Ophelia Kimber, Staff Writer
Life360: It’s no doubt that parents will go to any extreme to protect their children, but where is the line between cautious and paranoid?
Life360, a San Francisco based technology company, with an estimated 18 million monthly users, offers location tracking services for linked “circles” that include anyone a user wants to share information with. The app allows the circle to receive notifications on when someone leaves a location, arrives, a user’s battery power, speed of a vehicle, and can create a personalized map for regular routes and locations. From a teenage perspective, Life360 is an off the charts extreme. Introduced as a family app in order to bring them closer together, Life360 is an absurd new tool being used for parenting. Whilst the desire to protect your child is understandable, Life360 is an invasive app that restricts the independence of children everywhere. While by no means does this argument represent the entirety of users, it does appear that hatred for the app is a common theme among teens.
The app goes as far to track the speed at which the car someone’s moving in is going. A parent coddling their child to this extent leaves no room for learning opportunities or growth. While a speeding ticket is unideal, it’s mistakes like these that can offer learning opportunities for teens, but because the environment Life360 and apps similar to it create there is no room for error or discovery.
It’s apps like this that formulate a lack of trust and independence. Since when is parenting giving your child a device and using it to track every move they make? The fears parents have regarding their child’s responsibility and safety are understandable but unnecessary. A study conducted from 1976 to 2016 by San Diego State University and Bryn Mawr College analyzed 8.3 million teenagers 13 to 19 years old through a series of surveys representative of race, gender, region, and socioeconomic status. After asking the participants what activities they did, including what they considered adult engagements like going out, drinking alcohol, and having sex, they found that teenagers in the 2010’s weren’t taking part in these activities as much as assumed. The study concluded that teenagers now are growing up more slowly than those in previous generations. The conclusion was even found unanimous amongst the different gender, race, regional, and economic groups they surveyed suggesting an unexpected cultural shift in today’s society.
Depending on how intensely parents use tracking apps they can be both invasive and impractical. According to Newport Academy, a teen rehab and mental health treatment facility, a study done by 300 college students found that “helicopter parenting,” the overprotection and excessive interest in the protection of a child, had a relatively high amount of negative effects for children. While this form of parenting is often done out of good conscience the study found that the children of these parents were more likely to use medication for anxiety or depression and even use prescription medication recreationally. So while Life360 isn’t the issue itself and nor do all parents using the app fall under the umbrella term of “helicopter parent,” the app represents the counterproductive extremes some are willing to take. To a certain extent these tracking devices are reasonable, no doubt are dangerous circumstances that both teens and parents want to avoid. However, the constant overseeing of an adolescent’s life and decisions are unhealthy for both parties. The choices teenagers make on their own prepare them for adulthood and an unceasing parent over the shoulder not only prevents growth in independence but can threaten mental health.
Even though protective measures families take to ensure the safety of one another make sense they don’t recognize the larger issues. Before parents download the app to track their teens they should think before they do it. Are they truly downloading the app for the safety of their child or is it a lack of trust? In any case, however, precautionary apps like this should be a last resort. Society and families specifically should no longer have to rely on safety apps to keep one another safe but rather focus their attention on solving the main issue at hand. The world is undoubtedly becoming more complex and the growth in technological advancements shows that society is perfectly capable of rising to the occasion to make environments safer, rather than relying on apps to do it for them.
There are other protective measures available for parents if they choose to take them, like the iPhone app Find My Friends, but Life360 is an extreme step towards an overly-fearful style of parenting. In the end, parents, if you choose to download the app, it comes down to communication. Communicate with one another why the app was downloaded in the first place and maybe set ground rules for using it. But constantly tracking your child, depending on an app for your child’s safety, and helicopter parenting has been proven on various occasions to negatively affect the mental health of adolescents.