The Kids Are Grown—When Is It Time to Turn off the Location Tracking?

For most of parenting history, one of the clearest signs that a child was growing up was that you simply knew less. They took the car, stayed out late, went off to college, started dating—and you didn’t necessarily know where they were at every given minute unless they called or explicitly told you later. Part of that growing-up process, for both kids and their parents, was learning to accept that uncertainty and trust that they could handle themselves.

Smartphones have fundamentally changed that bargain. According to a 2026 C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, 52% of parents of 18- to 25-year-olds now track their child’s location, with the majority of parents who do it saying they do so for peace of mind or in case of an emergency. Nearly all parents who track say it helps them worry less, but almost 1 in 4 also say it sometimes makes them more anxious than reassured. That tension becomes even more complicated when you consider that, while almost every parent says their child knows they can see their location, only about half say they gave that young adult the option to say no.

There are plenty of situations where knowing your child’s location can be reassuring, especially when they’re traveling alone, driving late at night, or heading somewhere unfamiliar. It can even be reciprocal: Nearly half of parents in the Mott poll said their young adult tracks their location, too. Barbara Hofer, Ph.D., a psychology professor emerita at Middlebury College and co-author of The iConnected Parent, says families don’t necessarily need to view location tracking as an “all-or-nothing proposition.” A college student who doesn’t want a parent checking their whereabouts on a Saturday night, for example, might be completely comfortable turning tracking on while driving home for the holidays. What matters, she explains, is having an open conversation about when that access is actually useful.

The more complicated question is what happens when a safety tool quietly becomes a permanent part of the parent-child relationship. Where’s the line between reassurance and overreach, and why can it feel so hard to stop tracking once everyone is used to it?

The simplest answer to this question may be that once you get used to knowing where your kid is, not knowing can suddenly feel strange. It’s also possible that location sharing was never a big, conscious thing that parents decided to do in the first place.

Devorah Heitner, Ph.D., author of Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, points out that it’s often just built into the technology families are already using, like Google Maps location sharing or Apple’s Family Sharing, so that once friends start talking about Life360 or everyone in the family is on Find My, constant access can begin to seem totally normal.

“We just think this is the default, right? Like the default is being able to see where people are,” Heitner says. And once there’s been a moment when that access really was helpful—for example, you saw that your newly licensed teenager made it home safe—it can be hard to imagine willingly giving up that security. “You may start to anticipate the future anxious moment where you don't know where someone is, and rather than wait to hear from them or worry about them, you think, ‘I'll just keep this on all the time,’” she adds.

There’s also not necessarily an obvious moment when families are supposed to stop. In fact, Hofer says that it doesn’t occur to most parents to establish a time frame for when to cut off location sharing, which makes it easy for something that made perfect sense at 16 to continue at 18, 20, or 24 without anybody really revisiting it.

Giving up that access, as it turns out, may actually represent something bigger than toggling off a setting. Aline Szenczy, Ph.D., clinical psychologist from Weill Cornell Medicine and Uptown Psychology, says that for some parents, stopping location tracking means acknowledging “that their child is becoming more independent and that the parent no longer has the same level of oversight or control.” In other words: Sometimes we keep tracking merely because it’s useful, because everyone else is doing it, or because nobody told us when we’re supposed to stop in the first place.

There’s a big difference between checking to make sure your daughter landed safely in another country and opening Find My six times on a random Tuesday morning because you’re wondering why she hasn’t left her apartment to head to work yet.

Szenczy says one thing parents can pay attention to is how compelled they feel to check. “If a parent feels compelled to check frequently, experiences relief after checking, or becomes distressed when they cannot access their child's location, it may be a sign that the behavior is serving an anxiety-management function rather than a safety function,” she says.

Another important point is that having more information doesn’t always make parents feel better. Hofer says parents who continue tracking college-age kids can actually become more anxious when they see where they are or how late they’re staying out, and then pass that worry along to their child, where it can fester and turn into resentment.

Then there’s what you actually do with the information. Heitner says location sharing ideally shouldn’t turn into “day-to-day spying”—for example, checking whether a child went somewhere after class or who they might be spending time with. Even when a kid knows they’re being tracked, she says, it can often lead to conflict if parents suddenly start saying things like, “Oh, I saw you were with so-and-so, what were you guys doing?” or "I saw you didn't go to class today, what happened?"

“We have to really think about: Does this level of information help us have open and trusting relationships?” she asks. “There are so many times I've talked to families where it's led to mistrust and sown the seeds of almost paranoia between family members.” At that point, the access becomes less of a safety tool and more of a way to give you information about a life they may not have chosen to tell you about yet.

Szenczy suggests parents stop and ask themselves one pretty straightforward question before checking: “Why am I checking right now?” If the answer is that there’s an actual safety concern, that’s one thing, but if the answer is mostly because I feel uncomfortable not knowing, she says that may be worth paying attention to.

There may not be a magic number of location checks per day that suddenly makes someone an overbearing parent, but if not checking feels impossible, or the information you’re gathering leads to you questioning your child later on or panicking, those are pretty good reasons to reconsider how you’re using it.

Letting kids become independent has always involved a slightly terrifying reality for parents: Eventually, they have to encounter problems when you’re not standing right there to solve them.

Laurence Steinberg, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University, explains that learning to function in the world independently is a fundamental part of adolescence and a skill that they will need to be competent and capable adults. “Part of the process is having parts of your life that parents don’t monitor,” he says.

That doesn’t mean teenagers should suddenly get unlimited freedom or parents should stop caring where their kids are. Judith Smetana, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and an expert on adolescent-parent relationships, describes autonomy as something that develops slowly over time. “In a healthy family, it's sort of a gradual change over the course of adolescence to give the child more autonomy,” she says. “Parents still have to keep kids safe, but they also need to give them opportunities to make choices and show they’re capable of handling them.”

Part of that growing independence is also deciding what information about your life belongs to you. Smetana calls this the “personal domain,” and says it expands throughout adolescence to include things like friendships, activities, how late kids stay out, and romantic relationships.

Location tracking complicates that a bit. Your 20-year-old may have decided not to mention that they stayed at someone else’s apartment last night. Find My may tell you anyway, which can affect trust, especially when the information’s being gathered instead of voluntarily shared.

“It’s terrible for trust. I mean, you have to give your kids a chance, right?” Smetana says of parental monitoring. In research she conducted with more than 200 college students looking back on parental digital monitoring during their high school years, Smetana and her co-author found that participants viewed monitoring as highly invasive of their privacy and were least likely to believe it would strengthen trust between parents and teens. The data were collected in 2019, which Smetana notes is significant given how much more normalized location tracking has become since then.

“Everything we know about disclosure and secrecy really hinges a lot on the quality of the relationship, because things have different meanings depending on the quality of that relationship,” she says. In other words, a college student who has no issues sharing their location with a parent they trust is not in the same situation as a young adult who feels they have no choice but to stay on a family tracking app, especially if every unexpected stop leads to a line of questioning.

Constant tracking can also make it a little too easy for kids to miss out on learning how to handle things on their own, Heitner says, whether that means asking for help, finding their way, or figuring out what to do when their phone dies or plans go sideways. A dead phone, a wrong turn, a flat tire: Those are annoying situations, but they’re also chances to learn I can handle this.

“We don't want to just track our kids, trying to anticipate anything that can go wrong,” Heitner says. “Mentoring is helping them feel like we trust them to be ready to problem-solve, even if something unanticipated goes wrong.”

All of this can make it sound like the minute your kid graduates high school, you should kick them off Find My and call it a day, but it doesn’t have to be that all-or-nothing. In fact, nearly every expert we spoke with left room for situations where location sharing can actually be useful, especially when everyone involved knows it’s happening and agrees on why.

Heitner suggests thinking about tracking on a case-by-case basis—i.e., maybe your teen’s driving somewhere they’ve never been, your college kid is on a long road trip, or your young adult is traveling abroad for the first time.

Szenczy agrees that location sharing can be appropriate when it’s “used transparently and collaboratively with older teens and adults.” Instead of announcing, I need your location because I’m going to worry all weekend, Szenczy suggests making it a conversation: “I know you're traveling this weekend, and I want to make sure you feel supported. Would you be comfortable sharing your location while you're traveling and turning it off when you get home?”

There are also plenty of lower-tech ways to do this—sending a quick “I’m here” text, for example, or checking in a little more when someone’s traveling alone or somewhere unfamiliar instead of keeping location sharing on 24/7.

Location sharing can also only do so much. Heitner points out that if something truly dangerous were happening, someone could always take or disable a young person’s phone anyway. That’s why tracking works best as one layer of safety rather than the whole plan.

If you’re hoping for one magic age when parents should stop tracking their kids, the experts don’t totally agree.

When asked what should change as kids move from adolescence into adulthood, Steinberg’s answer was just four words: “Parents should stop doing it.” Heitner, on the other hand, recommends families have a review date for when tracking should end instead of necessarily setting a hard expiration date. For example, if you started tracking your child because they just started learning how to drive, that arrangement shouldn’t automatically roll over into checking whether they’re making it to their college classes on time several years later.

It’s also worth pointing out that there may be some things about your adult child’s life that you’re better off not knowing. “Maybe you don't want to know why they spent the night out in college,” Heitner says. “Maybe that's not information we should have at every second.”

Smetana says this is really just the next version of something parents have been doing all along: seeing how their kid handles more independence and adjusting from there. “It sounds like it's this onerous process, but really it's a day-by-day figuring it out,” she says. Hofer says these conversations should start well before adulthood and keep evolving as kids get older. The key, she says, is that everyone gets a say and agrees on the rules together.

And if your grown child is the one saying they don’t want to be tracked anymore, that deserves some weight, too. “Part of children becoming adults is learning to set their own boundaries, make decisions, and communicate what feels comfortable for them,” Szenczy says.

For parents, that may mean tolerating the discomfort of having less information while showing your kid, as Szenczy puts it, “I trust you and I believe you can handle this.” That may be one of the stranger parts of raising kids now: You can know where they are almost all the time, but maybe sometimes letting them grow up means deciding not to look.