Is it a good idea to locate your teenager?

Many teenagers stay away from their parents during puberty. This is a natural part of development. Teenagers want to search, learn and experience the world alone. Privacy and independence become crucial. However, these values often conflict with parents’ desire to protect their children. As a parent, you want to know what your children are doing. At the same time, teenagers are annoyed at your “intrusiveness”. This triggered a controversial debate that when you want to protect your children’s safety, you may need to invade their privacy to do so. Do you trust blindly or check their activities? Is it a good idea to locate your teenagers?

Should parents locate their teenager?

First of all, in today’s life, most parents are using some kind of global positioning system technology to check where their teenagers are at any time. Many cell phones have cell phone locator that allow parents to locate their teenager’s whereabouts. Research shows that, about 16% of parents are using cell phone locator to locate their teenagers.

When it comes to locating your teenager’s whereabouts, we won’t give a definite answer. Deciding to locate your child’s whereabouts is a sensitive decision, depending on your child’s specific situation and past history. For example, for a teenager who rarely demonstrates, it is dangerous behavior or criminal activity, and tracking their position may not be worth destroying the trust in the relationship. Your child can interpret your location tracking decision as “monitoring” or “snooping”.

However, if your child has drug abuse, behavioral problems or illegal activities, you may think that the benefits of locating outweigh the risks. It is important to mention that locating your teenager’s whereabouts sometimes backfires. If a teenager wants to attend a party that they know you don’t like, they can leave their cell phones behind. Or vice versa: they can be at school, in a safe place, but still engage in dangerous behaviors like drug abuse. This is why every parent needs to decide for himself whether locating their whereabouts is necessary when it comes to their own children.

Let yourself integrate into the life of teenagers.

Whether you decide to follow your children or not, we all agree that parents should conduct a much simpler form of locating your teenagers.

The best way for parents to locate their teenager’s whereabouts is to use a GPS cell phone locator on their smartphone. Most teenagers are getting smartphones at a young age. Being able to install a GPS cell phone locator that allows parents to know where their teenager’s location is at all times will make parents more assured to let their teenagers go out without parents accompany.

The reality is that most teenagers are left to tend to their own life while both parents work outside of the home. That’s why it’s so important to have a way to know when your teenager gets home from school or arrives at a friend’s house.

Using GPS cell phone locator is particularly useful for times when your teenagers may be walking from one location to another or taking public transportation.

Final thoughts

In the process of raising teenagers or any children, it is very important to know what happens in their lives. As a parents, you should locate your teenager’s whereabouts regularly, know who they are with, know what they are doing, and ask them questions regularly. Even if your children are angry about your participation. Not only does it strengthen parent-child relationship, but it is also the number one predictor of good behavior in the future. Research shows that regular parental supervision and participation is the best way to cultivate successful children. And vice versa: poor parental supervision may be a risk factor for teenagers to have problems later, such as mental health problems and drug abuse problems.