When You Should Track Your Kids With Technology
Just because your child is growing up does not mean you shouldn’t be concerned about their safety. You always need to know where your child is whether you simply ask them, drive by his or her location or track them with technology. Remember, being a safety-conscience, interactive parent does not mean you have to be controlling. Trust that you have raised smart kids, but be able to find them if the need arises.
Discuss Safety
If you are going to use technology to monitor your child, do not make it a secret. Instead, engage your child with using his or her smartphone for safety. Most smartphones are GPS enabled and your child more likely than not knows this.
If you choose, a system like Life 360 can track your entire family and they can track you. You can use this tool to be a model for your child so that everyone in the family knows where everyone else is. Life 360 is designed for rapid communication and emergency situations. You even can send quick texts like “Be there in 5 minutes” through their system. In big emergencies, there is a panic button that will alert the whole family.
Set Parameters
It is a sad truth, but sometimes parents need to track their kids because they cannot trust them. Especially in times of family stress, kids will act out and make poor decisions. Divorce is a tough time on everyone, and children may use this as an excuse to break rules. This is when tracking comes in handy.
FootPrints is an app that can log all of your child’s movements throughout the day and allow you to send the information to someone else, like a co-parent or counselor. The app has a geofencing component that allows you to define an area, like school or home, and receive notifications if your child leaves that area. This type of application should only be used if there is a reason to distrust your child’s behavior. If so, you might want to use it in conjunction with counseling and a behavioral plan.
Track Your Child
If you need to track everywhere your child goes because of high-risk behavior like breaking curfew, drinking or doing drugs, the Family Tracker by LogSat might be a helpful tool. This tool uses a locally resident program to maintain a location log of your child’s movements. The system sends an email to your mobile device rather than an SMS text, and the user does not know these emails are being sent. These two points make it one of the best tracking apps out there.
If you don’t want to download any tracking-specific apps or software, some phones come with location software already enabled that law enforcement can access in the case of an emergency. Knowing this, really look at your motivation for monitoring your child’s every move. If you think you can trust your child, then you probably can. But, if you have reason to believe your child is doing something dangerous, these apps can help.
