Colman Noctor: Young people need experiences where they aren't being watched

We routinely do things today that would have seemed extraordinary 20 years ago, including tracking our children, but is this healthy?

Families have good reasons to share locations. If one of my children is travelling somewhere unfamiliar, I understand the reassurance I would get knowing they have arrived safely. Picture: iStock

While teaching a large group of students last week, I asked whether their location was currently being tracked on their phones; about 70% raised their hands.

But what struck me more than the number was how unremarkable the whole process seemed to them. There wasn’t any debate about privacy or discomfort about somebody knowing exactly where they were. For many of these young adults, being tracked by a parent, partner or family member was simply a normal part of life.

It got me thinking about how quickly technology can change our social behaviour without us really noticing. We routinely do things today that would have seemed extraordinary 20 years ago. Parents can watch a dot moving across a map as their adult child makes their way home from a night out. Couples can know exactly where each other is throughout the day, and we can see that somebody has read our message and become annoyed when they don’t reply.

None of these things are necessarily bad. Families have good reasons to share locations. If one of my children is travelling somewhere unfamiliar, I understand the reassurance I would get knowing they have arrived safely.

What interests me is how quickly technological possibility becomes social normality. We don’t necessarily decide that this is how we want relationships to operate. Technology simply makes something possible, and then, once enough people start doing it, what once felt intrusive becomes completely ordinary.

I was reminded of this during my clinical work when an 18-year-old patient told me her boyfriend tracked her location. What struck me was that she didn’t seem particularly concerned. Her parents had tracked her for years, so the idea that someone cared enough to know where she was at all times didn’t seem especially unusual.

Risk of normalisation 

There is, of course, an important distinction between parents using location sharing for safety and a partner using it as a means of control. The motivations are entirely different. But it made me wonder about the risk of normalisation. If you grow up with continuous monitoring as an ordinary part of being cared for, does that influence where you draw the line between care and surveillance? Perhaps the question, “Why do you need to know where I am all the time?” doesn’t occur to you to ask when being tracked has always been part of your relationships.

This is particularly interesting from a developmental perspective because growing up has always meant gradually moving away from our parents. While children begin life entirely dependent on us, their world expands little by little. They play outside without us, go to friends’ houses, walk to school, get the bus into town, go to parties, start college, and eventually leave home.

Traditionally, each step towards independence also meant parents had a little less control. There was a time when a son or daughter moved away to college, their parents couldn’t open an app at 1am to find out where they were.

I’m not suggesting everything was better then. Some of the childhood freedom some experienced probably veered towards neglect rather than enlightened parenting. But not knowing was once an unavoidable part of parenting, just as being temporarily beyond your parents’ reach was part of growing up.

A young adult can now live hundreds of kilometres away while remaining digitally tethered to home, leaving us with a question previous generations never had to answer: Just because we can know where our children are, does that mean that we should?

Another side of this dynamic concerns parental development. Letting go is a developmental task for parents. As children grow, we have to become more comfortable with knowing less, controlling less, and, eventually, being needed less.

But these technologies let us postpone that discomfort.

While we may convince ourselves that the technology is solving a genuine safety issue, it may in reality be used primarily to ease parental anxiety, which is a different motivation.

It is important to ask: is the tracking app for them, or for us?

Surveillance is everywhere 

Location tracking is only one part of a much wider surveillance culture that young people are growing up in. Cameras are everywhere. Doorbells record people approaching our houses; shops have CCTV, and everyone carries a video camera in their pocket. And Meta’s smart glasses have pushed this further, because recording someone is no longer obvious.

We should be curious about how human behaviour changes when people assume almost anything they do in public could be recorded.

AI researcher Connor Leahy has observed how young people are reluctant to dance on a night out because someone might record them. He also suggests that approaching someone you are attracted to also feels different now because a clumsy chat-up attempt, or an embarrassing rejection could be filmed and shared.

Young people have always worried about embarrassment. I remember the terror of walking across a dance floor to ask someone to dance, knowing you might have to make the long journey back to your friends after being turned down. The difference was that the humiliation was short-lived. Yes, you felt mortified, and your friends slagged you, but eventually everybody forgot about it. But that moment is much riskier now because it can be captured, replayed, forwarded, and shown to people who weren’t even there. It is understandable that this might make young people more cautious about taking social gambles.

This may be one consequence of surveillance culture we haven’t fully considered. If we behave as though we might always be watched, we become more self-conscious. We manage ourselves more carefully, take fewer social risks, and perhaps become less spontaneous. This is especially relevant in adolescence, which is supposed to involve awkward experiences. Teenagers need to dance badly, say the wrong thing, approach someone who isn’t interested, get rejected, feel embarrassed, and discover that none of it is fatal.

Smartphones haven’t simply changed communication; they have changed what we expect of one another. When information is readily available, we can quickly start to feel entitled to it. We want to know why somebody hasn’t replied when we can see they have read our message, why they were online but didn’t respond, or why their location doesn’t match where we expected them to be.

For children growing up within this environment, these aren’t technological changes. They are simply how relationships are.

That is why our conversations about children and technology need to go beyond debates about screen time. We are so concerned about what technology can do ‘for’ us, we are not paying attention to what it’s doing ‘to’ us. We need to think about what technology is doing to the social environment around our children and what behaviours it is making normal. Is constant availability always healthy? Is knowing everything about each other intimacy? Does safety always have to mean surveillance?

Children and young adults need experiences where they aren’t being watched, tracked, photographed, or immediately contactable. Independence doesn’t magically arrive on their 18th birthday. It develops through thousands of small experiences of being trusted, making decisions, getting things wrong, solving problems and discovering that you can manage, even when nobody is watching.

The challenge for parents is that technology has removed boundaries previous generations had automatically, so parents have to create those boundaries intentionally.

I completely understand the comfort of opening an app and seeing your child’s little dot moving safely towards home. I’m not suggesting we all switch off location sharing completely. But perhaps every now and then it is worth resisting the temptation to check, because growing up has always meant our children gradually moving beyond our reach, and a crucial part of parenting is learning to be comfortable with not always knowing exactly where they are.