure things out. And I think part of that is they've had this parent little safety net under them. I don't think it serves them well. And I want young people to have the freedom to gain the experience that will lead to confidence.

16:48Right. Right. You have to be able to know that you can fix things sometimes. Yes. And making a mistake usually isn't the end of the world, right? And then we have a conversation about, okay, what happened? Great. Now, let's talk about how next time it's going to be different. That's how we learn. And so some of the kids couldn't even envision not having that safety net under them, not having that parent knowing where they are, what they're doing. And I just want them to expand their thoughts. You're not breaking off contact. You're not doing anything wrong. You're just taking away that net and giving it a try, right? Walking that type rope. It's not that high when you're 19. Like it's okay. We have a lot of supports built into university campuses or a lot of other places to help the young adults to make sure the mistakes are too bad or help them. But they got to do it. They got to try. I really hope that by hearing about our study, by stopping to think about it, just for

17:55a few minutes, both parents and their young adult kids can consider how they might adjust their use of location tracking technology so that it's a much more positive thing for everybody. And do using these location tracking tools actually, does that help parents feel safer and sort of aside from what parents feel, does it actually make kids safer in the end? We actually heard from some parents in our study that sometimes it makes them feel more anxious, right? I can imagine that. Like my student, whereabouts, and why are you there? She was looking at the location for peace of mind and all of a sudden it didn't show something that she expected. And immediately her mind turned to like, what is the problem? When there was no problem at all. So it's probably not healthy for parents to all the time just be kind of obsessing over

18:57what their younger little kids are doing or where they're at. But reserve that for situations where it potentially could be helpful. Certainly, I completely understand the in an emergency. This is a great tool to use. This helps us find the phone. And certainly there are sure there are many instances where it helped law enforcement or campus police find a student that it was missing. But much more often, I think it just gets in the way. Right. Well, this is, I am generally a person who is like very freaked out by location tracking and I think this whole trend is like, I'm like, ah, you don't need to know where I am all the time. But it did remind me that one of the ways in which I've used this with my parents is turning on my location is almost always off just in general on my phone. But when I pre-CNN, when I was like somewhat more independent journalist working for smaller places and I would go out on reporting trips that were maybe kind of risky, I would share

20:02my location with my parents so that I could somebody would know where I was if I was knocking on doors or something like that. So I think there are ways in which, you know, you don't have to have this technology on all the time, but it can turn it on where it's useful. And that's the perfect example of there was a situation where you said, hmm, I want to make sure I have, I kind of have backup on this if it goes bad. And in that case, it was your parents. And in a different situation, it might be your roommate. It might be a spouse or a significant other. And so you're using the technology in a targeted situation with somebody who you feel comfortable could be helping. And it's not just an automatic. Hey, we did this when you were 11. Let's keep it going. Right. Well, we've talked about some of the sort of developmental risks that this habit can create. But are there other risks that people should consider that could come with sharing your location all the time? I think the general risk of honestly, you don't know where your data is going or you can

21:07take up on that. And I feel like it's almost every week that we learn about a new situation where our personal data, often location data that we thought was safe or we thought was contained to just this app or this company or this use turns out to be shared a little bit more broadly without us quite realizing it. So I think that's an important thing for people to know. Systems get hacked. Data gets shared maybe a little bit too loosely. And so I think it's something that people should think carefully about. Right. Well, and we've talked about how so much of this has just sort of grown out of parents' habit tracking their younger kids. And certainly I can understand the reassurance that this would give you if your kid is walking to school or something like that. But is even that something that you think parents should think twice about? Yes.

22:08Tracking younger kids? Yes. If you talk to a school teacher in middle school or high school about what are what's the disruption of folks? A big chunk of his parents during the day contacting their kids. And some of it is checking to make sure they're okay. Some of it is dumb stuff like, hey, I was thinking of chicken for dinner. What do you think? And so I think what has happened is the phones have provided sort of a constant connection and parents think like, hey, that door is open all the time. Let's just chat. It's, I don't think that's good for kids because again, they aren't having the space to figure it out. So you know what, if your kid forgets his lunch, he probably could pawn some stuff off that other people don't want or talk to lunch lady into giving them something and he'll pay them. Like, kids are, most kids are pretty savvy and they can figure out things.

23:12And that constant, you know, always in contact approach. I just don't think it's healthy for kids. Again, we're not letting them have experiences that lead to growth and eventually to confidence. This is making me think of like my high school and middle school days of not having this technology available. But there was also this sort of like community understanding that like, if you crash on your bike on the way to school and obviously you've got no way to reach your parents, like somebody else's parent is there. They're going to stop. They're going to help you. And it feels like so much of technology these days like pulls us away from relying on community because we can just rely on our phones or we can just rely on our parents. And maybe that's not necessarily a good thing. I completely agree with you. And it's this kind of implicit and insidious expectation that the phone is the thing that saves you. Right?

24:13I'm not sure that's how we should be operating. There's a really interesting gender thing going on here where parents are more likely to track girls. Oh, interesting. I would argue. It's really important for girls to learn some of these skills themselves. How do I take care of myself? How do I maintain awareness of my surrounding? How do I, how do I, of these people here at this parking lot where I need a little bit of help, which is the one I should go up to, right? I call it spidey sense or your intuition, but that's really key to self preservation. And I think a lot of young women get that, right? And I also think a lot of them just haven't had enough opportunities to practice. Right. Or don't feel confident if nobody has told them, yes, of course you can do this. You don't need me.

25:14Right. Because we're telling them, I'll watch you. I'll track. It'll be okay. They think they're protecting their girls when maybe what they're really doing is preventing them from developing their own capabilities. So if parents have started tracking younger kids, is there an age at which you think they need to start the conversation, start thinking about maybe scaling back the use of this technology? Like what point should parents start thinking about that transition? Almost as soon as the first phone arrives, right? And I would just say, what is it that you think is going to happen good here? You can also teach your kid to plan ahead. Let's talk about the night before who's going to take you up and what after school activities, right? We're also losing some of those kinds of skills in our young people because we can get a quick answer by texting mom, start backing off in that as soon as you can and allow your middle

26:20school kid. Almost all days, go through the day, figure it out. Yes. If there's a change in the practice time, great, a quick text fine. But a lot of days, go through the day, we'll talk about it when you get home. That's what family dinner is for, right? Let's hear about each other's day. But let's have parents step back from that on the present safety net that the kid can always see, right? Have a silent safety net that's there in the background. But that still allows your kid to feel a sense of freedom and a sense of responsibility, right? Because we want our kids to feel that pressure too. And then again, by the time they hit young adulthood, we want them to feel like they can do this. And what about if there are young adults listening who are thinking, I would like to start the conversation with my parents about their tracking activity, but I don't want to freak them

27:24out. What advice would you have for them? Hey, I was watching this thing from with this lady from the University of Michigan and she said we should talk about this. Boundaries are good. And you want to be able to put boundaries around technology so that it isn't taken over your life. And you know, you want the same thing for your parents. Let's talk about it. I think there might be a couple of situations where I would say, hey, I would like you to turn that on and just maybe use it to make sure that I'm okay. Otherwise, I want you to trust me. And if our problem is that you just want to know what's going on, then let's make a plan for when I'll call to check in or stop by and keep you informed. But let's do that a different way than the constant location tracking. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for doing this. I think this is such an important conversation. And hopefully this does start conversations with families about this technology. It is important and it's easy to let it happen without ever stopping and thinking about

28:31it. So I just want people to be more purposeful about what they're doing. Thank you so much. Thanks. We'll link to the University of Michigan's report about parents and their location tracking habits and our show notes. A few key takeaways from my conversation with Sarah for parents with kids of any age or for young people who are navigating the tracking discussion with their families. First, even though tracking your kids can give you some peace of mind, you might be getting in the way of opportunities for your kids to figure some things out for themselves. Think about the independence you want your kids to have as they get older and consider using location tracking tools only in certain situations. Next, if you started tracking your kids' location when they were younger, consider bringing them into a conversation about the technology as they get older, rather than just defaulting to keeping it on. Ask how they feel about it and talk about family boundaries. Finally, while location tracking tools could be useful in an emergency, doing it constantly

29:33can make parents and kids more anxious. Keep in mind that most newer smartphones these days include built-in emergency location features that can transmit the device's location to first responders in the case of a true crisis. That's it for this week's episode of Terms of Service. I'm Claire Duffy, Catch you next week. Brussels clean up nicely at Sweet Green. Maple glazed, roasted, and edges perfectly caramelized. Sweet Green's fall harvest is back on the menu, and the season's most overlooked little green vegetable is dressed to be devoured. You know what to do. Order on the Sweet Green app. Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every 5 seconds, with the most accurate heart rate sensing and awareable. So your vital zap, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push.

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