Family Locator Makes Me Mad.

There was this Verizon ad on TV that sparked a long conversation between my wife and me. It was showcasing an app called Family Locator, which tracks your family members via their cell phones. The point of the ad was that this worrisome mom could track her daughter (who looked somewhere between 10 and 12) on her very first solo outing (with friends) in an indoor shopping mall.

I can't show you the ad, because Verizon has made it private, in its own channel, for some reason.

We saw pros and cons to this child-tracking software. On one hand, a parent armed with this technology may allow their child out of their sight sooner, possibly allowing a child to take the bus alone before a parent would have ordinarily let them.

On the other had, this app could be seen as a staggering and possibly development-stunting invasion of privacy; a technological cashing-in on modern parental paranoia. A real idiot's breakfast, if you will.

So many parents I've met are so terrified of letting children out of their sight that they simply don't. Parents can hardly be blamed for feeling like this--my parenting peers and I were raised at the dawn of cable news, which turned local, isolated incidents of child abduction into apparently pandemic national nightmares. I'm sure there's more to it than that. Maybe they love their kids more than I do mine. They way I see it, though, it's an irrational fear, and we have a duty to our children to overcome our irrational fears for the sake of our their mental health and development.

But what if your child gets abducted? Stranger Danger. Ugh. When I hear moms my age trading helpful tips on how to make their children terrified of strangers, I have to bite my tongue to keep from reminding them that their children have more to fear from their own family members than from real strangers [citation needed]. Maybe this is a case of parents just doing what they can to protect their children, but it really feels like a blunt and stupid shortcut to teaching their kids real skills for evaluating situations. Resorting to tracking their location is even lazier.

Moreover, what does it do a kid's brain, knowing that your mom or dad is monitoring your every move, ready at the drop of a hat to swoop in for immediate evac the moment things get even slightly out of hand? So much of growing up, for me, depended on being somewhere my parents may not have approved of--or even just being out on my own, knowing that I was the only one who knew where I was. Sure, I was alone or with friends in the tiny streams connecting suburban backyards, but even if independence is an illusion, I believe it's an important game for a child to play.

I'm not exempt from this, by the way--my instincts are to protect my boys in any way I can. I get nervous when I can't see them. I'm also a little scared of the dark, because I suspect there's a gorilla with human intelligence standing a few inches from my face. Again, though, there's a duty to understand and overcome fears like this, not to simply pass them on unexamined. All's I'm saying is that just because the technology exists to take advantage of your every whim don't mean you got's ta use it. I mean, in an emergency, sure. But all the time? As a matter of course? If you can put a chip in your daughter's brain so you can switch her off if she thinks about climbing a fence or smells alcohol or looks at a boy, are you protecting her? Yes, maybe, but in a really assy way. And you're robbing her of the ability to make a real decision on her own. There's also the larger (possibly smaller) question of the rightness of an action changing (or not changing) is that action becomes easier to perform, but that's probably another conversation.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'm being reckless. Maybe my kids won't grow up to be mighty and self-reliant adventurers or captains of industry. Maybe they'll be captured and enslaved by a cult. I know while there aren't too many parents among you, a great many of you are former children. I'm interested to know what you think, despite the rantiness of this post, which started off as a 140-character tweet.

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EDIT: If I'd seen this, I might have just linked to it. Lenore Skenazi, Author of Free Range Kids has written a more focused and succinct response to the same ad. The commenters are all similarly appalled, although to be fair, they are commenting on a blog called Free Range Kids. Some do make the interesting point that this app would be very useful if you lost your cell phone.