We made tracking easy. Why leave your kid out all day if they have a phone that you can call whenever to make sure they’re safe? Why let them go out without knowing where they are if it’s so convenient to just put a tracker on them and know where they are at all times?
As soon as we didn’t have to trust our kids anymore, we stopped, and as soon as we stopped, we no longer trusted them with anything. That’s the issue with convenience - we’ll do anything so long as its easy and sounds useful, and we won’t bother wondering what the repercussions of that might be.
Why let them go out without knowing where they are if it’s so convenient to just put a tracker on them and know where they are at all times? As soon as we didn’t have to trust our kids anymore, we stopped
This causation is exactly backwards; this was a trend happening long, long before trackers were common. Helicopter parenting really started taking hold in the 90s and was pretty firmly entrenched by the 00s, well before every kid was walking around with a phone.
The trackers are actually a response by parents who are trying to buck this trend and want to be able to go back to giving their kids more independence but need to prove to other parents, teachers, police, the state, etc, that they aren’t being irresponsible by doing so.
Helicopter parents existed before this, yes, but they were viewed as an overbearing subset of parents. They became the early adopters of this technology that didn’t need to be convinced to use it. The only kids I knew with phones growing up were the ones with parents who needed them to call to check in every hour.
But soon more and more kids had phones, so the paradigm quickly shifted, and what used to be considered overbearing and helicoptering became a normal amount of worry. You kid has the phone - why not call? Subsequently, not having your kid call to check in on a regular basis was soon seen as neglectful.
The same thing happened with phone tracking and things like air tags. At first I knew a few people who used them for their kids, and they felt the need to defend their decision to use them, but eventually enough people used them that nobody batted an eye, and not using them was viewed as unsafe.
We made tracking easy. Why leave your kid out all day if they have a phone that you can call whenever to make sure they’re safe? Why let them go out without knowing where they are if it’s so convenient to just put a tracker on them and know where they are at all times?
As soon as we didn’t have to trust our kids anymore, we stopped, and as soon as we stopped, we no longer trusted them with anything. That’s the issue with convenience - we’ll do anything so long as its easy and sounds useful, and we won’t bother wondering what the repercussions of that might be.
This causation is exactly backwards; this was a trend happening long, long before trackers were common. Helicopter parenting really started taking hold in the 90s and was pretty firmly entrenched by the 00s, well before every kid was walking around with a phone.
The trackers are actually a response by parents who are trying to buck this trend and want to be able to go back to giving their kids more independence but need to prove to other parents, teachers, police, the state, etc, that they aren’t being irresponsible by doing so.
Helicopter parents existed before this, yes, but they were viewed as an overbearing subset of parents. They became the early adopters of this technology that didn’t need to be convinced to use it. The only kids I knew with phones growing up were the ones with parents who needed them to call to check in every hour.
But soon more and more kids had phones, so the paradigm quickly shifted, and what used to be considered overbearing and helicoptering became a normal amount of worry. You kid has the phone - why not call? Subsequently, not having your kid call to check in on a regular basis was soon seen as neglectful.
The same thing happened with phone tracking and things like air tags. At first I knew a few people who used them for their kids, and they felt the need to defend their decision to use them, but eventually enough people used them that nobody batted an eye, and not using them was viewed as unsafe.