We live in an uncertain and often dangerous world, and today’s young people face risks that many from older generations never even had to consider. Naturally, this has given today’s parents a heightened level of worry for their kids.
That’s certainly understandable and maybe even warranted — to a point. But some parents seem to have taken this to lengths that feel downright twisted. And in the case of one college student on Reddit, her parents’ constant worry has become intrusive and damaging to her mental health.
The freshman’s parents track her every move at college on Life360 and other location-based apps.
For many of us who are Millennials or older, our parents’ “tracking” amounted mostly to knowing our friends’ parents’ phone numbers and giving us a curfew — unless you were Gen X, of course, in which case you were fully feral, and they actually had to put PSAs on TV reminding your parents that they even HAVE kids.
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Nowadays, though, parents are not only more conscientious and concerned, but technology has allowed them to be far more proactive. From devices like AirTags and location-tracking features built into phones to apps like Life360, digitally tracking their Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids’ location has become standard practice — to a level many find downright disturbing.
Count this college freshman, who posted her story to Reddit, among them. She described her parents as “extremely controlling,” and now that she’s on her own, it is impacting her severely, damaging her social life and leaving her in a budding mental health crisis.
Her parents track her every move at college and have called the police when she tried to protect her freedom.
First, we must state the obvious: To continue tracking your child’s location when they are on their own at college is excessive in and of itself. Developing a sense of independence is part of the point of even going to college, and they can’t do that when a parent is watching their every move.
But this student’s parents take things to a truly disturbing extreme. “They constantly track my location and … stipulate that I must be in bed, in my dorm, by 10 every night,” the student wrote. They check her location to make sure she’s obeying them, so naturally, she has responded by evading their surveillance.
“I have switched my location in Find My to my iPad, which I leave in my dorm,” she explained, “and I pause my location in Life360 to get around this.” But her efforts were no match for her mom’s obsessive checking of the various apps’ information.
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“Last night, my mother called multiple times while I was out clubbing, and when I didn’t pick up, she called my school’s police dispatch and found out where I was,” the student wrote. “I believe that they pinged my phone.”
This is not only absurd but dangerous — it pulls police resources away from legitimate emergencies to appease one mother’s frankly disturbing obsession with her daughter’s comings and goings.
But she didn’t stop there. She was so upset about her daughter’s efforts at subterfuge that she emailed the school’s dean and demanded her daughter withdraw from school.
Her mother’s surveillance has left the college student feeling anxious and depressed. Experts say this isn’t surprising.
The student is deeply upset by her parents’ actions, which she says are “[preventing] me from being social in a healthy and sustainable way.” Yeah, it’s pretty hard to make friends at college when you essentially live in a parental police state.
But more importantly, she writes that “their controlling behavior makes me so anxious and depressed” — an outcome that is not at all surprising given the ways overprotective “helicopter” parenting like this has been shown to impact Gen Z as they emerge into adulthood.
A 2022 study found a direct correlation between overprotective or “helicopter” parenting and the staggeringly high rates of anxiety and depression in young people. This parenting approach produces adults who struggle to trust themselves and feel totally unequipped to navigate the world.
That’s surely part of this young woman’s struggle. But there’s an even bigger elephant in the room — this is an invasion of her privacy. She is essentially being stalked by her own parents, who are so resistant to a basic modicum of autonomy that they’ve demanded she drop out of college for even attempting to assert it.
That’s not just weird and out of line, it borders on abuse. And it is backfiring in precisely the ways that experts say excessive location tracking tends to do — by not only removing any opportunities for their daughter to learn how to be her own person, but by damaging her trust in her parents, making her secretive, and eroding their parent-child relationship in general.
Surely her parents mean well, but their draconian approach will only open her up to more potential danger in the long run by making her feel like she can’t come to her parents for guidance on risky situations. It makes no sense, and the hard truth is that they need to get a grip.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.
