I pay attention to a number of social media groups around parenting and technology – and often see questions about how to use technology to protect our little kids: to keep track of them or reach them in case of emergency.
Answers include a variety of tracking devices designed for objects (e.g. airtags), or specifically for kids (e.g. Jiobits), watches (e.g. Garmin bounce) or phones (pinwheel, bark, iphones). None of these are necessarily bad choices, but I am often surprised at the lack of critical questions about whether we should be using technology to track and reach our little kids.
Now, I used reins with my daughter from the time she started to walk – not only because she too young to understand the rules of not running off, but because I believed the freedom of being able to walk a few feet away from me was valuable (and yes, my husband took this photo after he texted me…) Not everyone agrees to “treating you kid like a dog on a leash”, so I’m ok with different views on parenting. But I do think it is important to ask the questions of why we feel the need to track our children – or get in touch with them in the case of emergency (with maybe a more US-focused set of issues than usual).
For tracking kids, these questions usually come up when people talk about their young children taking the bus or walking short distances to school. Fear of children being kidnapped is often a driving force – with high profile cases of child kidnapping and media sources scaring us about the frequency of kidnapping (don’t take candy from strangers etc.). Yet, the actual risk of being kidnapped by a stranger is about 1 in a million – and most ‘cases of kidnapping’ are in fact either misunderstandings, runaways, or parents involved in custody disputes keeping their own children away from the custodial parent.
Recently, we were outside our (new) home watching our 4-year old scoot around with some new friends. They went around a building, and when my husband started to follow, the parent of one of the other children touch his arm, slowing him down and said “trust the projects”; a powerful reminder to trust the people living around us to be good towards our children, rather than be a danger to them. And yes, the kids showed up on the other side of the building in just a few seconds, screaming with laughter at their daring adventure.
I will admit, I have attached an airtag to my daughter a couple of times. It has sometimes been because I felt it would be a good idea in case she wandered off, but mostly because I worried about how I would be judged by other parents if we didn’t take this precaution and something happened to her. But in reality, the chances of something happening to her are overwhelmingly low and as long as we are doing our best to keep her in a safe environment and teach her not to wander off,
And what about when we need to contact children in case of an emergency. Unfortunately the reality in the USA is that children are at risk of mass shootings in their schools – and it’s rare to get through a school year without some kind of lock-down occurring in most schools. In the truly real and scary situation of your child being in danger, being able to call them is probably not going to help anyone but yourself (and likely not even going to help you if they cannot answer or the networks are overwhelmed with many parents trying to reach their children simultaneously). It may, in fact, be more dangerous for your child to be rushing to get their phone, or to phones ringing when teachers are trying to keep everyone quiet. It is hard to imagine being out of contact in a time of panic, but we’d be better off spending our time working on real solutions to gun ownership, than trying to find ways to reach our children if there is a gunman in their school.
And just like in our neighborhood – trusting others to care for your children and reach out to us if our kids need our help is an important element of rebuilding community for everyone. We need to teach our children our phone numbers, and who to go to in case of an emergency. We need to get to know and trust our neighbors so that our kids are among friends if they are not in our immediate vicinity. Technology is a solution to a problem that might not be real – we’d be better to solve our feeling of isolation and trust our community, rather than add technology prematurely to our little kids’ lives.
