Tracking (Apps) for Kids

A while back, we gave my 8 yo daughter my old smartphone so she wouldn’t keep taking our phones to play games. It didn’t have a SIM card, so it was really a computer + camera she had, not a phone that could make calls. And now she finds some kids in the apartment having smartphones with SIM cards, ergo the demand that she be given one too. So far we’ve stood firm but the question is when she will have one, not if.

Since I’d started thinking about this topic, I decided to listen to this Short and Curly podcast on the next question that comes with giving a smartphone to your kid. Should you put tracking apps on your kid’s phone? Is it right and necessary? Or are you becoming like the KGB, Stasi and every surveillance state in history?

It’s a tough choice: trying to balance privacy v/s safety. Kids feel they can take care of themselves, that they are not animals to be tracked continuously. But how do you as a parent know if the kid is mature to be out there without supervision? Sure, you might be lucky to have a mature kid who understands that you monitor because you care for them. But a kid that mature will probably also conclude that it means that you don’t trust them enough.

Like in quantum mechanics, there’s the issue that a kid who knows they are being tracked by their parents will change their behavior accordingly. Do you take the win of a kid who behaves sensibly regardless of the reason? Or are you just pushing the kid to start an arms race where they try and find ways to sneak under your surveillance radar? The podcast gives an example of a diabetic teenager whose over-concerned parent rushed in every time the monitoring app on the phone indicated a sugar level problem, thereby severely embarrassing the kid… and almost certainly making him resentful.

At this point, you might be thinking the golden middle is to track the kid only when needed, not all the time. But this is a bell-the-cat solution: good in theory but impossible to execute. How do you decide when tracking is needed? Won’t you inevitably end up monitoring the kid at times when it wasn’t warranted? Worse, won’t you end up knowing some aspects of your kid’s life that they wanted to keep private? And would you, the parent, be able to act as if you didn’t know those things and do and say nothing? And if you jump in every time there’s a risk or a bad choice made, how will they ever learn?

No easy answers, so I am glad that I don’t have to kick this can down the road to avoid making a decision… because this particular can actually lies down the road. But for how much longer?