I can track my college sons’ movements on my phone, but should I?

By Don Riddell, CNN

(CNN) — I can see my twin sons driving down to Florida, tracking south on I-85 toward Panama City Beach.

I’m sure they won’t have noticed Newnan Towing Services and the Canongate 1 Golf Club flashing past the window as they pass through Coweta County, Georgia, but I can see it all on my smartphone, the detailed progress illustrated by their white initials inside gently pulsing gray circles on the location tracking app.

I am one of the millions of parents who’ve had the ability to locate their children from the day we bought them smartphones, wondering whether it’s still appropriate to track where they are now that they are young adults in college.

One in four parents say that they track their young adult child’s location with GPS apps or software, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center report. But given my unscientific poll of my parental peer group, I’m surprised the number isn’t higher. Many of my family’s parent friends — some of whom wanted to be anonymous, while others were OK being quoted — say their kids consent to the tracking and that they track their kids for peace of mind and safety, nothing more.

“We have never had to question her whereabouts, and unless her location looked really suspicious, we won’t,” said parent Christy Keys of her daughter Ella, who attends the University of Tennessee.

“He wants me to know where he is!” said parent Kim Asher of her son Aaron, a George Washinton University senior. “Being in DC now is crazy times!”

Far from using the technology to intrude on their children’s privacy, some of our friends said that they use it to make sure they don’t intrude in their children’s lives. The parents will check to make sure that their kids aren’t driving or in class before calling them, while others will confirm they have made it to their destination after a long drive.

Sarah Gallagher Trombley, a former Snapchat executive who founded Digital Mom Media in 2023, says she’s not surprised that parents and their young adult kids are finding it hard to decouple, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic smashed everybody closer together.

“It’s not all bad,” she told CNN. “Much of it has to do with the nature of the kids and the nature of the parenting. I think there are plenty of kids who find it very comforting that Mom and Dad are still kind of looking out, especially if they miss you, too. Knowing that you have that digital connection through space and time, I think that’s a warm feeling, especially when you first go to college, it’s disorienting.”

Tracking apps can give peace of mind

Of course, my parents didn’t have anything like this to check on me during high school in the early 1990s in Hertfordshire, an hour north of London. My mom said she couldn’t sleep until she’d seen the arc of the car headlights sweeping across her bedroom ceiling.

But once we’d left home for college, she didn’t think about it again until we were back at the end of the semester. She agreed that what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.

Just one generation later, we have incredible technology that is both a blessing and a curse, tools to provide comfort but which can just as easily magnify our concerns. Many of our friends admit to checking up on their children at college, often to make sure they’re not in a hospital or a police station. Using a GPS app gives them the peace of mind to roll over and sleep at night.

But we sometimes know their whereabouts at our peril — how well are you going to sleep if you check the app and discover that they’re 100 miles away in the middle of the woods?

One evening, the app revealed that my sons were, in fact, in the middle of the woods but also that they were with each other. So we assured ourselves that they were probably fine. But what would we have done if they’d been alone? Or what if we had daughters and not sons? The chances of catastrophe are so small that we’re probably better off not knowing at all.

As concerned or curious parents, we can end up punishing ourselves by tracking our kids.

Andrew Ducker is an old college friend from the north of England. His young adult children are now experiencing similar lives to our own back in the day. He told me that his 23-year-old son, Ed, has recently graduated from Kings College in London and is enjoying the life of a young man about town. Even though he moved away four years ago, his anxious mom can’t help checking his location in the middle of the night, even though he’s hundreds of miles away and there is nothing much she can do about it.

The risks of going overboard with tracking apps

Then there is the misleading information to contend with — the geolocation tech isn’t always totally accurate or reassuring. One of my son’s dormitories overlooks a 14-lane highway, and he doesn’t always seem to be tucked up safely in bed. I have learned to override the panic impulse, because I realize that he couldn’t possibly be sleeping in the middle of the road.

Another friend described the panic of discovering late one night that his daughter’s location seemed to be in the middle of a sketchy downtown parking lot at 1 a.m., and it wasn’t moving. His anxiety spiked when she didn’t answer his calls.

Since he lived in the same town where she was studying, he got dressed and drove to the location, assuming that she had accidently dropped her phone. But he couldn’t find her or the phone. More calls to his daughter and her friends went unanswered until he arrived at her sorority house at 2 a.m., ready to pound on the door. It was only then that somebody answered the phone and confirmed that everyone was sleeping soundly in bed. He laughs about it now, but he admits it was not his finest hour.

Experts have long been warning about the perils of tracking high school kids, arguing that it can damage the trust relationship, give a false sense of security to the child, and relax the burden of responsibility for their own actions. Gallagher Trombley, the Digital Mom Media founder, worries that the helicopter parenting and the constant surveillance of our children, covert or otherwise, might have harmed an entire generation.

“Have we raised kids in such a way that it is harder for them to truly be independent?” she wondered. “I worry about the failure to launch.”

But how does the dynamic change when they become adults themselves? I think it depends on what you do with the information you glean from their whereabouts. But if you’re going to speak to an adult child about their movements and life choices, you should bear in mind that they’re not 13 anymore.

Establishing and respecting boundaries is key

Tracy Foster is the cofounder and executive director of Screen Sanity, a nonprofit that helps families and communities pursue digital health. She told CNN that the ability to track adult family members can be acceptable, providing the boundaries are respected.

Foster shared the example of a 29-year-old who only recently cut the cord on parental tracking, and their mother was furious. “Can you imagine living in a surveillance state from your parents when you’re supposed to be an adult?” she said.

“We encourage parents to take a driver’s ed approach towards technology,” Foster said. “As a parent, you start in the driver’s seat, and your kids are watching you. They’re learning about speed limits, then they sit in the passenger seat and then they take the driver’s seat, and you move over to train them.

“Ultimately, they’re driving by themselves, and you’re not even in the car. That’s how driving works and that’s how technology works, and the parents need to realize they are getting out of the car,” she said. “This 29-year old’s mom did not realize she was not still in control of her child.”

Based on my conversations with my parent friends, I think some young adult children have agreed to stay in the digital family group because they were looking out for their parents. The kids might be concerned about their parents, not the other way around. Far from abdicating responsibility, these young adults were embracing it and moving, however slowly, into their future roles of caring for us.

As my generation continues to age, many of our kids will eventually be monitoring us. As members of the so-called “sandwich generation,” my wife and I are already familiar with looking out for both our kids and our parents.

Jennifer Rowland, who lives in Nashua, New Hampshire, has been adjusting to her daughter leaving for university at the same time that her father has been learning to live as a widower in Littleton, North Carolina. Rowland found herself tracking them both on her phone. Earlier this semester, she realized that she was no longer getting alerts of her father’s movements, leading to her discovery that he was in the emergency room.

“Oh my gosh,” she exclaimed, noting that he has now recovered from heat exhaustion. “It just brought about this whole different experience of using (a GPS app) that I wasn’t expecting.”

Keep family ties but let your grown kids thrive

I think I’ve come to accept that knowing my sons’ precise location doesn’t actually make them safer. They have consented to our ability to track them, but I don’t intend to call them out on wherever they are, at whatever time it might be. Perhaps the occasional peek at a digital map is more about simply wanting to feel their closeness.

I experienced that joy quite profoundly during the summer, when the GPS app pinged me with a “risky driving” alert while I was working at the office. The report hit me like a gut punch as it sketched out a recent journey showing high-speed acceleration, aggressive breaking, and a series of reckless and seemingly implausible 180-degree turns. My screen resembled a coloring book of a toddler on steroids, and I watched, aghast, as the crayon swiped back and forth, depicting what seemed like an insanely dangerous drive.

But something didn’t look quite right. On closer inspection, I couldn’t see any roads on the map. Then it dawned on me that he was riding a Jet Ski on a lake, and my horror gave way to joy. He must have been having the time of his life, and all I could do was smile. I wasn’t out there on the water, but I felt an intense connection with him, as if I were sharing in his carefree exhilaration.

I certainly don’t feel the need to snoop on my boys. I respect their right to live independent lives, and I trust implicitly that they will make good decisions. But as a parent who has spent every day of the past 18 years looking out for their well-being, I will admit that it was hard to let go overnight. I found it heartwarming to see that they were moving around the campus and exploring their new world.

My sons have been away for two months now, and I rarely check their locations anymore. I’ve concluded that whatever impulse I may have had to check on their whereabouts has been part of the separation process, gently letting go as we adjust to our new lives apart.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.