Illustrations by Miguel Porlan
No one warned me, when I became a parent, about all the apps that would colonize my phone: the app for the baby monitor where I could gaze at my daughter, even when my husband and I finally had a night out. The app for the Snoo smart bassinet we rented in bleary-eyed desperation, which logged her sleep by the minute. The app where I logged her sleep manually because the Snoo was not accurate enough. And still, I remember thinking that I had been quite restrained. I mean, I didn’t buy the $299 Owlet smart sock, which would send her pulse rate and oxygen saturation directly to my phone, or the $290 Nanit monitor, which would track her every breath.
Our day care did not have a livestream—see? restraint—but that is indeed a service some now offer. Preschool required its own app, though, as did summer camp. Soon my phone began pinging with messages about playground spats and injuries as minor as paper cuts. As I write this, I’ve learned that my daughter woke from her nap at 2:17 p.m.
The panopticon doesn’t end with babies and toddlers. Parents with children older than mine tell me they obsess over grades, which are updated instantly with each new assignment or quiz. They watch their kids via the camera on their Ring doorbell; they monitor text messages. They scrutinize daily photos from sleepaway camp—once a time of complete disconnection—for evidence of sunburns or social ostracism. Why is he standing apart from everyone else? Why isn’t he smiling?
But most of all, parents track their kids everywhere they go. Location tracking might start, for younger kids, with an AirTag slipped into a backpack, jacket, or shoe. (Skechers now makes shoes with a dedicated compartment in the sole.) For kids old enough to have their own smartwatch or phone, the GPS is built right in—and so parents keep tracking them into adolescence and even beyond. Three-quarters of parents with teenagers ages 14 to 17 had access to their kids’ location data, according to one study.
[From the April 2014 issue: Hanna Rosin on the overprotected kid]
Even among college students, one-third were being tracked by their parents, according to another study, conducted in 2021 by Michaeline Jensen, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Five years later, Jensen says, that number is even higher: More than half of college students are being tracked, per her unpublished data. In her own lab, she’s learned that even her graduate students continue to be tracked; she told me about one student, 29, who recently defended her dissertation but whose mom still checks—and calls about—her location.
If watching your kid’s real-time location isn’t enough, there is Life360, a tracking app that allows parents to review up to 30 days of time-stamped location history, monitor driving to make sure their kids stay within the speed limit, and get alerts when they arrive at or leave saved locations, such as home, school, and, yes, a college dorm. “Holy sh—,” a psychologist who studies kids’ resilience started to say when I described the app to him. But a college psychiatrist whose patients include undergrads needed no introduction to Life360. “Students spend so much time complaining to me about that thing,” she said. The app has 102 million active monthly users and counting.
What is all of this tracking doing to us? Lately, I have been posing a version of this question to child-development experts as well as parents and teens themselves. “It’s funny,” Kaitlyn Burnell, a psychologist at UNC Chapel Hill who has studied digital tracking, remarked when I asked her the question. “As you’re saying that, I literally got a notification from my 1-year-old’s day care saying that she ate a graham cracker.”
I have not yet found a randomized controlled trial parsing the effects of parental notifications about graham crackers—nor, to be more serious, are there any long-term data on outcomes for parents who use these apps to monitor their babies from birth. But while it’s hard to argue that newborns are suffering from overattentive parenting, developmental psychology does suggest that constant monitoring eventually becomes unhealthy. One of the primary developmental tasks of adolescence, Burnell told me, is achieving a measure of independence. “If you have this metaphorical umbilical cord,” she asked, “is that sense of independence going to be adequately developed?”
[From the May 2020 issue: Kate Julian on childhood in an anxious age]
The more I probed what constant monitoring is doing to kids, the more I also started to wonder what it is doing to parents, on the other end of the umbilical cord. Our phones promise us a kind of omniscience from the moment a kid is born. Even when we are physically apart, we remain digitally tethered. But as parents, we are supposed to undergo our own transformation as our children grow, relinquishing the knowledge and control we once held. “That’s an important developmental task for parents too,” Burnell said.
And here, we parents might be failing ourselves. We are certainly not thriving. In 2024, the U.S. surgeon general issued a public-health advisory about the mental health of parents, echoing a similar advisory about youth mental health three years earlier. In a national survey in which 18 percent of teens reported anxiety, so did 18 percent of parents. For all the recent concern about a crisis in teen mental health, parents are clearly struggling too.
I think of the immortal words of my 3-year-old this morning: “Calm down, Mom!”
When Maureen Paschal, a college counselor in North Carolina, sent her daughter off to college a few years ago, she was promptly invited to join a group chat for moms of the girls living on the same floor. The moms, she recalls, tracked their daughters’ location during sorority rush, watching as they moved from house to house. But the incident that stuck in her mind came one fall morning, when a mom messaged the group chat that her daughter was still in her dorm room. She had a math test in 10 minutes. Could someone ask their kid to go knock on her door?
“I just was like, This is too much. It’s just too much,” Paschal told me. But not everyone thought so. Another mom soon replied: My daughter is on her way.
In a sense, the scene that Paschal described was nothing new. Helicopter parenting came into popular use some 20 years ago, and articles about parents who trail their kids, metaphorically and literally, on campus still drop every fall, like acorns from an oak tree. But what stood out to me about this anecdote were all the phones—and how frictionless they make it to indulge every parental anxiety that pops in your head.
[Listen: Russell Shaw’s ‘Raising Resilient Children’ podcast]
One step leads so easily to another: If you’re invited to a group chat for parents, why not join? If you can see where your kid is on campus, why not look? If they’re not where they are supposed to be, why not say something? All it takes is a few taps on your phone, which you pull out reflexively anyway whenever you sit on the couch.
Back in the dumbphone era, my own mother could not have spent all day messaging the moms of my freshman dormmates even if she’d wanted to. And I feel quite confident that zero of my teenage friends’ parents tracked their location—again, because they couldn’t, at least not without an alarming amount of effort.
Then, in 2015, Apple made a software change that may have done more to normalize location tracking than anything else: The company began shipping iPhones preloaded with Find My Friends, allowing people to share their location with one another. As the name implies, the app was not originally created for families, but it’s since become a default option for parents tracking their kids. (The app merged with Find My iPhone in 2019 to become just Find My.) Life360, which launched in 2008 after one of its founders saw families trying to find one another in Hurricane Katrina’s chaotic aftermath, has taken off in recent years too. Its monthly active users have quadrupled since 2020, with revenue totaling almost half a billion dollars last year. These are the two most popular location-tracking apps. Both are effortless to use.
When I first talked with teens and young adults about location tracking, I would start by asking when their parents began tracking them. I soon realized that this was like asking when they began eating solid foods. Like, always? For many kids, location tracking came automatically with their first smartwatch or phone, without much ado. For many parents, too, location tracking eased into their lives because it was available.
“Once we had that tool,” a mom of four told me, “it felt like we were irresponsible if we didn’t use it.” I remember this feeling as well, when I first saw neighborhood moms discussing how to attach an AirTag to a 3-year-old. Wait, was I supposed to be doing that? Had I been cavalier—irresponsible—by sending my kid off to preschool without one?
Let’s first say this: Location tracking is so useful! Convenience and coordinating logistics are the main reasons cited by about a third of parents who use it, according to preliminary data collected by William Pelham III, a UC San Diego psychologist who last year began a nearly 1,000-family study about location tracking during adolescence. Pelham, who came to this topic after studying substance use and delinquency in teens, told me his original interviews were geared toward asking about behaviors such as breaking curfew, having sex, and taking drugs. The third parent who came in tried to stop the interview, telling the researchers, “You guys don’t get it. I use these apps purely for logistics. I use it to figure out when I’m picking him up at high school: Is he at the east door or the west door? ”
For parents who use location tracking only like this, it’s not that complicated—no need to overthink it. But safety is another big motivation, cited as the primary reason by 40 percent of parents in Pelham’s data. And Pelham is interested in how parents ensure safety through location tracking: “What is the behavior? Does that mean checking every single day?” Multiple times a day? Calling—or even driving over if the parent sees something they don’t like?
Faith, a recent college graduate, told me her mom watched her closely on Life360 in high school. (I’m using only first or middle names for some of the people I interviewed, so they can speak candidly about their family life.) “She would call me when I’m on the highway, lecturing me about how fast I was going,” she said. “Or there was this one time that I was at a friend’s house and she didn’t recognize the address. And she went to that friend’s house from my location and knocked on the door.” It was embarrassing, Faith said, but her friend wasn’t particularly shocked; this kind of thing happens when everyone is being tracked. When the app glitched, as it sometimes does, her mom would drive out to the random location she saw on Life360. Faith’s relationship with her mom was rocky to start with in high school, which made Faith closed off, which made her mom more dependent on Life360, which made Faith feel even less trusted—a downward spiral that many experts I spoke with warned about.
The handful of studies on location tracking of teens have found mixed or only very small effects on the teen-parent relationship, though they also have not probed too deeply into how the parents use it. (Nor have they, altogether, found a consistent relationship between tracking and socioeconomic class.) In general, the studies don’t distinguish between the parent who looks at their teen’s location only during pickup and the parent driving out to any unknown location on Life360.
Many parents who use location tracking, I suspect, fall somewhere between these two extremes. Watching their kid’s location dot is not about control so much as peace of mind. The apps offer a “perception of safety,” Gregory Chase, who studied location tracking of teens as a Ph.D. student in Jensen’s lab at UNC Greensboro, told me. He elaborated on the difference: “When you know someone’s location, you don’t necessarily know who they’re with or what kind of behavior they could be engaging in.” You can see your son in his dorm room and not know he’s binge drinking; you can see your daughter at a friend’s and not know about a sexual assault, the majority of which are perpetrated by someone known to the victim. But at least you can rule out your kid lying in a ditch somewhere?
A persistent theme in my conversations, and in conversations that experts say they have with parents, is the sense that the world has become more dangerous and too many risks lurk out there. This is not borne out in the statistics: In just about every way, teenagers are living safer lives than ever. They are not only less likely to be victims of violence than in the 1990s, when crime peaked; they are also less likely to smoke, drink, use hard drugs, or get pregnant. The rates of all these behaviors have plummeted by more than half. “There’s some kind of risk-taking dimension that’s definitely down in teens,” Pelham said.
The pendulum swing toward safety has real benefits, but it may have costs too. Teenagers today are also less likely to get a job, go on a date, or drive—all of which involve some small but tangible risk or uncertainty in the physical world. Their lives have turned inward, and when they do venture out, they’re tracked.
By coincidence or not, the rates of depression and anxiety in teenagers have steadily increased. These trends “feel intuitively connected, right?” Pelham said. He is careful to acknowledge that this observation is more inference than empirical fact. The cause of the teen mental-health crisis is a topic of debate, much of it recently centered on the role of social media. But it’s hard to imagine that a diminished tolerance for risk and uncertainty in teenagers is not affecting their well-being.
And perhaps parents feel it on some level too, because even those who closely track their kids spoke to me with evident nostalgia about their own freer, wilder youth—the opposite of what they are giving their children. “A lot of parents today are just super hypocritical,” Henry Stuart, a college junior, told me. His dad still tracks him. “This is the same generation that talks all the time about Oh, it was so great in the ’80s; like, we could just ride our bikes all around the neighborhood, and, you know, we would come home when the sun goes down,” Stuart said. “But then these are the same parents that are on Life360, stalking their kids and watching their every move.”
Thomas Parker, a dad of two and stepdad of four, encountered location tracking before he had teens of his own. (He doesn’t track but his ex-wife does.) He had used a version of it, called Blue Force Tracking, while deployed in the military. “Everybody hated it,” he told me. Well, clarified Parker, now a mental-health counselor in Arkansas, “we loved it, in that if we were ambushed or something and we needed help, they could tell exactly where we were—but it also turned into a nanny state. Like, You’re only supposed to be driving 30 and you’re driving 35. You have to slow down.” Even in a war zone, it could be too much.
Russell Shaw told me a story about getting lost on a family vacation when he was 7 years old. He had gone to a video arcade with his older brother, who left first, after asking if Shaw knew the way back to the motel. “I said, ‘Uh huh.’ ” His brother left. “Then I walked out of the place and I had no idea where to go.” What next? This was the 1970s: no cellphones, no GPS. In truth, he was not far, perhaps a block away, but in his little-kid brain, he was utterly, deeply lost. He wandered. He eventually found an adult, who took him to the police, who drove him around until he spotted his parents walking down the street in search of him. “It sucked at the time,” he said, “and then the next time something like that happened, I thought, Oh, I can get through this.”
In his telling some half a century later, this story is not about the traumatic experience of getting lost but about how his younger self overcame it. What if his parents had been able to immediately swoop in because they saw his coordinates on their phone? There would have been no getting lost, no “it sucked,” but also no eventual triumph. Shaw, who until recently was the head of Georgetown Day School, in Washington, D.C., has written a newsletter for The Atlantic about raising resilient kids and is working on a book about the topic. He wonders what all of this location tracking means for kids’ resilience. “If we are being tracked or surveilled, and there is a ubiquitous sense that we can be rescued, are we not fully internalizing that sense of our own capacity?” he said. “And ultimately, there will come a time when we do need to stand on our own two feet.”
Shaw’s story of getting lost stayed with me because I did, in fact, hear the inverted version from parents who track their kids. The modern tale goes something like this: A teen makes a mistake while driving or taking the subway; in a panic, they call their parents, who look up their location and coach them back to where they need to be—thank goodness for tracking.
One parent who recounted such a scenario is Louise Barkhuus, who actually studies location tracking as part of her research at NYU on human-computer interaction. She has been interested in the topic since 2003; early on, she found it difficult to recruit volunteers willing to install location-tracking apps, so unusual—even invasive—was the technology back then. (These days, she says, “it’s so easy.”) In her own life, when Barkhuus’s daughter first started taking the subway alone, she kept a close eye on her location, and would text if the app showed her on a train going in the wrong direction. Several times, her daughter called her mom lost, asking where to go.
I wasn’t sure, at first, how Barkhuus felt about micromanaging her daughter’s subway rides. But when I told her about Shaw’s story of getting lost at 7, and his worry that parents are no longer giving kids the opportunity to navigate these situations on their own, she responded, “I think it’s completely correct.” In the moment, though, what mother is going to hang up on her panicking daughter? “We’re oversurveilling our children in a way that’s not necessary,” Barkhuus said, “but I don’t know how to take it away.”
Barkhuus’s own research has chronicled how location tracking has become normalized, even among kids themselves. Sure, teens and young adults with particularly intrusive parents resent the stalking—some have learned to get around tracking, by tinkering with the settings or leaving their phone behind in a friend’s mailbox—but many find reassurance in being tracked. (They are also all sharing their location with their friends.) Some of the college students she interviewed actually initiated it with their less tech-savvy parents. They’ve internalized the idea that they need it. Even Faith, who hated her mom’s use of Life360, nevertheless said she understood the underlying motivation: “The world was getting more dangerous and it’s just a safety thing, which I agree with fully.”
Where might teenagers be hearing that the world is now so dangerous, other than from their parents? Over the past half century, the norms of parenting have veered hard toward safetyism. My colleague Hanna Rosin wrote about this shift in her 2014 Atlantic article “The Overprotected Kid,” in which she observed that the independence of her own childhood seemed unbelievable a generation later. From 1971 to 2010, in one large U.K. study, the percentage of parents who allowed their 7- and 8-year-olds to walk home from school alone fell from 80 percent to 6 percent. Children absorb the sense that danger can lurk around every street corner, because it’s what their parents taught them. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when researchers look at the risk factors for anxiety in children, one of the strongest is having an anxious parent; genetics plays a role, but so does parenting.
Barkhuus told me another story, about a time she took the train on her own as a girl of 12. She grew up in Denmark in the ’80s, but the freedom with which she remembers moving through the world is not so different from what Americans of the same generation recall. One day, there was a big train accident. Barkhuus was fine, but the trains were delayed on the way home, and she was an hour late to her brother’s birthday party.
I imagined how this would play out in 2026, if a 12-year-old spent an hour unaccounted for: Mom calling, calling, calling; checking the news and seeing that there was a train accident; calling; fearing the worst; calling, calling, calling until her kid finally showed up or called back. When Barkhuus got home, she remembers, her mom had simply assumed that her daughter was off doing her thing. She was annoyed, initially, at Barkhuus’s tardiness to the party, but she had not constructed a whole scary scenario in her head. “She didn’t think about an accident. She wasn’t worried.”
Without the expectation of being constantly connected, her mother had simply gone on with the birthday party. She trusted that her daughter would eventually show up, and she did.
But what if something had happened—outside the video arcade, or on the train? If you, like me, have a tendency to worry, perhaps this shadow of doubt also appeared unbidden in your brain, in which case, boy, do I have a Life360 commercial for you. It opens in a kitchen as a mother sings to her teenage daughter:
You are my whole wide world,
My heart, my joy, my baby girl.
You’ll never know how much I love you!
When you’re gone I just think of you …
Dying.
Her voice drops. The live-action commercial turns into a cartoon enacting her words.
Every time you leave my sight,
When you drive to school or stay out at night,
This is where I go,
To the million ways inside my brain
In which you could die at any given time.
You could bleed out on the street or get stuck in a mine.
You could get kidnapped by bandits.
Some creep could harvest all your organs and then sell them online.
There are a million ways inside my brain
In which you could die at any given time.
You could be flattened like a pancake by hydraulic machines,
Or be sucked into a wood chipper by the leg of your jeans …
And so it continues, with more and more outlandish scenarios for a whole minute, as the daughter rolls her eyes.
It’s a funny ad, very tongue-in-cheek, I remarked to Lenore Skenazy, who quickly interjected. “You laugh, a little ruefully, but they normalize the idea that catastrophizing—‘worst-first thinking,’ I call it—imagining your kid dead is just the normal,” she said. “And the only way to assuage it is to check, check, check, check your phone.” The commercial ends with the daughter handing her mom a phone installed with Life360. “There,” the daughter says. “No more freaking out.” Just check Life360.
Skenazy is one of the foremost public advocates against this need to “check, check, check, check” on your kids, a position she held long before their phones were beaming their location into our pockets. In 2008, as a columnist for The New York Sun, she wrote about leaving her 9-year-old at a Manhattan Bloomingdale’s with a subway map, a MetroCard, and $20 to find his way home alone. He made it, “ecstatic with independence,” she wrote, but her actions provoked such hostile backlash, she was inspired to a new life’s mission. She came out with a book, Free-Range Kids, and a reality-TV show, World’s Worst Mom, where she coaxed overprotective parents to, for example, let their tween daughter use a public bathroom by herself. Skenazy also co-founded the nonprofit Let Grow to promote kids’ independence, along with Daniel Shuchman, a private investor and philanthropist; Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist best known as the author of the anti-phone treatise The Anxious Generation; and Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist who recently came out with his own book blaming the decline in teen mental health on schools, rather than phones. Let Grow’s founders may disagree on why, but they do all agree that society is squelching kids’ independence—to their detriment.
I mention all of this to suggest that, on one hand, Skenazy’s message of child independence has found a receptive audience, at least in certain circles. She is an excellent messenger too, by turns funny and unsparing. Skenazy and her co-founders at Let Grow are frequently featured in magazines such as this one. And parents who inhabit brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods like mine talk often of aspiring to some flavor of free-range parenting.
On the other hand, the past 20 years have been a long, exhausting march toward more parental surveillance—and surveillance in general. Since Free-Range Kids was published, the percentage of parents tracking their kids’ location has risen from approximately zero to 100 percent. (I exaggerate, but not that much.) And as I discovered when I had a baby, the products for monitoring your kids at a young age have multiplied with technological progress. When Skenazy’s kids were small, baby monitors were more or less audio-only affairs. In this age of smart monitors, she said, imagine what monitoring a baby’s every breath does to a parent. “You’re supposed to be holding your own breath to say, ‘Okay, she breathed. [Gasp.] She breathed. [Gasp.] She breathed. [Gasp.] She breathed. [Gasp.]’ And so you’re turning regular life into a near disaster that you must be alerted to all the time.” An app like this sells short-term peace of mind, she argued, “but it delivers the opposite. It delivers the impression that your child is only safe because you are in control.”
And if hypervigilance is the only way to keep your kid safe, how can you ever stop watching? Today, it’s monitoring your newborn’s every breath; tomorrow, it’ll be physically hovering over your toddler’s every step; in 20 years, it’ll still be tracking their every step, now from afar. Anxiety becomes a form of caring, surveillance a form of love.
Most parents agree—in the abstract—that kids need to confront their own challenges and make their own mistakes as they grow up. They need to learn how to ask for help when lost. They need to face the consequences of oversleeping for a math test before they oversleep for a job interview. But when you’re hovering digitally, phone in hand, it is so natural to want to help and so easy to intervene.
Skenazy argues that the apps deprive parents of the opportunity to develop their own muscles: “There’s no reps of your letting go of your kid, living without knowledge for a little while, and then them returning safe and sound. And you’re realizing, Wow, I don’t have to worry every single second.” Instead we have been trained to check and check again, as if reassurance can be found only on our phones.
Perhaps the last person I expected to endorse Skenazy’s views was Chris Hulls, co-founder, executive chairman, and until last year also CEO of Life360. “I really like her,” he told me. “I agree with her on so much.” Hulls grew up in Marin County, California, as a free-range kid himself—very free-range, in fact. At age 11, he told me, he traveled to Kenya on his own, where he lived with the family of an Episcopal priest whom he had recently met. “It was out in the bush with no power, no water, not only no cellphones, but no phones period, so I was completely, completely unfindable.” He could call his parents only on a weekly trip to Nairobi. “If something bad happened, it would have taken probably days for my parents to find out, and I almost got bitten by a puff adder out there,” he said. “That could have killed me.”
Hulls didn’t die, obviously, and the experience was a formative one; after high school, he joined the Air Force, then studied business at UC Berkeley, and then founded Life360, which began as a school project after Hurricane Katrina. The early years of running the app were a grind—he lived in a friend’s closet—until it finally took off. Hulls has not chosen the risk-averse path in life.
He agrees with Skenazy about the importance of kids’ independence. And he agrees that “safetyism is a thing, and it’s not a good thing.” But in a world where parents are already preoccupied with safety, he argues, Life360 actually grants teenagers more independence, by giving parents the peace of mind to allow activities they otherwise would not. “Absolutely some parents do go over the top,” he said. “But I think the average teen is getting more freedom and autonomy, not less.” Life360’s current CEO, Lauren Antonoff, told me the average user opens the app five times a day; a spokesperson later added that less than 4 percent open it 10 times a day and less than 1 percent more than 20 times a day. Most app usage, Antonoff said, is driven by people managing school pickup and other day-to-day logistics, not monitoring for safety.
Safety is core to the company’s business, though. Life360 is a freemium app: Basic location tracking is free, but extra safety functions, such as individual driver reports and additional days of location history, can be unlocked for $9.99 to $24.99 a month. (Like all freemium apps, it is constantly nudging you to upgrade.) Safety “drives a lot of our retention and our revenue,” Hulls told me. So what was the intent of the ad, I asked, where the mom sings about her daughter dying? “I thought it was the opposite of fearmongering,” he said. “It’s making fun of fearmongering.” But perhaps the real genius is that it does both. The ad has been viewed nearly 9 million times on YouTube.
Maureen Paschal, the mom who told me about the parent group chat for her daughter’s dorm, recounted that story because she herself understood the impulse to track. “I knew I would be obsessed,” she said, if she had her daughter’s location. Paschal’s solution was to make her husband use the app on his phone. She could ask for her daughter’s location in a real emergency, but by placing a big obstacle—her husband—in the way, she could not check all the time.
Other moms (yes, it is mostly moms who track) also told me about how they came to check the apps out of compulsion, habit, or simple longing. When Julie Bohannon-Wyczynski’s daughter went to college, she would open up Life360 every day. “Everything in me wants to check and text her,” she recalls thinking. “I need to let it go.” She found herself similarly obsessed with her younger sons’ grades in their school app, questioning them about any suspicious zeros she saw. “Mom, the teacher has not put in the grades yet,” her sons would say, rolling their eyes. Bohannon-Wyczynski, who is a therapist herself, soon realized that checking whenever she had 10 minutes free at work was not healthy behavior.
[From the July/August 2011 issue: Lori Gottlieb on how to land your kid in therapy]
Indeed, to psychologists, repeatedly checking an app is the opposite of how you’re supposed to deal with anxiety. This behavior is called reassurance seeking. “It is a trap,” Camilo Ortiz, a clinical psychologist on Long Island, told me. “You feel better immediately, and then you need it again.” Or sometimes, you feel worse. Several years ago, Ortiz said, he saw his daughter’s location in the middle of a wooded park during the school day. “I called her and I couldn’t get through to her, and I became panicked,” he said. “I drove home 100 miles an hour because I was convinced she was kidnapped in a park.” (She had actually gone on the subway, and the app had glitched.) “If I were to do it over again, I would track much less.”
Recently, Ortiz, who is on Let Grow’s advisory board, started piloting what he calls independence therapy for anxious kids. The therapy has kids brainstorm and carry out a series of activities unsupervised, such as taking the bus or walking to the deli to buy cold cuts. These activities are meant to expose kids to small doses of uncertainty and discomfort in scenarios that are not the direct source of their anxieties. (By analogy, Ortiz pointed to a small study where participants who were treated with exposure therapy to spiders became less fearful of heights too.)
One of the first participants, Ortiz said, was a 9-year-old girl who was afraid to sleep in her own bed. She chose to ride the city bus by herself. The girl actually missed her stop, but she found a grown-up, who helped her get off and backtrack the extra blocks home. That night, she slept in her own bed for the first time. “I can’t know for sure, but I think the getting-lost part and realizing, Oh, even if the worst thing happens, I can figure it out was crucial for her in terms of her own sense of self-efficacy,” Ortiz said. Hers is one of four cases that he published in a 2024 study.
When Ortiz pitches independence therapy to parents, “the first question is: But I can still track them, right?” Sure, he tells them, but the ultimate goal is no tracking at all. Just as the therapy teaches kids to tolerate uncertainty and discomfort, it’s meant to teach parents the same. “We think this is a stealth treatment for parents,” he said.
Recently, he’s been experimenting with a version of independence therapy for just parents. They meet as a group over Zoom before having their kids carry out a daily unsupervised activity for three weeks. Can treating parents indirectly treat kids? (This basic idea also underlies a more established treatment program called SPACE, or Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions, which has generated enormous interest lately; it teaches parents to stop accommodating their child’s anxieties.) One dad who went through Ortiz’s program last year, whom I’ll call by his middle name, Thomas, told me he had never considered himself anxious. He let his 12-year-old son walk to school and to the park with a friend—albeit while tracking his son’s location and sometimes even following on foot “like a private investigator, just to, I don’t know, make sure they didn’t die.”
In therapy, Thomas learned that he was supposed to eventually give up tracking. “Well, that’s insane,” he recalls thinking. “I must know at all times where he is. When he’s 25, I’m going to want to know where he is.” He described that moment as “a turning point when I was like, Oh fuck, I’m just as crazy as all these other parents.” Thomas did stop following his son on foot—but the tracking, well, he hasn’t been able to turn that off yet.
Other parents told me about learning to counter not just their own anxieties but those of other adults as well, now that everyone’s unused to seeing children walking around alone. “Are you really going to let Casey go into Walmart by herself?” Darleen Smith remembers her family asking about her 11-year-old daughter. Smith did let her daughter go to Walmart, and also to CVS and the nail salon and a movie and to set up a lemonade stand, which became six or seven lemonade stands. “She lasted, like, three, four hours some days, and she wasn’t complaining at all. That surprised me,” she said. Things didn’t always work out perfectly; her daughter asked neighbors if she could walk their dog and no one took her up on it. But in giving her daughter the space to fail, she also gave her the space to exceed her expectations. Casey made more than $1,000 at her lemonade stands.
You don’t need to sign up for independence therapy to let your kid take the bus or walk through Walmart untracked. You can just do it. You can just do things. But the program, I noticed in my conversations, gave parents much-needed permission to break social norms, however uncomfortable that made everyone involved. It almost always went better than they expected.
When Courtney Perrone, another parent in the group therapy, started having her 9- and 10-year-old daughters plan dinner and buy groceries by themselves, other parents in her small town realized that their kids could do this too. “It ended up sparking even a little bit more independence, I would say, around the neighborhood,” she told me. “You now have multiple kids at the grocery store by themselves.” And that’s the thing about social norms: We create them, and we can re-create them too.
This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “The Geo-Located Generation.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.