The Child-Tracking Apps Encouraging Parental Paranoia

Did you catch the new ad for the Life360 tracking app? It features a mom singing a Disney-sweet song to her daughter who looks to be high school age:You are my whole wide worldMy heart, my joy, my baby girlYou’ll never know how much I love you!When you’re gone, I just think of you …Dying. The girl reacts the way you probably just did: “WHAT???”Kidnapping! Wood-chipping! Organ-snatching! Road-tripping! The mom sings of all the ways her daughter could die, each with a cartoon visual of bloody, severed organs, limbs and heads. SO MANY severed heads.And such a perfect example of how our culture is driving parents crazy.Did you actually think your child could survive a walk to school? Get with the program, mama! Indulge in your very worst fantasies, like the lady in the ad.And please don’t bother learning to COPE when you’re separated from your tots. If you can’t be WITH them every single second (alas!), at least make sure you can WATCH them every single second. Because otherwise …Woodchippers.At this point, most of us above age 30 can still remember growing up without our parents knowing where we were every second. Loved it.But fear sells. So even though the crime rate today is LOWER than when most of us were children (lower against tots AND grownups), today’s parents have grown up on a steady diet of “Law & Order” and local news. Scary. An ad like Life360’s just normalizes what I call “worst-first thinking” — thinking up the WORST-case scenario FIRST and proceeding as if it’s likely to happen. And THAT is what normalizes helicopter parenting.The daughter in the ad, stunned by her mother’s diarrhea of dysfunction, comes up with a solution: OK, mom. From now on, you can track my every move. I’ll just sacrifice my growing autonomy because you can’t deal with your neurosis. (She doesn’t use those exact words.)The thing is, that solution doesn’t even work. The more that you give into anxiety, the more powerful it becomes. “My god, I don’t even know where to start,” said a Long Island University psychology professor, Camilo Ortiz, the father of independence therapy, watching the ad. “It goes contrary to everything we know about how to deal with anxiety in a healthy way.”Psychologist Laura Kastner, a professor at the University of Washington and author of “Getting to Calm,” agreed. The healthy way to deal with anxiety, she said, is to push through it. If you sit with the discomfort, it loses its grip. This is known as exposure therapy: You get exposed to what you’re afraid of and gradually realize you can deal.The opposite is to “accommodate” a fear or anxiety by giving in to it, says Ms. Kastner. For instance, by checking a tracking app to see if your child has just been decapitated.Encouraging a parent to keep making sure their child isn’t dead is “a trap,” says Mr. Ortiz, “because it deprives the person of learning to tolerate the anxiety.”Now: irony alert.Last December I interviewed Life360’s inventor and chief executive, Chris Hulls. He said when he was growing up, here in America, he somehow met a Maasai warrior who invited him to come to Kenya. So Mr. Hulls did — for the summer, on his own, with his parents’ blessing.He was 11.“I was on a thousand acres in the middle of nowhere, completely unreachable. I talked to my parents two or three times. They could not have been able to find me if they wanted to.”Mr. Hulls sounded proud of his independence — and his parents’ trust in him. My guess is, his parents were pretty proud too.As for the app he went on to invent, which now has 83 million users, Mr. Hulls said, “We try not to be fearmongering.”Maybe it’s time to try a little harder.Creators.com

The Child-Tracking Apps Encouraging Parental Paranoia

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