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What Teens Lose When They Can Always Be Found
The tyranny of Life360 and Snap Maps
“My parents have always advocated a Darwin-style parenting approach; only the smart kids will survive.”
That was one of my high school students’ explanation for why her family is in the minority when it comes to parents using location tracking tools for their children via any number of smartphone applications, from the simplicity of sharing locations in Google Maps to more complex applications like Life360.
I’m a teacher and a mom of a teenager, and I realize that there are many perfectly rational reasons why we parents would want to track our kids’ location. Most of these revolve around obvious things like safety, driving, emergencies, natural disasters, and bad people who do bad things. But some of our reasons may be more about us and less about them; more about trying to quell that ever-present anxiety about our children’s well-being that starts, as I recall, somewhere around conception, and ends, I am assuming, sometime around never.
This topic of parental surveillance came up as we were discussing Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which I assign to my ninth grade Humanities classes every year. Our guiding curricular question for this course investigates the ways that geography shapes culture. So Solnit’s treatise on the value of redefining our relationship to being lost fits right into our query.
They speak with a borrowed nostalgia of times described to them when kids could simply walk or ride their bikes to a friend’s house.
“Children seldom roam, even in the safest places,” Solnit writes. “Because of their parents’ fear of the monstrous things that might happen (and do happen, but rarely), the wonderful things that happen as a matter of course are stripped away from them. For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back. I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.”
To Solnit’s point, this generation, as represented at least by the freshmen I teach, is deeply…
