I think I have a pretty good trust relationship with my kids, but there have been times where they have been half an hour late home from school or a gig etc. and the worry button gets hit. In all occurrences, it has been simple things like missing a bus, or staying back to get help with teachers etc., but those are the sorts of things that I'd like to be able to check on quickly before resorting to calling/texting.
The ability to notice something is amiss, then do a quick spot check to see "Oh, its OK, he is still on school grounds" or "He's on the number 10 bus homeward bound" is reassuring.
EDIT: I just realised that I forgot to answer your actual question re: Are my kids OK with it (the monitoring).
Neither of them have pushed back much on this. In fact, last year I developed a small iPhone app purely for the family to use to achieve the sort of tracking this Google system does. My sons were actually quite helpful in helping me design and test it out. End of the day I abandoned the app because I just didn't have enough time to maintain it, and there were other third party apps coming out that did the same thing.
As mentioned above, we have a pretty good trust relationship with our kids. Its not as if we track their every movement, and we are quite flexible with them spending a lot of time out with their friends and other sporting/social activities. It is just on those outlying times where we feel the situation is not completely 100% rosy that we like the ability to do a quick 'ping' check.
It definitely does seem potentially kinda creepy or weird initially, but if you do truly trust each other, it's actually really useful. e.g. You can passively see where someone is before nagging them to ask if they're going to get here soon, etc.
You can also configure the phone to send out its location just before its battery dies.
The disconnect here for me is that your hypothetical is hardly a new phenomena unique to our time. What would you have done in the 50s? 80s? 90s?
Let's put things in perspective here. The very fact that you can have real time updates on the metrics off the /device/ that is expected to be carried with your son means you have a direct channel of communication to your son's device. Worried? Give him a call. Problem solved.
Why? I always see such massive push back to technology in what would theoretically be a tech-adopting crowd.
Why would i, as a band playing Son, want to have to stop practicing or playing a set to call my family back in a timely manner? Couldn't some technology, perhaps a device in my pocket, allow my parents to know where i am, handle the burden?
Why is my mother knowing where i am such an invasion of privacy? Mind you, i'm 30 now, but i don't care if my wife knows where i am 24/7. Hell, i want her to. I'd also like to know where she is. We've got nothing to hide from eachother, so why should the 1950s method of calling eachother periodically to ping our locations be used? Why is 1950s your metric for success here?
I want technology to make my life less of a hassle. By all means, make it secure, i'm not arguing anything different. But i'd like to move beyond 1950 please.
"Giving him a call" is all fine, except if they are mid set or are tearing down while another band plays - stages can be loud places, and not the best things for talking on a phone, or even texting when they are busy moving gear. A quick check to see "Oh, he is still at the venue" or "He appears to be at the band's storage lockup right now" is enough for me to know that it is pretty much ops normal.
If they are 18 and paying for their own service, then fine, that's another story.
But until then, I don't think it even matters. Seriously, I feel people without children just don't understand how parent's feel.
Honestly, I don't think it really matters if your citizens are OK with it or not. They are still citizens and you are responsible for them.
If they are politicians and have a say in the service, then fine, that's another story.
But until then, I don't think it even matters. Seriously, I feel people just don't understand how the government feels.
If you don't put children in situations to experiment and earn your trust, they will never learn.
And yes parents worry, that's normal. If you lose sleep over your kid being out having fun with friends, it's perfectly ok. It's feature of raising kids, not a bug.
Would that work on all kids? I doubt it. But we can't project our own experiences onto other parents and kids. It can seem bizarre to those that grew up with a rebellious streak or controlling parents but it's possible to have really good and trusting relationships with your parents.
The truth for me; If I had listened to my parents, I would not be as cool. But If I had listened, I would be healthier and getting older - I realize health is happiness.
If my parents had received a push notification the moment I left school, my teenage years would have been utterly miserable, instead of just mostly miserable.
To be honest, I hope my kids do the same when they're that age. I'd absolutely yell at them if I found out because that's how it's supposed to be (and that's how they get better at not being caught), but deep inside I'll be glad they did. It's part of growing up.
That being said, I understand why Americans and their car-centric, gun heavy cities wouldn't agree with this, except maybe in a city like NYC. Which is why I won't be raising my kids in the US. I expect the public infrastructure of where I live to guarantee my kid's safety, and not to have to rely on helicopter parenting to give me peace of mind.
Knowing your kids location isn't something you always need, but when you do, you need it badly. Anything can happen in a 'large, safe city' - such as being run over. Parents knowing where you are when you don't turn up at home at the agreed time is OK with me.
My other question is: are you a parent yet? When you become a parent, your brain gets rewired, you start worrying about things you never worried about before.
Ahhh here's the thing though, in such a case you don't really need their location right that second. There's nothing you can do. They will be taken to a hospital and will be taken care of. Of course you would love to be there for you children the second they are in pain, just like when they fell on their face when they just started walking, but you don't need to. As a parent you have to accept that from when your kids get into their teenage years they will start to become independent, they will have experiences (good or bad) without you and they will be just fine. Or they won't be fine. But you certainly couldn't have prevented them getting run over, getting robbed, abducted or raped by having constant access to their location.
>you start worrying about things you never worried about before.
And you always will worry, trust me. Even when your kids turn 30, you still worry. You have to try to look at this objectively instead of with your feelings, people start being independent and there's nothing you can do about it. You will have to learn to let them go. What's next, do you want body function trackers installed so you can check their heart rate to see if they're still alive or their glucose level to see if they have already had their lunch yet?
My point to GP here is this: growing into adulthood is a give and take in both directions. You have to give your newly emerging mini-adults enough space to fail, recover, adapt, and learn - and yes, potentially get injured too, as horrible as that mere chance might seem.
If you don't do this, you're interfering with their chance to learn resiliency and self-reliance.
And anecdotally, they'll maybe be less likely to willingly stick around as adults and allow you to indulge your parental worries, once in a while.
Uh I think your reward function is broken.
Why punish them if they're being safe and doing something you actually want them to do? Why not communicate with them to figure out the rationalization behind the rule and enforce the right thing?
I'm afraid I don't really understand why inconsistent logic means knowing your kids location is bad.
Incidentally you can just leave your phone at home, or turn it off.
My first thought was "leave it in your locker". Though there are separate security concerns with that.
Also, now days a teenager without a phone, might as well be at home.
I did wander and skatboard in a lot of locations that were closed off, or we were not supposed to be, which isn't something your parents would usually want. Doing that I made a lot of great connections with people I wouldn't have met in my otherwise pretty sheltered life.
I think it's more important that such a system could easily destroy a lot of good experiences for the children and less important that it prevents bad ones (which can also be valuable experiences).
I don't think my parents ever took note of it, but if they would have known, where I was I guess they would have been a lot more strict about it. And that would be understandable, because who wants to get a call from the police?
So no, nothing "bad" would have happened, just a bit of hassle.
From the article: "And if your trusted contacts are really worried about you, they can request to see your location. If everything’s fine, you can deny the request. But if you’re unable to respond within a reasonable timeframe, your location is shared automatically and your loved ones can determine the best way to help you out."
From a later example on that page this "reasonable timeframe" seems to be 5 minutes.
As a kid, I always meant to but often forgot.
Fwiw, most of the time in hs my parents knew more or less where I was but not specifically what I was doing. That seems reasonable to me.