I’d chuck an Apple AirTag tracking device into my two children’s backpacks, along with their PE kit and water bottle, thinking it was the right thing to do. They were just six and four. If I kept a constant eye on them 24/7, I felt in control. Nothing could happen to them – could it?
Everybody else was doing it. The idea that we are living in an unsafe world, which requires parents like me to spy on our kids with an AirTag, a smartphone, or by using a live location sharing app like Life360, is the new normal. Last year, the shoe company Skechers even launched a children’s shoe with a hidden space to handily slot in a tracking tag, and I’ve heard of other parents buying silicone holders that clip onto laces to keep the AirTag secure on different types of trainers.
Originally, AirTags were launched by Apple in 2021 to track belongings, but it didn’t take long before parents realised they could use them to keep tabs on their children. Parents such as Mike and Zara Tindall, whose eldest daughter Mia, 11, was spotted racing around the Burghley Horse Trials in Lincolnshire in 2024 with an AirTag attached to the belt loop of her shorts.
I thought using trackers would give me peace of mind – but it did the opposite. It turned me into a neurotic and paranoid mother, as I started to check my phone regularly for updates on their location. If I couldn’t find Lola, now nine, and Liberty, seven, for a second in the park, I’d catastrophise it as a kidnapping and ping the AirTag. As I tracked their movements during outings without me, scenes flashed momentarily in my mind from missing child thrillers like All Her Fault, when Sarah Snook’s character picks her child up from a playdate, but her son is not there (and, I might add, his online tracker is found smashed in the school car park).
I started to question the philosophy behind my life as a CCTV parent: what the hell was I doing? I had been perfectly relaxed until I got addicted to stalking my kids.
The AirTags also began to instil fear in my children. They questioned why they had these mini discs in their bags, pockets, or swim bags. “Are we unsafe, Mummy? Why are you tracking us?” was the general theme. This was at the start of 2025 – I’d been using them on and off since 2022. I decided that enough was enough; it was time to take a more free-range path of trust.
I had to have a major rethink – just like a group of health experts are currently advising parents to do, urging them to “pause on tracking”, while reconsidering whether “the surveillance childhood we are sleepwalking into is really benefiting our children”.
Generation Focus, a campaign group aiming to make schools smartphone-free, is sounding the alarm on tracking kids with a letter signed by 74 professionals, who claim tracking is just another extension of damaging helicopter parenting.
It says it breeds anxiety in the younger generation and makes them less free-thinking and independent. Tracking kids “undermines a child’s ability to develop a sense of autonomy” and risks “preventing them from learning vital real-life skills”, such as “learning how to find a safe place and ask for help, and knowing what to do in an emergency without a smartphone”.
When we track children, it adds, “we are implicitly telling them that the world is unsafe”. It also pointed out that carrying a smartphone can actually be dangerous because it could make a child a target for mugging.
Although there is no scientific proof yet that tracking children can be harmful to them, numerous studies point to a direct link between helicopter parenting and anxiety. Recent research published in Development and Psychology in 2025 found that helicopter parenting throughout life amplified stress in first-year college students during the transition to university.
This parenting style, where controlling and overbearing parents “hover” over their children at school and at home, micromanaging their every move, is exactly what tracking feeds into. This kind of parenting includes a constant flurry of worry that psychologists and researchers have long suggested creates negative implications on the child’s mental health, such as anxiety and depression, as well as self-esteem, because they are never left to their own devices.
Helicopter parents want to make their children happy, safe and protected from failure and injury at all costs – and tracking them is an essential ingredient. However, psychologists suggest that this could be backfiring. Far from raising healthy, independent-minded kids, helicopter-parented children struggle to trust themselves because their caregivers have stunted their decision-making skills – and tracking leaves little room for any autonomy.
Children of helicopter parents also seek perfection and fear making mistakes because they constantly have a parent breathing down their neck. Tracking them makes the hyperfocus on them even more intense.
Helicopter parents want to make sure their children are happy, safe and protected from failure and injury – and tracking them is an essential ingredient
Rushing into every emergency – or locating children in a flash with an AirTag – stops a child from learning to problem-solve. Having an AirTag meant my children never needed to take responsibility for their possessions or know where their school bags were in the mornings, because Mummy could track them. Now, they need to work it out themselves.
I want my children to be resilient in the face of challenges – and to feel empowered. It’s time to cut the “invisible umbilical cord between parent and child”, as the group of health experts describes the act of tracking.
I have taught my children what to do in a real emergency – or if a stranger approaches them. My job is to make sure they are safe, but also to know when to detach with love.
That often means addressing my own anxieties, rather than projecting them onto my children. The reality is, I don’t need an AirTag to double-check their real-time location because I know where they are. I might backtrack on my viewpoint when they are teens, and I may give Lola a vintage Nokia handset, without internet access, when she heads off to secondary school on the bus so that I can keep in touch.
But until then, I have to trust they will be safe – and start the process of letting go.
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