You Can Track Where Your Child Is. You Can't Track Who They're Becoming.

Sarah Zhang opens her December cover story for The Atlantic with a confession many parents will recognize. In What Constant Surveillance Is Doing to Children, she counts the apps that colonized her phone from the day her daughter was born: the baby monitor, the smart bassinet, the preschool app. Even as she writes, a notification tells her the exact minute her daughter woke from her nap. From there, Zhang follows the tracking all the way to college, where apps like Life360 let parents review weeks of a child's location history and get an alert when they leave the dorm.

Zhang is fair to parents. Location sharing is useful, and many families rely on it mostly for logistics such as school pickup. But the psychologists she interviews keep returning to one concern. Adolescence is when young people are supposed to build independence, and a digital umbilical cord makes that harder. Freedom was shrinking long before smartphones. In England, 86% of parents of primary school children said in 1971 that their kids were allowed to travel home from school alone. By 2010 it was 25%, according to a Policy Studies Institute study spanning four decades.

The Reps Happen When No One Is Watching

The Atlantic frames this as a story about anxiety, and it is. But the most important thread in the piece is about identity. Zhang shares a memory from Russell Shaw, a longtime head of school, who got lost near a video arcade at age 7, found an adult who helped, and was eventually reunited with his parents. It was miserable at the time. The next time something similar happened, he recalls thinking, "Oh, I can get through this."

That moment is where conviction begins. Conviction is the earned capacity to act on what you believe before the outcome is certain, and the word that matters most is earned. No one can hand it to a child. It is built in small moments of uncertainty a child gets through on their own: the wrong bus, the missed stop, the awkward conversation with a stranger who helps. When a parent watching a moving dot steps in every time, the child gets home safely but loses the rep.

Zhang describes a clinical psychologist piloting what he calls independence therapy. One 9-year-old who was afraid to sleep alone chose to ride a city bus by herself, missed her stop, asked an adult for help and found her way home. That night she slept in her own bed for the first time. Getting lost and recovering taught her something about herself that no amount of reassurance could.

I made a related argument in Agency Isn't Born. It's Earned in the Rooms We Create. Agency grows when young people are trusted with real decisions and allowed to live with the results.

Parents Need Their Own Reps Too

What I appreciate most about Zhang's essay is that she turns the lens on parents. Checking an app again and again is what psychologists call reassurance seeking, and it tends to feed anxiety rather than calm it. Every check quietly teaches a parent that a child is safe only because someone is watching.

Tracking itself is not the villain. Shared location can coordinate a busy family and, as Life360's co-founder argues in the piece, can give parents the peace of mind to say yes to more freedom. Clear family agreements about when to look and why are a genuine asset. The trouble comes when the dot replaces the conversation, and a parent knows where a child is without knowing who that child is becoming. I explored this balance in Room to Roam Is Not Enough. Kids Need Room to Be Themselves.

Small Steps for Families This Month

Pick one errand your child can do alone this week, sized to their age: walking to a friend's house, buying a few groceries, taking the bus. Then stay off the app while they do it.

Agree on rules as a family. When will you check location, and when won't you? Writing it down turns a reflex into a choice.

When your teen gets lost or makes a mistake, ask how they figured it out before you tell them what they should have done.

Notice your own checking. If you open the app more often than logistics require, try one day without it and see what happens to your worry.

And talk about what your child learned about themselves, not only where they went. A young person who can say "I handled that" is building something no tracker can measure.

Zhang closes with parents who let their kids do more and found it went better than they expected. That is the quiet lesson. Every child will one day face a situation no app can solve for them. The best preparation is a history of small moments they solved on their own.

A child learns who they are in the moments no one is watching. Protect a few of those moments.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.