It’s a scary world out there, and you just can’t be with your kids at every hour of the day. That’s why it’s easy to see why the various GPS tracking devices, from cell phones to chips you can attach to their shoes to iPhone apps, are so appealing to parents. Why worry about where your kids are when there’s an app for that?
Sure, the scenarios that companies selling these devices are plastering all over their advertising are terrifying – losing track of a child, for any reason, is frightening. After watching a few of those ads it seems like it’s only sensible to be able to digitally track your child at all times. But what happens if your child loses their phone? Or leaves their backpack on the bus? Kids even forget their shoes on a semi-regular basis. Not to mention the fact that these sorts of big brother parenting devices tend to bring out the criminal master mind in all children, so there’s no guarantee your child wont’t deliberately ditch the device. Unless you implant that chip into your child’s head, there’s just no way to be sure what you’re tracking is actually your child.
While it’s all well and good to protect your kids, these tracking devices are just one of the many ways technology is helping us avoid teaching our kids to be responsible, and teaching ourselves to trust our kids. Much like parental controls on computers and televisions, which keep us from having to teach our kids to use media in a trustworthy way, GPS tracking devices seem like a great way to raise kids without teaching them the fundamentals of moving around the world without parental supervision.
It is a scary world out there, it’s true. But treating your child like a paroled convict isn’t going to help you raise a responsible adult with the kind of coping skills it takes to take care of themselves.
