I’ve seen people on other sites say they thought Stranger Things was unrealistic (obvious reasons aside) because 10 year olds were roaming the mall unsupervised. Made me feel really old, and pretty sorry for the kids of today. Where I live, it’s illegal for anyone under 13 to be out without an adult.
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Don’t worry about the Beaver, June. Wally’s showing him the ropes. He’ll be juuust fine.
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Geez, where grew up it was apparently not illegal for 13 year olds to be out riding their bikes along back roads with their rifles to go shooting… at least, if it was, nobody called the cops. 
I solve the problem by being too cheap to get them phones… and I’ve also developed a bit of an allergy to the whole mobile ecosystem in general.
Makes me “worst … Dad … ever …”
← My daughter can roll her eyes so hard they loop back into her skull and come up from underneath… 
A friend’s kid has a box in another friend’s garden where he leaves his phone on the way out for a night of underage boozing. nature finds a way…
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Yeah my family has been using Life 360 for years. My daughter even added her boyfriend so she could see when he was leaving work (she was anxious about his commute.) Honestly, she’s more worried about where I am than vice versa. She’ll ping me with checkin notifications if I’m out late.
I absolutely agree that it’s about the users, though. If my ex had had access to something like this, I would have been constantly bombarded with demands to know why I was in location X and who I was seeing. With Mr. Bells it’s more like “oh, are you at Target? Can you get me some socks?”
It’s much less accurate if you have wifi turned off. My spouse doesn’t have his wifi turned on at work, with the result that he’ll randomly appear to be in the next town over in the middle of his workday. I assume that’s the tower his phone happens to ping, but I did tell him if he’s having an affair with a bored housewife in the rich part of town, steal me some designer purses.
Edit: This is what my daughter does when I go out to a concert with friends. I’m purple.
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yes but the cub scouts also would train you with bb guns and make you get a safety cert you bring to boy scout camp if you want to shoot a rife (or do the same at bs camp), and you were handed one bullet at a time - no loading up 30 round mags on the 10/22 and going to town
i see people handing 9 year olds guns to pose for photos for reddit/fb, and i seriously doubt these kids are learning the four rules, how to safely unload a gun, etc
they want the freedom of pre 9/11 but none of the responsibility that came with that freedom
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We held out until 7th grade. Plus they have enough WiFi tech to not matter when they’re mostly at a few locations.
Environment matters too. We had to raise a stink several times when official school sports had travel plans like “just call your parents when we are headed home” instead of real return times. As if every kid had a phone and parents that could drop everything on 15 minute notice.
You can imagine the eye rolls when we made it an issue with the school instead of getting a phone that year.
Being engaged and involved as a parent is the only fix for this. Tracking isn’t a substitute. It’s just a tool, like talking, can be used for good or evil.
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We only got our 18-year-old a phone 2 years ago, and then only because he could connect it to his glucose monitor and share his blood sugar readings. And, as we feared, he got so attached to the phone that any restriction on using it led to complete meltdowns. He’s opted out of Life 360, but as he prefers to be glued to his computer that’s fine. If he wants to leave without telling us, great. Bye. (He threatened to run away once if we took his phone, and we said sure. You’re 18, you can leave whenever you like. He’s never made that threat again lol)
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Wonder how many kids will have second phones.
Hmm. Maybe I’ll start a business where they get loaner phone and I take their phones to the library, church,* etc.
*I keep forgetting that churches are not safe for kids.
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I would have been sorely tempted to have the kid give the coach a landline number to call, with an answering machine. Wouldn’t actually make the kid wait for hours with a free babysitter, but having the coach think it for the length of the drive home might get the point across.
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It took my girlfriend half a year and a couple of predecessors to teach me to keep her up to date where I was. Okay, mostly to let her know when I was running late. Of course, this was thirty years ago, before cell phones were ubiquitous.
And now there’s an app you say? Hmmm… I can see how pull notifications would be nice, but I’d rather push them myself.
True that… safety was drilled into us hard, and the guns were not modded AR-15’s, that’s for sure.
I think that wildly varies. There are a lot of responsible people who teach their kids safety - and there aren’t. And back in the day for every dutiful boy scout, there was also some white trash kid shooting his cousin and friends with a BB gun.
Though back to the point you replied to- OMG we have kept out kids on leashes SOOOO tight compared to our generation. And our generation was tighter than the one before but still.
My dad got in trouble for taking a small boat 14 miles off shore. I never got caught going probably 2-3 miles from my house with my friends. My kid can’t ride her bike around the block alone.
In this age of information, terrors are everywhere.
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I looked into Life360 because I wanted to build a magic mirror that could communicate where my family was. But full time tracking is a lot to ask, so I looked into the tech and policy around privacy. On a novice read of their Terms and Conditions, the company explicitly reserves the right to sell access to realtime location data on minors. How about… fuck you?
There is also a lot of weasel language saying that if you want the (kid-tracking) service to track anyone under 18, you have to send them a postal letter or some other arbitrary friction shit, and they’ll (we assume) comply with relevant child-protection laws. Pretty clearly, no one is supposed to actually do this, but of course if harm occurs, it is 100% the parent’s fault etc.
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Isn’t that a COPA violation?
When a user activates the child-tracking service, you assert that you are only tracking adults, or 14+ or something like this. 
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We use location tracking to extend and push the distance back out. Same with time away from home. Kid headed out for 6 hours with a vague overall area and destination. Works fine, and there’s no worries if we need to get in contact.
We don’t use Life 360, just the built in Apple tools. This also means we’re not using any of the more micro managing items. Really just replacing texting “where are you and when will you be home” with a check.
In general, it’s good for answering that question in many scenarios.
Headed back, and I should be making dinner ready for when you return, and not 20 minutes to early. Getting the kids from after school, or stuck at work and I should get them. Did a carpool ride pick you up, or are you stranded somewhere. Make it to work before the huge accident that was just reported, or were you still on the road.
It’s all gets back to how someone uses it. If you’re replacing texting someone every 10 minutes demanding what they’re doing, you had issues before adding in new tools.
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I’m glad to see that some parents are pushing back against this. In my own town, I routinely see kids out on bikes (or skateboards) whenever the weather is decent. Nobody calls the cops on them, either.
Out on the bike trails, both in my own neck of the woods (far SW Chicago suburbs) and in Wisconsin as well, I’m seeing more parents with kids on bikes instead of in trailers. Just this morning in Griffith, Indiana, a father and fairly young son on road bikes kept a lead on me that I couldn’t quite close until they turned around.
Okay, so we use this all as a family. My kids can see where my wife and I are and we can see where they are. We got it originally for a vacation where everyone was going to be doing their own thing and it just caught on. It’s really easy to not have to do a bunch of checking in and also know if it’s worth waiting for someone or if they are off doing something.else.
Seriously, the only people who should have a problem would be those that have problems way beyond an app, either at the youth or adult level. Either the parents are helicopters who would keep close tabs in person or the kid is really doing dangerous things.
To the person who said they were latchkey and they turned out okay. I was too. But our movement was way more limited than my kids and the reason is because of technology. So it goes all ways. Saying only some things like social media. maps and ride share, which provide flexibility of movement are good and shared location services are bad is silly.
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Often they were one and the same. My brother, everybody, minus the dutiful part.
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