The ad concludes with the teen girl introducing her mother to the tracking app.
“There,” she says, handing her mum the phone. “No more freaking out.”
Applying reason to formless fear is precisely what we must teach our children, especially if they are to escape the global trend of rising clinical anxiety, linked to smartphone use and social media, that is claiming our girls in particular.
But how can we teach them something we can’t model ourselves?
I know that it is statistically unlikely for a child to be snatched off the street. I know that she is more likely to be at risk online, and that, in general, children are more likely to be harmed by someone they know, than a stranger. And yet, the little red backpack icon on the “Find my” app map soothes me.
Of course, a contemporary parent can never win – that’s one of the reasons we are so anxious. Soon after I began my surveillance, a friend alerted me to the warnings of e-safety and family violence experts. The use of location-sharing apps is linked to an increased risk of digital coercive control.
A survey of 2000 adults from the eSafety Commissioner found that one in five men and one in ten women agreed that constantly texting to ask who their partner was with, or what they were doing, was a sign of care. Almost 14 per cent of survey participants said using a location-sharing app to track a romantic partner whenever they wanted to, was reasonable, but the figure jumped to almost 19 per cent among 18 to 24-year-olds.
Separate research reported in the Herald/Age, by Griffith University PhD student Maria Atienzar-Prieto, found young people misinterpreted being followed by a partner on a tracking app as a protective behaviour borne of care and trust.
“One of the findings that really highlighted how this behaviour was normalised, was that the behaviour starts in the family home,” Atienzar-Prieto told the Herald/Age. “Parents need to be aware of the associated risks that can come with this type of technology.”
Overhearing my hand-wringing about whether location-tracking was good parenting or terrible parenting, another friend, and father of three, suggested a compromise route – couldn’t we track our kids and not tell them?
“Covert parental surveillance is surely better for them?” he ventured.
Experts disagree. It erodes trust and is a breach of the child’s privacy and dignity, apparently.
The tracking can go both ways – many children and young people are now used to knowing where their parents are at all times. This is not something my generation (X) would have ever cared to know. There even exists a TikTok trend called “fambushing” where teens track their parents’ location and turn up unannounced, to surprise them.
I don’t know whether this is sweet or sad – surely the point of parenting is to prepare your kids for independence from you.
When I was 19 and backpacking with my best friend, we lost each other in Bangkok. We both rang our mums in Sydney (at huge expense) and passed messages through them about a meet-up place and time. When we reunited, we never bothered to let our mothers back home know. We had more travel to do. We were untraceable, and we wanted to keep it that way.
Now I am hypocritically helicopter-ish. But perhaps the most telling detail of my ignoble descent into AirTagging, is that I needed to get my child to install the thing on my phone and set it all up for me.
Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.
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