Woman's Hour - Parenting: Tracking apps

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

Tracking apps can share a friend or loved ones location with you at all times, so you always know where they are. So it's little wonder that some parents see them as an easy way to keep tabs on their teenagers. But does it stop them becoming independent? And can it ruin trust in your relationship with your children? In this week's Woman's Hour Parenting Podcast, we hear from two different perspectives. Debby Penton tells Jenni Murray why she uses location tracking apps to keep track of where her kids are, while Nicola Morgan explains why she has some concerns about the technology

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray here, welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for parents. Christmas and New Year are not always easy parents if you have teenage children. There are the parties before the holiday and then, of course, the very late one on New Year's Eve. So some of you may have invested in a tracking app which allows you to establish surveillance of your child at any time of the day or night. It may well be a relief for you to keep constant track but how good is it for a teenager to feel mum and dad are following them all the time. Well Nicola Morgan is a writer and the author of Blame My Brain, The Amazing Teenage Brain Revealed. She joins us on the line and Debbie Penton has a

14 and 11 year old and uses a tracking app. Debbie why did you go for a tracking app? Well I think it was at the point that my children or my my eldest actually, had started secondary school. We had, until that point, picked him up and dropped him off at school every single day. And it was my husband's idea, just less about tracking them every minute of every day, because no one's really got the time to do that. But you could do it if you wanted to. If I wanted to, but you spend a lot of time staring at a dot at school, for example, or sitting at home. So it was more the ability to set what they call geofences or kind of locations on a map

that you get a little alert every time they move in and out of that area. So as a working mother, the big thing for me was that my children would be coming home and without me being there and I guess in the old days you might ask your child to give you a call when they got home or you might try and call them and now I just get a small alert that pops up on my phone and I've got that peace of mind that I know that they're home. What do the children make of it? The children, well it was a condition of them getting their phone, much in the same way as not changing their password is a condition of them keeping their

phone. We pay for the phones. And that requires some sort of kind of supervision and access to make sure that they don't misuse the phones. And so having the app on there is part of that condition. It started when they were 11. I wouldn't want to be the parent who tried to install the app on there is part of that condition. It started when they were 11. I wouldn't want to be the parent who tried to install the app on a 16-year-old's phone for the first time. That's exactly where I was going to go next. We're having trouble getting hold of Nicola. We will get her, I'm sure, eventually. But I was wondering, you know, 11 and 14.

Yeah, OK, you might get away with it. 15, 16, 17? No, I mean, my sister just tried to do it for her 13-year-old. I was that. But I think beyond, you know, 15 and 16, I don't really see myself using the app on the children or even needing to know where they are. If they learn to turn it off and they're out with their mates, as long as they're doing all the other things you'd expect them to do, like stick to the curfews, call in if you've asked them to, then I'm not going to sit at home. I mean, I have a full life and I really don't feel the need to know the whereabouts of my children at every single moment what concerns do you have about using such an app i think um as you know i didn't catch the very beginning of that but i caught um debbie's last last comment and i think that she has encapsulated not having a need to concern. But there are other parents who are using these apps in somewhat different ways that are more like surveillance or spying. And in fact, some of the apps even have the word spy in the title.

And I think that if you have an atmosphere of trust, a relationship of trust with your teenager, then the way that you might use this app is entirely healthy. But if you don't, then it's likely to be unhealthy. And also if you don't, it's entirely likely that the teenager is going to find all sorts of ways around the app anyway. You know, they can use blocking techniques, download software themselves that's going to allow them to avoid, to evade your surveillance and that thereby creating um the likelihood of an even worse even more more dangerous more risky

situation and and more problems ahead but what about the question of of independence i mean let's accept okay that the teenagers may well be more adept at the technology than the parents are. But what do you suppose is the feeling in a child that, hmm, I'm not really independent. I can't really go and defy my parents because they're spying on me. Exactly. And that goes to the heart of it. So adolescence is is an evolutionary mechanism. It's a mechanism to develop independence. It's about separation.

It's about moving the child away from being the dependent, protected baby and child that they obviously needed to be towards being the independent, unprotected adult that we all want them to be. And that's what adoles adolescents programmed teenagers to do so teenagers are biologically programmed at some point to try to acquire this separation and that's entirely right and proper unfortunately parents are biologically programmed to protect and the there's nothing biological that happens in a parent's brain when their child becomes a teenager that stops that drive towards protection. And so if you've got this possibility of using technology to continue to protect for far too long,

then you've got a recipe for helicopter parenting and you've got a much less likelihood of the child or teenager developing that independence on their own in the way that they're programmed to be. One interesting aspect to this is to do with the age at which the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows us to have this independence fully developed. And when I was first writing about this in Blame My Brain in 2005, scientists thought that this full development

happened at about the age of 23 on average. And now scientists are saying that that full development seems to be happening later. And the question must be asked is whether perhaps there's something we are doing as parents and in societies like ours that is extending that independence to a later time. And I don't think that's, if that is the case,

I don't think that's something we should be proud of. Debbie, you're obviously being very careful about this and you're very aware of the problems that might come if you try to continue it to a greater degree. Have you ever thought of it as spying or surveillance, which are very scary words? No, I think, I mean, there's a brilliant episode of Black Mirror where this kind of surveillance is taken to the extreme. I think the fact is, I can only see where the children are. I can't see

what they're doing. I don't want to know what they're doing. I fully expect them to be pushing boundaries, trying new things, mucking about the boys, they're teenage boys, that's what they're going to do. And girls too, but I don't have them, but I was one.

I have boys too, but let's not assume it's only boys who are bad. No, no, true. I think there are some really practical advantages of using technology. Children are using really practical advantages of using technology. Children are using technology. Everyone's using technology to enhance their lives, make their lives easier. There are practical reasons why we've used this app,

whether it's... and there's a lack of communication. The other thing about children is their brains don't understand consequences. They don't understand the impact of that action or inaction. Therefore, they don't remember or think it's important necessarily to answer their phone, to turn it off silent, to ring your parents. So at the end, I've come home from work and my youngest is missing. And I'm thinking, oh, he's supposed to be at home. And of course, he hasn't communicated to me he should be at school.

He won't answer the phone, but I can see that he's at a rugby match or something. Debbie Penton, Nicola Morgan, thank you both very much indeed for being with us. And again, we'd like to hear from you on this one. Have you got one of these tracking apps? How do you use it? What do the kids think? And of course, if you have any ideas about things that we could discuss about being a parent, do contact us. You can

email us or you can tweet us or you could even send us a letter. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth.

How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.