Tuesday, August 07, 2018

Why We Track

A couple of years ago, when Nix was working on getting her driver's license, our family made the decision to use a family tracking app through our phones. It had absolutely nothing to do with trust or some need to know where my kid was 24/7. It was for safety and peace of mind. When you have a new driver, you spend a lot of time worried about the million things that can go wrong while they are in the rolling death trap surrounded by bad drivers. You can tell them to text you when they get where they are going, but then they hit traffic and you hear there was a five car pile up on their route and you have to wait to find out if they are okay but they forget to text. The next thing you know, you are having ridiculous thoughts of driving past their work like a crazy stalker to see if they made it okay. OR, you can download an app that lets you know they just forgot to text you.
The next benefit came after Nix went to college. Some of her friends were giving her a hard time about being tracked. We got labeled as helicopter parents. Nix was seriously considering turning her's off. And then it happened. She got lost in her new town. She got lost driving home on the weekend. She got lost a lot that first couple of months. In fact, every time she started thinking of ditching the app, she'd have to call me to look at the app to see where she was and how to navigate back when her phone map directions were failing her. It was the dreaded "proceed to the route" instructions when you have no idea how to get to the route.  I admit that it is tempting to check in and see if she is staying out late or making it to class, but that urge eases up after a couple of weeks, and you start to only use it when you need it.
It turned out to be useful with Rocky. Most days he works from home, but he does go into the office from time to time. I like to time dinner so that he can eat with us on those days, but to do that, I need to know when he leaves. I set an alert to ping at me when he leaves the office so I know it is time to start cooking.
The most amusing benefit of family tracking came from my parents. My father sometimes goes to all day woodworking events. With equipment running, it can be hard to hear your phone. My mom's phone isn't compatible with the app we use, so she asked me to add my dad to our's. That's right, I track my dad so that my mother doesn't worry about him. I may check it occasionally when they are traveling here so I know how much time I have left to clean the guest bathroom. My dad likes to check it so he can call and ask me if I bought anything when I was at Ikea and laugh.
When we first started this, JD didn't really go anywhere without us, but we decided to go ahead and put him on it too so it wouldn't be a big deal to add him later, and also so if he left his phone somewhere we could narrow down where to look. He used it to see where I was in carline so he would know when to move to the front of the line and when he had time to talk with friends. I was recently reading about a kid about his age that went missing. Although there is no guarantee that his phone would remain on him if he went missing, it does give me a little extra peace knowing that we would at least have a place to start.  I also read about a kid, also his age, that almost died of alcohol poisoning. Although having the app would not have prevented this kid from being stupid, when someone picked up her phone to call her parents, they could have known where she was and had the ambulance meet them there instead of having to beg someone to drive her home first.     

There are several apps like this. If you want to consider one, I recommend doing a little research to find one that fits your needs. We use Life360 because we all have different types of phones and it was available for all of us. There is an option to pay extra for reports on the comings and goings of your family (this includes a list of how fast they were driving), but that seemed like overkill to me.  If you do decide to try it out, please be honest and don't try to sneak it on your kid's phone. If you try to be sneaky, they will be sneaky too. It isn't hard to disable it or cheat the tracking, so you should really discuss it as a family and get everyone on board for the right reasons.
For the record, if Nix decides she doesn't want to be on the tracker anymore I would absolutely remove her.