The Surveillance Childhood

 Tracking our kids' every move with phones or AirTags is causing a "deeply concerning" increase in anxiety among young people, according to more than 70 psychologists, doctors, nurses and health professionals who have come together to urge parents to "reconsider whether the surveillance childhood we are sleepwalking into is really benefiting our children." They add: "We are implicitly telling them that the world is unsafe," and warn that constant monitoring prevents kids learning the skills and developing the autonomy necessary to navigate real life.

"It's so normal to want to keep our children safe," says Clare Fernyhough, co-founder of the campaign group, Generation Focus. "But there is no evidence that tracking makes them any safer."

A Huntsman with His Horse and a Group of Hounds
Charles Bilger Spalding (1810-1871)
Photo Credit : Walker Art Gallery [CC BY-NC]

It's also a staggering invasion of privacy. I would never track my son - I'm his mother, not his Big Brother...

My son, now 11, recently started secondary school and he gets the bus alone, so we've given him a dumbphone for emergencies. Over the summer, we asked if he'd mind us tracking him. He wondered why we would do that. "If you want to know where I am, you can just ring me," he said. The logic was hard to argue with.

I'm well aware I'm the odd one out here. I'm one of the only parents I know who doesn't track their child, and at a recent dinner with friends, it transpired that they track their partners' locations, too. I don't do that either. It had never come up before, and then suddenly an entire table were staring at me in shock and disbelief. They all thought I was weird, and vice versa...

I would consider having my husband under surveillance a violation of trust; plus, it forces a relentless level of honesty that no marriage really needs... I want to feel independent, not micro-chipped, like a pet, and I want the same for him. Keeping a constant eye on the person you're sharing your life with is snooping, in the ballpark of secretly reading their emails...

So much of what people do online they'd never dream of doing in real life, and that's usually the problem. You wouldn't physically follow your kids around, sidle up to them behind a newspaper with eye holes cut out. They need freedom as they grow; teenagers not being entirely honest about what they're up to is a rite of passage, an essential stage of development on the way to adulthood. The experts raising the alarm about tracking describe it as an "invisible umbilical cord between parent and child". Perhaps their warning will encourage some to make the snip.

(Polly Hudson, The Guardian, 2026)

 How prevalent is the "tracking" of children by their parents? Another extension of "smother love"? Here the mother says that her eleven year old now catches the bus alone. In Tokyo many parents will initially accompany a five year old on the underground, get out at the right stop and then walk to school. The next day the child does it by himself.

If you are, Polly, the odd one out in your group then embrace it. As for tracking your spouse where does that come from? Isn't that as dangerous as tracking your child? Isn't tracking more concerned with the anxiety of the tracker rather than with the safety of the tracked?