Today’s kids will never know the freedom of running loose and wild, just as we’ll probably never get used to being watched on video everywhere we go.
Today’s kids and young adults are the most watched generation ever. It started when they were babies when parents, instead of being just adults who happened to have kids, suddenly were micromanagers.
When you and I were kids (I’m willing to bet), we’d leave the house in the morning and not have to come home until supper. Now children’s days are heavily scheduled, usually with at least one parent or grandparent in attendance.
When I was a kid, I’d come home to an empty house sometimes. When my daughter reached the age when she could come home alone instead of day care, I surrounded the house with cameras and signed up for a video monitoring service. Now I know exactly when she goes in and out each and every door (as well as when the dog walks around and when the chickens crowd onto the porch and when packages have been delivered).
I have spared her from cameras inside the house, but every time I get frustrated by or angry at a bad neighbor, I buy and hook up another outdoor camera or two.
And don’t even think about how parents lay their kids’ entire lives out there to the world in social media posts. What must the kids feel when they are old enough to be aware of that and embarrassed by it?
In the time leading up to my daughter getting her own car, I gave a lot of thought to whether or not to have her use a location app. The parent’s phone has a place where the child’s location shows up wherever he or she is. Technically, it shows the location of a child’s phone (or car keys), not exactly the child, but anyone who knows a teenager knows they cannot be away from their phone for any amount of time.
(Whew, am I relieved that technology didn’t exist when I had that crazy boyfriend who turned out to be a stalker. This kind of technology is probably making a lot of people’s lives a living hell.)
I can’t see my daughter doing too many bad things; she is a great kid (or I am a ruefully naïve mother, like mine was). I had decided against getting the surveillance app for my daughter. I’d let her grow up guided by her conscience (and our own interpersonal game of child-parent interactions) rather than be continually spied upon by technology.
It was a tough decision to make, because on the plus side there’s knowing where to find her in case of emergency. If the app were embedded in her arm, for example, I’d definitely use it to track her at all times, but since it’s just on the phone, it may not help in the case of a crime, because kidnappers are known for throwing out their victims’ phones.
Just as I had not only reached that decision not to use a tracking app on my daughter but become comfortable with it, my daughter told me she had that app and showed me on my phone how to keep track of her.
I looked at it out of curiosity and got a kick out of seeing where she was.
Then I got hooked.
She’s at the coffee shop when she should be on her way home.
She’s still driving, so I can’t call her yet (no distractions).
Her car is parked in that tiny parking lot which is hard to get out of instead of the big, safe lot at the apartments where her friend lives. When she gets home she’ll be told never to park there again.
She’s near the grocery store. She could run in and pick up a few things.
My intentions were good. My reality is, I suppose, predictable based on human nature.
So far, she is a good kid and does not seem to mind the yoke around her neck of Mama always knowing where she is.
Eventually, she’ll start to regret offering that up, and start resenting it.
One day – and this could be a moment simply as part of growing up, no resentment or regrets involved – she’ll realize she’s old enough to not be under her mother’s watch, and she’ll remove that app, and I won’t be able to track her anymore.
That will only be natural, but it will feel like a rejection, which I must brace myself for.
