I might be in the minority here, but I 100% agree with this. I don’t know how to make it a gift link. Hope y’all can read this.
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We still have “Find My Friends” on for our kids. They have the ability to disable it if they want, but haven’t. I do literally only use it for 2 things: to give me an idea of whether it is a good time to text something that isn’t urgent (Oh, he’s in a classroom building, I’ll text later; looks like he’s out with friends, don’t want to bother him); and when they are home for breaks things like, “ah he’s near the high school, I’ll ask if he can pick up his brother” or, “looks like he isn’t headed home yet, I’ll hold off on starting dinner.”
I go weeks without checking it and it truly doesn’t cause me any anxiety. If they turned it off, I would just end up texting him more so maybe that’s why they haven’t.
I also have the program connected for my mom, my husband, and one friend I get together with a lot. I wouldn’t be offended if any of them turned it off, but they initiated it because it was more convenient. 
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Showing my age here, but somehow raised two kids without tracking them, and can’t imagine a family where people can (even if they don’t actually look) know where each other is at all times. I mean, you can always text to ask them, and if they don’t want to tell you, maybe they wouldn’t want to be tracked, either. It just seems like a lack of trust among adults.
I get this is a thing now, but I truly find it mystifying.
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Couldn’t read the article – what was her takeaway? I’m assuming that it’s time to let them have some independence.
D shares her location when she’s traveling. S never has. H & I share locations, and I have an AirTag hidden (not from him) on his bike in case either of them go missing while he’s on a ride 
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I c&p’d
Dear Carolyn: We have two “kids,” 18 and 20. We used an app to track them in high school, when they were driving, etc. We found it simplified our schedules and knowing where everyone was or needed to be picked up. I even liked knowing when my husband was headed home after work. He uses and likes the app.
When our older kid went to college, we took the app off their phone but could see where they were through AirTag/item trackers. I’d wonder if they got back to their dorm okay or what they were up to above and beyond their excellent communication. They refused my request to put the app back on for a car trip, saying they would be fine and in good touch. And they were.
My younger child is about to leave for college, and I’m anxious about removing the app. They don’t have any backup AirTags or trackers. I’ve asked friends for reassurance that it’s the right time, but EVERY single one still tracks their “kids”! Including one with a married 24-year-old daughter.
Our younger kid wants it off their phone soon. My husband agrees and says our kids are independent and trustworthy young adults who are in close touch. 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.
— Tracking
Tracking: 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.
Pardon my exasperation, but I can’t see anyone typing “simplified their schedules” with a straight face.
It’s about the anxiety!
Which is natural! But so unhealthy to indulge.
Tracking only prolongs it by promising something you can’t be given. Ever. By anything. The app won’t make your kids okay.
Your knowing where they are, when they arrive and how fast a car gets them there will not make them okay.
Your tracking what they are “up to” is not! okay! Nor will it make them okay.
Because whatever is happening to them at any given moment is independent of your knowing where. Treating location as your early warning system to parachute in with … advice? warnings? law enforcement? sharply worded concerns? is parenting beyond your job description to make yourself feel better.
We can flip that around, too. Learning to sleep when you don’t know where your adult offspring are will not harm them. It will help you relax and trust them, though, which will help you become a better parent of adults.
Meanwhile: Their being “independent,” “trustworthy” and “in close touch” speaks well of your family and no doubt reduces the risk of their coming to harm — but not to zero, and apps can’t change that except at the edges of the margins, which I’ll get to. So using “They’re good kids!” in deciding whether to app or not to app is merely an extension of the false premise for tracking them in the first place.
In other words, if your kids were screw-ups, boundary pushers or riskaholics with no interest in reporting back to Mommy, then I would still tell you to lay off the tracking — and not (just) because this cohort might risk even harder on principle, but because their whereabouts are not your business and their adulthood is not your problem.
Anxiety is your problem. Counting on false assurances instead of developing healthy detachment and coping skills is your problem. Not taking “would have been horrified to be ‘tracked’ in college by my parents” for an answer is your problem. An anxious worldview is your problem, and it’s contagious.
In high school, sometimes I was where I told my parents I was. Sometimes I wasn’t. I didn’t track my kids, under or over 18.
Now — your relationship with your kids is always 50 percent your business, and your most powerful tool for that is? Trust.
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.
If you all mutually consent to location-share in the event of a so-rare, absolute-worst-case, gone-missing-type scenario, then have at it. The edge-of-margin scenarios. But don’t peek, ever, unless needed.
And if you mutually consent to be one another’s crash-alert contacts and monitors of valuables, sure, I won’t judge (your elder kid does know, yes?). And 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.
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We still have our family Life360. D has chosen to remain on it. She’s always known she could remove herself. She just chooses not to.
99% of the time I use it to make sure my H hasn’t gotten snarled in traffic so I don’t ruin dinner.
We’ve never used it to monitor or limit activity.
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Same.
To each their own, but I never felt the need to do this. My kids and I have always texted at least once a day, every day (still do with the college kid and the older kid is married and has a demanding job so I hear from her a few times a week). They’ve always been good about texting me when they arrive somewhere and when they are leaving to come home, and when they get home. I had conversations with both in their teens, about trust. They understood that if they lied to me then the reins would be tightened. I can’t imagine myself planting an AirTag somewhere on them.
My friend was tracking her son on Life360 when he went away to college and noted to me that he had been spending multiple nights at a dorm other than his. I urged her to turn it off as it seemed to be more of an invasion of privacy issue at that point.
I sometimes feel bad for Gen Z because in many ways they really missed out on the idyllic childhood that our generation had - the freedom to run, play, grow, work through problems without hovering parents and being tracked by technology. My husband and I were talking about our own childhood summers where we would leave the house at 8am and not return until we were called for dinner (“called” meaning our moms rang a bell or yelled out the back door). I used to climb to the very top of tall trees and rock back and forth in the wind - if I had ever fallen, I would have died. In high school, my friends and I would take the train into NYC and be gone for 10 hours. My parents never had a worrying thought about it.
I do think the hovering and tracking (some of which I am guilty of myself) has resulted in a fair share of anxious young adults with a lack of coping skills. When I see parents still managing things for their college students, I worry about how Gen Z would do if there was a major life catastrophe, and the parents weren’t there to manage.
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I don’t track my daughters but they definitely track each other. This resulted in a ruse when my older one was about to get engaged and her sister needed to come into the town where older daughter lives for it without letting her sister know. So like a month before the date my younger daughter started complaining to her sister that other friends had been mentioning that that it seemed like she had blocked them from tracking and there seemed to be some sort of glitch. And then like a week before younger daughter turns off her sisters ability to track her and older immediately contacts her and tells her that now the “ glitch” is effecting her! Lol.
Since there’s no tracking with me and DH you’d think there’d be no issue with us sneaking in. But my daughters are so used to the fact that I respond to texts and calls immediately that I had to come up with my own excuse the day we were flying in for why I wouldn’t see her texts for hours. I had primed her weeks before by casually mentioning that I had an upcoming court call right before that weekend ( I’m an attorney but rarely appear in court it was something I’d mention since I hadn’t done it in years). She’d also come to our town 2 weeks before for work and we have a giant Calendar in our kitchen with all our plans on it and I took the step of writing fake “ plans” on that weekend “ Dinner with the Steins”… “BBQ at the Goldsteins” lest she think it was odd that we had no plans Labor Day weekend!
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Thanks for cut and pasting Carolyn Hax’s answer. She is always so smart, insightful, and gets to the heart of the matter each and every time. I don’t have a WaPo subscription so miss her column.
I do have my recent college-grad daughter on the find my iPhone app but never communicate with her in regard to it (what are you doing?) and check only occasionally (mostly when she traveling).
What I found endearing was that when she went to college, her small group of friends put each other on Life 360 (so, e.g., if one went out in date with guy and was late returning they could check on her).
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I’m surprised at how common it is for groups of young people to track each other. My daughters track each other and all of their friends track each other. My friends have said the same for their young adult kids.
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My D also had a find my friend group in college. It was part of their safe dating plan.
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My daughter and her cousin track each other. I didn’t know it was a thing but I thought that it was a good idea for a single female.
My kid will send her information and vice versa when traveling so that we can see an ETA. It was especially helpful when picking up at the airport.
So maybe I could see where the kid is?
Of course they sent a picture of them last weekend and I had to ask where they were.
My kids are older and I’m not that interested where they are at this age.
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Life360 just let me know my son was in an accident and called 911.
My daughter likes to track me to know if I’m at work and such.
I use tracking like Fight Club, we don’t talk about it.
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We have Find My Friend on our family’s phones. I can see the location of my wife and two kids and they can see mine. We mostly use it to see if someone is almost home rather than texting or calling them while driving.
When S24 was first learning to drive, we use a service called Bouncie that tracks travel routes, hard stops, fast acceleration, and speeding. It reassured us that he was being a safe driver and we removed it after about six months.
S24 is heading to college this fall and we are definitely asking him to turn off the Find My Friends. His phone will still alert us if he’s in an accident and he can text or call if he needs help.
Conversely, my dad recently asked me to set up Find My Friend for my mom who is having memory problems and often goes on long walks.
We never tracked our kids. Their mid 20s now. But living in a major city taking busses and trains, even going to school high school we just asked for texts when going to be late or leaving somewhere coming home so we had a clue. In college they let their friends know where they were. Etc. When traveling abroad they give us their travel plans and good to send pics of their adventures. We like lots of pics. Lol. Every family, child has their own bandwidth on all of this.
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In reading the article posted the thing that stood out to me is that the parent removed an app before their offspring went to college. They are going to college…they are capable of removing their own app…or not!
That to me is a sign of over the top control
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When my kids had to get ipads for school (required in their private school starting in 6th grade), for some reason, they were set up using my appleid. At some point, they got iphones and then their own appleIDs but we created a Family in Apple settings which meant I could see their devices in FindMyPhone app. This was so we could look for any lost devices.
It actually came in handy twice while D25 was studying abroad. The first time, she had her phone stolen from her purse in a nightclub (thankfully I had my phone turned on b/c she called me 4am Spain time, freaking me out when I saw an international number come up on my phone!). Anyway, she asked me to look for her phone and put it in Lost mode so it would disable the thief from using it. Another time she texted me from Paris while in an Uber with her friends - they thought the driver seemed fishy so she asked me to track her all the way until they arrived at their airbnb safely.
My kids now all have airpods, along with their phones and laptops. Several times they have asked me to look for their airpods when they couldn’t find them. One lost hers at work - we could see they were there somewhere so not stolen. Eventually a coworker found them in the storeroom where she was doing inventory. Son texted me from Ireland fearing he left his on a train but I could see they were in his hostel (found them buried in his backpack).
I don’t regularly track my kids b/c it would probably cause worry but on rare occasion I have checked their location when they are traveling. My son recently drove the 8 hrs alone back from school - I looked up where he was to have an approximate time when he’d get back; didn’t want to call him and distract him while driving. D19 “shares her ride” with me when she Ubers alone traveling to/from airport. In fact, my married D25 did so recently when visiting younger D in Chicago - flight arrived super late and she had to uber alone to her airbnb in an unfamiliar city.
Coincidentally, D19 was just telling me last night that she and her college friends all share their location with each other for safety reasons. She goes to college in Chicago so they travel around via public transportation/Ubers often. Older D said she and her friends did the same for safety reasons like when they were out drinking. My sons have never mentioned doing the same for their group of friends.
My kids could turn off the “sharing location” in our Family group at any time if they wanted. They know I don’t stalk them and I guess they like the convenience of me occasionally being able to look for their lost devices!
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I wish we could track MIL’s cell phone since it gets lost regularly in her house…but it’s a jitterbug…and I don’t think we can put these trackers on it!
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The tracking lost devices made me LOL. When younger S was an intern, we bought him an ipad to use out in the field collecting GIS data. The first week, he called me on the way home (his friend was driving) and said he couldn’t find it. So we all went back out there - at 9pm in the middle of a big thunderstorm/downpour with flashlights in a cemetery. Good grief. Finally remembered the find my phone. We pinged it, and it was in his friend’s van that we all searched multiple times, but it slid somewhere down deep… and his friend was freaking out, as he was driving home at that point, and the thing started beeping. He called S screaming “MAKE IT STOP!” lol. Good times. It also has come in handy when I leave my someplace. I’ll call H and ask him to see if I left it at home or wherever.
We started using the find my phone/friends when older S went to college. I was nervous about him driving over the mountain. Tiny, curvy, 2 lane road with no shoulder and no guardrail. I liked to see him making progress.
I love maps. I love them. I can scroll around them for hours. I love seeing the kids on the maps and looking at their surroundings and imagining what they’re lives are like. I love when they’re abroad, or in different places and you can see how far we are apart in the world. The technology just amazes me.
We use it before we call to see if they’re home. If they aren’t we don’t. If they’re traveling to see us, I like to get an idea of when they’ll be there. It helps me have dinner ready when needed.
But I don’t track them after 9pm and before 8am. That’s kinda my rule.
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I didn’t even realize tracking apps were a thing until I was talking to a group of moms a few years ago and they were comparing which apps they preferred for their tracking.
I must admit, my reaction was 
and then
We have never tracked any of our children at any point. The idea of it really hit against my belief in privacy and boundaries to which everyone is entitled. If you are old enough to be going about independently, the idea of tracking (imo) was unnecessary and an invasion of privacy.
Maybe it is the feral GenXer inside of me, I also immediately could think of about a million ways in which a determined child could evade tracking; easiest would be to just drop their phone off with someone else at their home, or with someone who was actually going to whatever location child had claimed. 
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