Tracking Teens: Safety Tool or Trust Breaker?

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Reena Ninan:
Is it really okay to track your teens as they get older? I want to be able to track my kid.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I track my husband. I track my parents. I track my 15-year-old. I wish I could track everybody. And I am such a hypocrite. I don’t know that the parent peace of mind argument outmatches the teen privacy argument.

Reena Ninan:
I’m having difficulty accepting your answer today, Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think a lot of people will.

Reena Ninan:
One of the things about parenting that I love in the digital era is you can kind of see where your kid is. They can kind of see where I am, how close I am to pick up if I’m really, really where I say I am.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’m on my way. I’m on my way.

Reena Ninan:
That’s exactly right. Exactly right.
But I love that we’re taking on this topic about, is it really okay to continue tracking your teens as they get older? What do we need? How do we need to think about this? I’d love to get into this letter, Lisa.
Dear Dr. Lisa, I’m writing because I’m stuck in a standoff with my 16-year-old son and I’m not sure what to do. Until recently, we used location sharing on his phone. It wasn’t something we talked much about. It was just part of the deal mostly, so I knew he got where he said he was going and could find him if something went sideways. A few weeks ago, I realized his location was no longer available. When I asked about it, he told me calmly, not defiantly, that he’d started turning off his location sharing so he wouldn’t be tracked. Part of me understands that he’s a teenager and wants privacy. Another part of me feels genuinely anxious. This is a kid who’s driving more, staying out later, and spending time in places I don’t always know well. I’m not trying to spy on him, but knowing where he is has actually helped me sleep at night. When I explained that, he pushed back. He said it makes him feel like I don’t trust him and that he deserves some autonomy. He also pointed out, accurately, that he’s never been in serious trouble and generally does what he’s supposed to do. Now we’re locked in a loop. I worry that turning off his phone is unsafe and he insists that being tracked is unfair. I’d really appreciate your guidance on how to think this through and how to talk about it with my son in a way that doesn’t turn this into a power struggle we both lose. Thank you. A concerned and tired dad.
Who’s right? The dad or the kid.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s perfect, Reena. It is perfect. They are both right. There’s no answer on this one that is anything other than this is the picture of healthy adolescence and it is why teenagers are hard. It’s why teenagers are hard. We cannot guarantee their safety. We do lose sleep worrying about them and where they are and what they’re up to. This, Reena, I have found over the years is an irreducible reality of having a teenager. And I get it where the kid is coming from and I get it where the dad is coming from. So they got to figure this out. I mean, we can try to help, but there is no slam dunk answer on this one.

Reena Ninan:
I think all of us parents feel the dad’s concern. You just kind of want to know, and especially if you know there are new locations that he’s going to be at or maybe new friendships, you just want to know, especially at night, you really do.
So what would you say about the dad’s worry here?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I will tell you, the dad is centering this on safety. And I actually don’t think he has much of a leg to stand on, but I do see why he’s bringing that up with the kid. Because the kid might be like, “Why do you need this?” And if the dad says, “Well, it’s a safety thing,” then there seems to be an argument there. I actually don’t agree. I have seen kids do all the wrong things in all the right places. The parent thinks they’re like, “Oh, they’re at that very tame household.” The kid is doing all sorts of things they should not be doing at that household. I’ve also seen kids who are in what the parent feels to be the wrong place who are actually … I had a kid get in big trouble. Her parent had told her not to go to a particular house after a homecoming dance. And then her date wanted to go to a party there and the girl went to drop her date off at the party and was headed home. And the parent was watching this and thought that his daughter was going to the party and got super pissed and she actually was conforming. I think the safety question is a tricky one, is a really tricky one. Because the other thing, and I feel this very strongly, we can’t keep our kids safe when they’re not with us. That’s not actually how safety works. And so if your kid is out and about, you are basically having to assume that they can keep themselves safe. I think to say like, “I track you to keep you safe.” Well, I don’t want some teenager thinking like, “I’m at a party and I can do whatever I want because eventually somebody will find me.”
That’s not the kind of reasoning that actually keeps kids safe. So I don’t think the safety argument holds up. I think the parent peace of mind argument can.
If the parent is like, “I need to know that you are at the house where I think you are so I can go to sleep. You’re later than I thought you would be coming back from this sports event. I am now worrying that you have gotten into a terrible accident. I can look and see that your car is moving along at a steady pace towards the house. Now I can go to sleep and trust that you’ll be home at a reasonable hour.”
If there’s an argument to be made, it’s the parent peace of mind argument, but I don’t know that the parent peace of mind argument outmatches the teen privacy argument. What do you think?

Reena Ninan:
Well, I want to be able to track my kid. I want to be able to know where they are, quite frankly.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I know it.

Reena Ninan:
So quite frankly, I’m having difficulty accepting this answer because I’m on the dad’s side. And I do agree with the safety piece because I think that is legit. What is it?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, their prefrontal cortex is still developing. They make bad choices. They definitely do.

Reena Ninan:
For any parent who needs a scientific reason, there you go. We have it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay.

Reena Ninan:
But I understand you’re also trying to protect the teen here, but I just, I mean, I know someone who tracks her 80-year-old mother is able to know where she is at any given moment.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, actually, and I now track my folks because they are well into their 80s. And Reena, I will tell you, I mean, we did an episode on this several years ago. My own tracking activity has changed dramatically in that time, and I frankly love tracking. I’m totally with you. I track my husband, I track my 15-year-old, I track my parents, and sometimes I’m like, “I wish I could track everybody.” I have my work wife at my office and I’m always like, “Oh, is she on her way?” I’m like, “Why can’t I track her?” Because she’s a grown adult too. I don’t have any reason to track. But I love tracking my younger daughter and I am such a hypocrite because I will tell you that tracking has allowed me to let my younger daughter, my 15-year-old do more of what she wants because I’m like, “Well, I can see her walking to her friend’s house and I can see she got there.” So I absolutely am with you on the complexity of this.
And yet I am thinking, this is a 16-year-old who has said, “It feels like an invasion of my privacy. I have done nothing to make you think that I need to be tracked. I don’t want it. ” And I think the reason I’m coming down on the kid’s side, yeah. Go for it.

Reena Ninan:
No. Okay. I hear you on the kid’s side. I hear you. But why is this child shutting the tracker off in certain moments when, especially if it’s at night, I want to know where. So I’m having difficulty accepting your answer today, Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I know. I know. I love it. I love it. I think a lot of people will. I think a lot of people will. I think that if the dad needs to make the case, if the dad truly needs to make the case, he’s going to have to go through the peace of mind or that, “It is very hard for me to go to sleep at night if I don’t know where you are. And frankly, you’re a good kid. I’m going to give you a … If you want to stay out till midnight or whatever the driving laws in our community allow by way of curfew, I’m okay with that, but I actually also don’t want to stay up until you get in the house.” So I think that there may be a conversation where the dad says, “Buddy, just do me a solid. It’s not that I actually don’t trust you. It’s that I need to sleep at night.” Is that an opening?
I think that’s usually what the issue is, right? Because if we play out the safety thing, you worry that your kid has gotten into an accident, right? Say that’s the worry. You worry that your kid has gotten into an accident and they’re not coming home and you need to see where their car is, that that is the worry. Okay. What can you do in that moment to have addressed this problem? Not really anything. It’s happened. The solution is not in the hands of the parent in this moment. The solution is elsewhere. Okay. You worry your kid is passed out drunk at a party or you worry that your kid’s gone to the wrong house. If the kid has passed out drunk at a party and you’re texting and calling and they’re not responding, but you can see they’re at the party, you don’t know if they’re passed out drunk or if they’re just not responding to you.
What are you going to do? You can drive over to the party? I mean, if you actually play out all the safety stuff, it’s hard to come up with situations where the parent knowing the kid’s location is the thing that’s going to keep the kid safe. It’s really hard. I think there’s two places that dad could try to make some headway. One is like, “Buddy, just let me sleep at night. That’s the only reason it’s not that I don’t trust you.” The other is I will be okay with this, but we need to agree that if you ever feel like you’re in a jam, you’re going to send me your location and I will come for you. So that’s a way where the parent can say, “You are able to keep yourself safe and you are making good decisions and I’m going to generally trust that. Also, things go sideways for teenagers sometimes, and I am on your team and I am on your side and I’m going to count on you to reach out to me if that happens.”

Reena Ninan:
This is a well-behaved team. I mean, in this letter, the dad says he’s never been in serious trouble. Would your guidance be different if it was a teen showing us risky behavior?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think it would. I think it would. And actually, clinically, I’ve cared for a family where the teen did do something really dumb, got very, very drunk at a party, ended up in the ER, terrible nightmare scenario. The parents had tracking on. The fact that they had tracking to not prevent this from happening. And the only way they were able to let this kid go out again was that they said, “We’re going to track you and we need to know where you are at all times for a period of time.” And that was actually the thing that allowed him to leave the house at all. I mean, they were basically ready to be like, “You’re on house arrest for good for good for good.” Reena, I’m really trying to be sympathetic to like … I get it. A lot of people feel like this is a safety issue, this is a safety issue.
And I really don’t want to be dismissive of that while prioritizing the fact that I don’t think it’s worth blowing up a relationship with a good 16-year-old who’s behaving. I mean, they’re all good, a well-behaved 16-year-old, over surveillance questions. I think that’s why I’m coming down so strongly on the kids side. Are there other scenarios though? What if there were a terrible event at a kid’s school? Would tracking somehow benefit anybody? Can you think that one through with me? What do you think?

Reena Ninan:
Just being able to know where they are, you’re able to …

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah. I mean, I think that’s always the concern. As a parent, it gives you a peace of mind just knowing, okay, they got to where they are or they’re at where they are. Maybe it’s instead of saying, “I just want to know where you are for safety,” maybe you have to say what it really is, which is it puts my mind at ease and maybe that’s the way we need to frame it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think that’s honestly … Well, they’re connected obviously, right? Our worries about their safety then mess with our peace of mind, but we don’t really keep them safe by tracking them, though there may be situations I’m not thinking of, but I’m trying to think of them. But I think saying it just makes me more at ease. And frankly, it allows me to grant you more freedom. That’s an argument that I really believe. We want kids to be having more freedom. And if this is something in this anxious universe in which we exist that makes that possible, that’s probably a net benefit. And I’m thinking about my own hypocrisy where I’m saying, “I totally track my 15-year-old.” Part of it is she isn’t bristling at it. If the day came where she was like, “It feels creepy,” like this kid is saying it feels creepy, I would be in the very uncomfortable position of having to be where this dad is, which is, “But I still like it. I want to do it and you don’t want me to do it.” But I think if I’m really honest about it, I would have to sort of say to her, “All right, well, here are my concerns. I need to know that you’re going to be in touch with me if something goes wrong. If you’re going to be out late, can we maybe have a conversation about tracking you for certain situations where you turn the tracking off and on, but it’s not an all the time thing.” I think that that’s some of what I would want to have to think through.

Reena Ninan:
Is there an age where up until this age, it’s always okay and totally acceptable to track your kid?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I don’t know. I mean, I think there’s lots of families who have devices of one kind or another that they use with younger kids that actually let the kids roam more free. And I’m a pretty big fan of those, whether they’re watches or things like that where it’s the thing that lets the family be like, “Yeah, take your bike as long as we know where you are.” So I think that I’m very easy going about. I think this 16 year old’s right in that sweet spot of like, I get it. I totally get it where the kid doesn’t like it and the parents still wants it. I think there’s really interesting questions about tracking kids at college. When you are home and your kid is at college, I do not track my college age daughter. She does not want to be tracked. If I asked her, she’d say no.
But Reena, back to your point, there was a night where she was getting back to college and it was late. Her sister tracks her and I asked to see her sister’s phone to know that she had made it back to her dorm. So I can live in the complexity of this while also calling a lot of questions about whether tracking kids actually keeps them safe, but I wanted to go to bed and I needed to know she was back in her dorm. And I wasn’t 100% sure that if I texted her saying, “Let me know when you get back to your dorm.” I don’t know that she would’ve caught it. She’s very good about turning her phone off. I mean, I cheated. I used my younger daughter’s.

Reena Ninan:
I don’t know if that’s really cheating. I think that’s good to have backway options to get in. We talked about tracking a few seasons ago and so much changes so quickly in the digital space, but I’m just curious if your thought process on this has changed at all since we spoke about it a few seasons ago?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think my sympathy for tracking has gone up. I think a few seasons ago I wasn’t tracking as much as I am now. I didn’t like it as much as I do now. A lot of what I’m using it for, Reena, and I think a lot of families are, my younger daughter runs cross country and so she has meets all over Northeast Ohio and there are long bus rides back. And I’m not worried about the safety of the bus so much as like, I want to know how much time I have before I need to get in my car to go pick her up at school. And so being able to see where she is is a huge asset. I think what we’re opening up is if we call it what it is, that it’s a lot of peace of mind. It’s not necessarily safety. It’s like, I just want to be able to know that you got back to your dorm safe or that how far you’re … Sometimes it’s convenience, like how far away you are.
If a kid didn’t want to be tracked, I think you could also then say, “Okay, but then the trade off is I still need the peace of mind. I need you to text me that you got back to your dorm or I need you to text me that you got to the party safely.” I think that’s probably where you could meet a kid halfway. What do you think?

Reena Ninan:
Yeah, no, I think that’s a great … I actually wanted to come back to this dad and the son and ask you about that, like what is the compromise here? So is that what you would suggest for them?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think that it would be something I’d have the dad put on the table, which is like, this is a peace of mind issue. It’s not about you being a bad kid, you’re a great kid. It’s just that I love you so much and I worry about you and I just need to know you’re safe. And I think sometimes saying that like the number one thing in my whole world is you being safe. Nothing matters in my world if you’re not safe. Reminding adolescents that what can feel like hovering or surveillance, it’s not about trust almost all the time. So I think that may soften the kid on being like, “Okay, fine. If that’s what it’s about, you track me.” I doubt it. But then I think the dad may say, “Here’s the solution I can think of that would let me sleep at night. What do you think about it? What other solutions do you have?” I mean, the kid may be able to come up with stuff. It’s nice that tracking could be turned off and on so easily. So there may be scenarios where the dad says, “You know what? You’re going to be on a highway for three hours. I’m only cool with this if I can just know that you’re moving along at a steady pace.” It’s not about me trusting you. It’s just, I’m just going to be anxious because you’re on the highway. I think there may be some room to work in that, but if the kid’s done nothing, if the kid’s done nothing to raise questions about his judgment or his behavior, I have a lot of respect for kids’ rights to have privacy.

Reena Ninan:
Got to say I’m surprised. I didn’t expect that to be what you say. I mean, you’ve always been on the side of, we’ve got to be realistic about technology, right? We have to have realistic parameters. You’ve always been on the side of that. Is there something psychologically that we should know about why teens choose to shut their location services on and off? For parents who don’t understand, because we’re so consumed by the safety issue, and this is maybe our first kind of head to head on a big issue that’s of importance. Why are they doing it? Why do they feel so emphatic about it? Because I feel like what I am missing in this podcast is understanding why you really get why this is important for them.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s such a key question. I think that we ask of teenagers something that’s nearly impossible, which is to become independent people while living with us. I think this is an extraordinary ask, right? I know what my kid ate. I know what she wore. I know if her socks didn’t match. I mean, I know so much about my kid who lives under my roof, and yet this is a kid who in theory is supposed to be getting ready to leave us and move on and become a fully fledged mini adult when she moves out. I think that so much of how teenagers try to address this basically impossible task of becoming independent while living under our roofs is to accomplish some sort of psychological autonomy. They hang out in their rooms and close the door. They want to be out and about without us knowing where they are or what they’re up to.
It’s like midwifing their way into adult independence. If we have total knowledge of every aspect of what they’re up to, where they are, what they’re doing, up until the moment they go on, right, move out, that’s so weird. It’s falling off a cliff, right? The kid’s trying to actually do something in between. I think I just have just a general respect for the ways in which teenagers try to carve out a sense of an independent life while we know when their next ortho appointment is. You know what I mean? So true. It’s such a funny thing. It’s such a funny thing. So I value it for kids. And we had it, Reena, we had it and there’s not a lot of evidence. I think, I mean, setting aside frankly, gun violence, I don’t know that the world’s less safe now than it was. And I don’t know that you can set aside gun violence, but our parents didn’t, they lost some sleep because we were teenagers.

Reena Ninan:
Great perspective, Lisa. Great perspective. And it’s also hard, I think, sometimes for us to accept that we are preparing them for independence when it’s the opposite of what we have done for decades with them. So it’s a good reminder.
So what do you have for us for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Despite all my hypocrisies and all of the yeah, buts and all the asterisks on my guidance here, I think the reason I have such a strong sense of like, you got to meet this kid where they are, maybe even more than halfway, is it’s relationships that keep teenagers safe. If you want to know what keeps a teenager safe, it’s their sense that if something goes sideways, I can call my folks. I know this to my marrow, right? The kid who doesn’t feel like they can reach out to their parents because they don’t have parents who are trustworthy or who they feel comfortable doing that with, those kids make me the most anxious in terms of their safety. Given that this teenager is being reasonable, being respectful, has not given the dad any reason to think that he’s up to something he shouldn’t be, I think there’s a real hazard if the dad is insistent that it could damage this relationship.
And I’m like, that’s the safety measure. That is the safety measure. Kids can ghost, they can turn off their phones, they can do all sorts of things. The thing that keeps the kids safe is a good working relationship with at least one loving adult. So the negotiations around this phone, I think that’s actually what you’re trying to protect more than your right to know where the kid is.

Reena Ninan:
Well, thank you, Lisa. Thank you so much for your perspective and for getting us to look at a situation that feels so problematic, but from a totally different … I feel like this was an out of body experience of trying to think what it’s like for the teen, but no, I appreciate it. Next week we said we’re going to talk about a daughter who is very obsessed with her appearance. I’ll see you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.