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I’d chuck an Apple AirTag monitoring machine into my two youngsters’s backpacks, together with their PE equipment and water bottle, pondering it was the proper factor to do. They have been simply six and 4. If I saved a relentless eye on them 24/7, I felt in management. Nothing might occur to them – might it?
Everyone else was doing it. The concept that we live in an unsafe world, which requires mother and father like me to spy on our youngsters with an AirTag, a Smartphone, or by utilizing a stay location sharing app like Life360, is the brand new regular. Final 12 months, the shoe firm Skechers even launched a youngsters’s shoe with a hidden house to handily slot in a monitoring tag, and I’ve heard of different mother and father shopping for silicone holders that clip onto laces to maintain the AirTag safe on several types of trainers.
Initially, AirTags have been launched by Apple in 2021 to trace belongings, nevertheless it didn’t take lengthy earlier than mother and father realised they might use them to maintain tabs on their youngsters. Dad and mom resembling Mike and Zara Tindall, whose eldest daughter Mia, 11, was noticed racing across the Burghley Horse Trials in Lincolnshire in 2024 with an AirTag connected to the belt loop of her shorts.
I assumed utilizing trackers would give me peace of thoughts – nevertheless it did the other. It turned me right into a neurotic and paranoid mom, as I began to examine my telephone commonly for updates on their location. If I couldn’t discover Lola, now 9, and Liberty, seven, for a second within the park, I’d catastrophise it as a kidnapping and ping the AirTag. As I tracked their actions throughout outings with out me, scenes flashed momentarily in my thoughts from lacking little one thrillers like All Her Fault, when Sarah Snook’s character picks her little one up from a playdate, however her son is just not there (and, I’d add, his on-line tracker is discovered smashed within the faculty automotive park).
I began to query the philosophy behind my life as a CCTV father or mother: what the hell was I doing? I had been completely relaxed till I bought hooked on stalking my children.
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The AirTags additionally started to instil worry in my youngsters. They questioned why that they had these mini discs of their baggage, pockets, or swim baggage. “Are we unsafe, Mummy? Why are you monitoring us?” was the overall theme. This was firstly of 2025 – I’d been utilizing them on and off since 2022. I made a decision that sufficient was sufficient; it was time to take a extra free-range path of belief.
I needed to have a significant rethink – identical to a gaggle of well being consultants are at the moment advising mother and father to do, urging them to “pause on monitoring”, whereas reconsidering whether or not “the surveillance childhood we’re sleepwalking into is de facto benefiting our kids”.
Technology Focus, a marketing campaign group that’s attempting to make faculties smartphone-free, is sounding the alarm on monitoring children with a letter signed by 74 professionals, who declare monitoring is simply one other extension of damaging helicopter parenting.
They are saying it breeds anxiousness within the youthful technology and makes them much less free-thinking and unbiased. Monitoring children “undermines a toddler’s capacity to develop a way of autonomy” and dangers “stopping them from studying important real-life abilities”, resembling “studying the way to discover a secure place and ask for assist, and understanding what to do in an emergency with out a smartphone”.
After we observe youngsters, they added, “we’re implicitly telling them that the world is unsafe”. Additionally they identified that carrying a smartphone can truly be harmful as a result of it might make a toddler a goal for mugging.
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Though there is no such thing as a scientific proof but that monitoring youngsters could be dangerous to them, quite a few research level to a direct hyperlink between helicopter parenting and anxiousness. Current analysis printed in Growth and Psychology in 2025 discovered that helicopter parenting all through life amplified stress in first-year faculty college students in the course of the transition to college.
This parenting type, the place controlling and overbearing mother and father “hover” over their youngsters at college and at house, micromanaging their each transfer, is precisely what monitoring feeds into. This type of parenting features a fixed flurry of fear that psychologists and researchers have lengthy advised creates unfavorable implications on the kid’s psychological well being, resembling anxiousness and despair, in addition to shallowness, as a result of they’re by no means left to their very own units.
Helicopter mother and father wish to make their youngsters glad, secure and shielded from failure and harm in any respect prices – and monitoring them is an important ingredient. Nonetheless, psychologists counsel that this might be backfiring. Removed from elevating wholesome, independent-minded children, helicopter-parented youngsters battle to belief themselves as a result of their caregivers have stunted their decision-making abilities – and monitoring leaves little room for any autonomy.
Kids of helicopter mother and father additionally search perfection and worry making errors as a result of they continuously have a father or mother respiration down their neck. Monitoring them makes the hyperfocus on them much more intense.
Helicopter mother and father wish to ensure their youngsters are glad, secure and shielded from failure and harm – and monitoring them is an important ingredient
Speeding into each emergency – or finding youngsters in a flash with an AirTag – stops a toddler from studying to drawback clear up. Having an AirTag meant my youngsters by no means wanted to take accountability for his or her possessions or know the place their faculty baggage have been within the mornings, as a result of Mummy might observe them within the morning. Now, they should work it out themselves.
I need my youngsters to be resilient within the face of challenges – and to really feel empowered. It’s time to chop the “invisible umbilical twine between father or mother and little one”, because the group of well being consultants describes the act of monitoring.
I’ve taught my youngsters what to do in an actual emergency – or if a stranger approaches them. My job is to verify they’re secure, but additionally to know when to detach with love.
That always means addressing my very own anxieties, somewhat than projecting them onto my youngsters. The truth is, I don’t want an AirTag to double-check their real-time location as a result of I do know the place they’re. I’d backtrack on my viewpoint when they’re teenagers – and I could give Lola a classic Nokia handset with out the web when she heads off to secondary faculty on the bus in order that I can communicate.
However till then, I’ve to belief they are going to be secure – and begin the method of letting go.
