What About Tracking Your Kids on GPS?

July 8th, 2023

I have been wrestling with this question a bit. Should a parent track their child with GPS? And to add more complexity: What about when they are no longer in your home, they’re adults, is it okay then?

First of all, I am glad it wasn’t an option for Angela and me when our kids were younger. I am not sure what I would have decided. My first inclination is that I would most definitely track my kids. Especially when they started to drive! As a parent of teens there are so many questions that can flood your mind. For instance: Have they arrived safely where they said they were going? Are they where they said they were going to be? How fast are they driving? Are they almost home? Have they even left? If I knew where they are I would certainly be calmer, after all I’d know where they are. So certainly having the ability to track them is a relief and calms all those fears… don’t they?

I have chatted with numerous parents who have had these same swirling questions and have decided to track their kids. There certainly seems to be some questions answered by having this option available. And it seems like it’s an automatically assumed option that parents will take. Interestingly though, I rarely find (I actually haven’t yet) parents who have had their fears calmed and having the option settling their anxious hearts.

Generally, parents are wanting assurances that their fears have not come to reality. We want to know that our kids are safe. But take a deeper pulse and it really doesn’t settle the fears because something else always replaces the ones that were seemingly answered. In other words, there is no shortages of fears that line up one after another for the things that matter most to us.

I want to encourage parents to pause a moment and ask, “What is this doing to my heart? What’s really happening in my heart?” This has many complexities beyond what we can wrestle with in a short blogpost, but this is worth considering on just the surface level at least.

Angela and I did decide that we didn’t want to encourage us having a shared tracking account with our kids – at the end of the day, it wouldn’t do our heart any good. Too any questions pop up: What happens when they don’t have service? Are they okay? What about if we “saw” them somewhere we didn’t know they were going? We also recognized that we are not in control – as much as I want to think I may be. My tracking ultimately wants me to be in the driver seat over my fears.

What we found we had to do with our kids from the beginning of parenting, and still very much today as they are adults on their own, is that they are the Lord’s and He is in control and wholly able to care for them far beyond what we can. We can’t know everything. We had to pray at times, “Lord, reveal what I need to know if there’s something for me to know.” We had to pray for the Lord to lead them. We had to open our hands before the Lord and entrust them to Him. Which is not an easy thing! We have to trust that it is the Lord who will calm my anxious heart and calm my fears – at the end of the day it would not be my kids who can do that.

I love what David Powlison said, "He is the only person who can profoundly reassure your heart.”

This isn’t a post to say tracking is wrong. It may or may not be, that’s between you and the Lord. The questions would be, “What does the Lord want? What is it you are wanting to know? Is it circumventing your trust in the Lord?” These are deeper-hearted questions I think we would benefit in asking ourselves.

Our fears are very real, they are also never-ending. The Lord reminds us that He is with us in these very fears and will carry us as we trust Him. I find great solace in dwelling on Luke 12:22-34. I hope you will too.

Let’s keep drawing closer to Him and inviting Him into these scary places of our hearts.

Nothing On My Own,