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Megan Rumney, an executive with a financial-services firm in Severna Park, Md., an affluent Baltimore suburb, decided to buy her older son a smartphone. She made the purchase with the understanding that she would use it to track his location and social media use. Rumney was hesitant to do so for the fifth grader but admits she felt a lot of social pressure and eventually gave in. All of her friends were getting their children a smartphone, and Rumney didn’t want her son to feel left out; his friends almost exclusively communicate using their devices. Still, she was concerned about the risks of social media and cyberbullying.

At the time, Rumney thought this was a good compromise. It allowed her son, Harrison, now age 14, to ride his bike to school, sporting events, and friend’s houses, giving him some sense of autonomy. A few years later she got her younger son Weston, now age 11, an Apple Watch for much the same reason. At times, though, tracking has become a burden of sorts.

When her kids aren’t with her, she uses apps such as Life360 and her younger son’s Apple Watch to track their location. Rumney says that once you have the technology, it’s hard not to use it all the time. “It’s good to know where they are and be able to get in touch with them, but it’s also a double-edged sword,” she says.

Rumney says she likes knowing where her kids are but doesn’t like her family’s overreliance on devices. She adds that she’s just not sure that being able to track Harrison was worth him having a phone that he spends so much time on, and she doesn’t know how this type of monitoring will affect him emotionally down the line. “If I could do it all again, I’m not sure, I would,” Rumney says. In fact, she’s held off on getting her younger son his own smartphone.

About half of parents in the U.S. say they monitor their adolescents’ movements via location-tracking apps, according to a study published in June 2023 in the Journal of Family Psychology. An additional 14 percent of parents who participated in the study claimed to use a tracking app while their child reported that they weren’t being surveilled, indicating that the monitoring was done unbeknownst to the child.

Experts worry that tracking teens’ locations can turn into a slippery slope that can at times hinder a teen’s relationship with their parents and harm their developing sense of autonomy, as well as create a false sense of security.

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.”

Choukas-Bradley adds that part of teenagers’ normal development has to do with the urge for privacy and the ability to maneuver their first romantic relationships or hold their own with peers while just hanging out. This stage of seeking independence during the teen years remains crucial to them for fostering a sense of personal responsibility, learning to make their own decisions, and establishing their own system of values. “There’s some tricky gray areas with regards to what tracking kids can tell parents and what that does to a kid’s sense of autonomy and privacy,” she says. Research published in the August 2019 issue of the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth found that some children understood their parents’ concerns for their safety, but at the same time, many felt that their parents often went too far by contacting them constantly in ways that felt meddlesome.

When parents’ scrutiny is overly intrusive, teens’ natural tendency is to rebel. “This can lead to feelings of resentment, which may strain the relationship,” says Judy Ho Gavazza, an associate professor of psychology at Pepperdine University.

A study published in November 2020 in the journal Computers in Human Behavior found that perceptions of privacy invasion are associated with rebellious responses. Teens devise ways to evade their parents by turning off their phone, letting their battery go dead, or refusing to respond to text messages. (Friction over tracking happens less with preteens, who need more supervision and expect less privacy.)

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