Are tracking apps OK for parents to use on adult children?

Is it caring or overbearing?

Many parents are turning to their phones to keep tabs on their adult children – but is this OK (if they agree to it) or is it a sign of mums and dads struggling to let go?

Dad-of-two Steven Medway, 53, has his whole family set up on a tracking app and couldn’t understand why it was such a divisive subject among fellow parents.

He said it became particularly useful when his daughter Martha moved 100 miles away from home for university.

“She feels a little less distant when you’ve got that,” he said.

Research by Unite Students, which surveyed 1,027 parents of first-year university students across the UK, found 67% of parents use an app to track their child’s location, but just 17% contact them daily.

Dr Martin Brunet, a GP and author who posts mental health content on social media, said while it was “a personal choice” he strongly advised parents to “let them fly the nest”, for their own wellbeing.

“One of the hardest parts of parenting is letting go and our modern world has made it easier for us not to, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing,” he added.

Steven, from Michaelston-y-Fedw, near Cardiff, has been using the Life 360 app for years, first prompted when his daughter Martha, now 19, started spending time away from their village with friends.

“We live quite rurally [and] we thought it was a good idea because if she needs to be picked up or anything… it will give you directions to Martha, wherever she happens to be.”

It therefore felt natural, when Martha started at the University of Reading in September, for them to keep using the app.

“She goes to parties, she won’t turn up to her halls until 3:30. But it’s not a problem, I’m not ringing her saying ‘what’s going on?’

“It’s just, when I wake up in the morning, I can see she’s back at halls. If she wasn’t, if she was still in the middle of Reading, or her phone was there, maybe I’d give her a call.

“It’s not that I don’t want her to do anything, I just like to know she’s got back.”

Steven added Martha was “quite an independent girl” who had spent a month travelling around Japan alone, as well as interrailing across Europe with friends, so he was used to her being away from home.

He said Martha had “never once” turned the app off, but he would respect her choice if she did.

“A lot of people have thought, falsely, that I’m forcing her to be tracked. Any time, if Martha doesn’t want to be tracked, she can just switch it off. I wouldn’t tell her off.”

Pub landlady Maria Connolly’s son Owain, 19, also recently moved away from his Swansea home to go to university in Hertfordshire.

As Owain is autistic, Maria, 56, said he could be “quite naive”, and sometimes struggled to mix with others his age, so the app offered “peace of mind”.

She checks it a couple of times a day to make sure Owain is getting out and to keep an eye on his phone battery so she can remind him to charge it if needed.

“He was a bit reluctant at first, but I was like ‘I pay your mobile phone bill, so if you want me to continue to pay the bill you’ll put this app on your phone’.

“I say ‘I see you’re in Wetherspoons, what table and I’ll send you some drinks?’ So we keep it fun, but it is in the back of mind that it’s for safety.”

She said she would be “disappointed” if Owain didn’t want to use the app anymore, but would “go with it” while admitting she would text and call him more often.

“I’ve let him go, he’s got his independence. I’m not constantly checking it, it’s just knowing there’s that little bit of a safety net.

“He’s not a child, but he’s my child. He’s my baby.”

Safety is the biggest motivator for Steven, who cited cases such as the triple death crash in St Mellons in 2023 when it took police two days to find the car involved.

“Those situations are often reliant on speed and accuracy, and [a tracking app] gives us it. That, to me, is invaluable.”

Steven says, while he has been accused of not trusting his daughter, the opposite is true because “you have to completely trust your family if you’re allowing them to have 24-hour access to your location”.

The Unite Students survey found 71% of dads used tracking apps for their children at university, compared to 59% of mums.

Lianne Hannam from Cardiff also uses Life 360 with her 21-year-old daughter Erin Mae and 15-year-old son Ostyn Lee.

“In this day and age now, the way the world is, I like to know where my kids are,” she said.

It was actually Erin Mae who suggested her mum download the app about a year ago, as she was using it with her friends.

Lianne, 45, thought it was a good idea, especially as her daughter is a new driver and is starting a job which involves night-time work.

“It puts me at peace because I worry terrible I do. But I can give her space because I know where she is, I’m not always on to her,” she said.

“It’s not that I struggle to let go of my kids because they’re growing up, it’s the outside world I worry about. The world scares me.”

Dr Brunet said he did not think parents worried more in days when they were unable to contact their children so easily.

“If you track them when they go off to uni, are you still going to track them five years on? When does it stop?

“I don’t think tracking companies are bad, but they are trying to sell their product and, along with that, sell the myth that if you love your children you would want to track them and that this will make you feel calmer.

“In the short term, you think it’s helped your own anxiety but, like a lot of short term things for anxiety, you’ve got to think about the long term.

“If you grow a tree indoors with no wind, it grows tall but does not grow strong. You need your children, in a reasonably safe setting, to be exposed to challenges.”