Phone apps can tell whether your kid is playing hooky. But remotely surveilling your child might not be great for navigating the trials of the teen years.
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With so many things for parents to worry about, from school shooters to fentanyl overdoses and child trafficking, it’s no surprise that they look to location monitoring apps such as Find My iPhone and Life360, which use GPS, as well as the location of nearby Wi-Fi networks and cellular towers, to track and keep their children safe, says Sophia Choukas-Bradley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, whose research focuses on the mental health and well-being of adolescents and emerging adults. “With that said, for adolescents, this is a stage of life when kids are seeking autonomy and independence from their parents,” she says, “and a time when privacy feels really important to kids for good developmental reasons.”