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What are yall using to track your kids iphone?


markstanco

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Wife and I use life360 because her job requires in-home consulting in shady parts of town (joke here). It annoyingly tracks how fast I drive etc as well.  It even tracked my every move on an offshore fishing trip long after I lost service, somehow.  I mean it literally matched my gps plots when I got back, trolling patterns and all.   Cant help with anything more than that, kids aren’t to phone age yet.  It does really dampen the sneaking around to dive bars, which was a favorite past time of mine. 

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We use OurPact to set time limits and block apps. Serves as a nice deterrent as simply threatening to lock down the phone generally results in compliance. Haven’t messed with location sharing much...usually just track via find my if I’m curious where kid is at. 

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Share google maps location.  Must leave phone downstairs to charge at night.  Conversation up front about how the phone belongs to us parents, and we will be checking it often and turning off location or deleting browsing history is grounds for our taking it back.  These are the carrots by which we motivate our boys.  Had a discussion or two with the older boy that I didn't bother his mom with after a perusal of the search history.  Problem hasn't persisted or he's gotten smart enough to selectively delete history, which I doubt, but don't wholly discount.

Did plenty I wasn't supposed to do when I was a kid.  He's a good kid.

Edited by dcbc
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10 minutes ago, EE2B said:

He finally found incognito mode in google.

 

Possibly.  But my experience with his generation is that current technology has always been the norm for them, so much so, that they tend not to deep dive into menus or long hold android icons to reveal such gifts as incognito mode in chrome.  Their GenX parents, on the other hand . . . .

But, yeah, he most likely has outsmarted me.

Edited by dcbc
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I currently just use the Find My app that comes with iPhones. We’re setup on family sharing so I have to approve all apps that are downloaded. I may switch over to Life360 now that my daughter is starting to drive. For the most part my kids are good kids and haven’t given me reason to be more intrusive in their stuff.

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On 12/25/2019 at 5:35 PM, dcbc said:

Share google maps location.  Must leave phone downstairs to charge at night.  Conversation up front about how the phone belongs to us parents, and we will be checking it often and turning off location or deleting browsing history is grounds for our taking it back.  These are the carrots by which we motivate our boys.  Had a discussion or two with the older boy that I didn't bother his mom with after a perusal of the search history.  Problem hasn't persisted or he's gotten smart enough to selectively delete history, which I doubt, but don't wholly discount.

Did plenty I wasn't supposed to do when I was a kid.  He's a good kid.

Mostly all of this for us.  Only we don’t track her with any of it.  Have had many ongoing conversations that started when she first got a phone that have basically been based on, “don’t give us a reason to put a tracker on your phone and we won’t.”  And so far, to our knowledge, she hasn’t.  She’s overall a pretty good kid (much better than I ever was).

But, all that aside, the best thing we ever did as parents with regard to the phone (maybe the best parenting move we’ve ever  made) has been “phone never goes in your room EVER.”  Nothing good can come from it.  She can be on it all she wants, just needs to be out where she’s not in the privacy of her room.  Phone lives in the kitchen.  She gets on it in the kitchen or in the family room.  It’s no different than having a boyfriend over.  We could literally come up with zero reason she would need it in her room.  And that’s been the norm for her in our house since pretty much day 1.  Stroke of genius on our part.

It’s almost crazy how simple and basic parenting 101 it has been.  When I hear parents who are struggling with their teens and their phone and I hear about how the kid stays up all night doing shit on the phone they shouldn’t be doing, I just laugh and shake my head.  Best advice I can give any parent with regard to phones.

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We have Life360. My wife set it up so she'd get an alert whenever the kids entered or left a specific zone, be it work, school, their mother's house or home. Had to turn it off because the dogs would hear the alert and start freaking out because they thought one of the kids had arrived at the house, only to be let down because she'd actually gone to her mother's instead. 

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On 12/28/2019 at 3:00 PM, Landomatic said:

Mostly all of this for us.  Only we don’t track her with any of it.  Have had many ongoing conversations that started when she first got a phone that have basically been based on, “don’t give us a reason to put a tracker on your phone and we won’t.”  And so far, to our knowledge, she hasn’t.  She’s overall a pretty good kid (much better than I ever was).

But, all that aside, the best thing we ever did as parents with regard to the phone (maybe the best parenting move we’ve ever  made) has been “phone never goes in your room EVER.”  Nothing good can come from it.  She can be on it all she wants, just needs to be out where she’s not in the privacy of her room.  Phone lives in the kitchen.  She gets on it in the kitchen or in the family room.  It’s no different than having a boyfriend over.  We could literally come up with zero reason she would need it in her room.  And that’s been the norm for her in our house since pretty much day 1.  Stroke of genius on our part.

It’s almost crazy how simple and basic parenting 101 it has been.  When I hear parents who are struggling with their teens and their phone and I hear about how the kid stays up all night doing shit on the phone they shouldn’t be doing, I just laugh and shake my head.  Best advice I can give any parent with regard to phones.

For NYE, we went to a party with 4 other couples.  Two of the moms had their phones out constantly watching where their high school kids were.  I kept my yapper shut, which is a borderline miracle; but holy furk that just felt so unhealthy and unproductive from a parenting standpoint, not to mention the constant interruption of the games/ conversations we were having.  I know their kids are good kids, not having been in trouble in the past and that they treat people with respect.  I don't get the need for constant surveillance.

I'm sure we did it wrong but with our kids, when they got their phones- we told them we were not going to constantly watch over them, but we had to always have the passwords and they had to produce the phone immediately if we wanted to look at it, as we were footing the bill. There was no expectation of privacy. I think from about 7th grade through high school we checked 2-3 times on each kid.  It was never a big deal.

You either trust your kids, or you don't.  That sends a galactically important message to them.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I’m another non-tracker dad. I threaten sometimes but have only checked it a couple of times in the last 3 years.  My parents never swiped the nudie mags from under the mattress when I was a kid. They never listened in on my phone calls.  And I turned out to be an educated, productive, upstanding poster on this fine website... wait...  

My kids get good grades, have respectable friends, and get good reports from teachers. They’re doing everything I ask of them. My older one is highly dedicated to the sport he competes in and gets up in time for 6:30am practices for it 6 days week year round. He usually puts himself to bed long before i would have told him to.  He’s on the right path and he has earned some privacy. If he’s into a little mischief online now and then or has a colorful browser history it’s no worse than what I got away with as a teenager. 

 

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On 1/4/2020 at 12:31 AM, Updawg said:

Or they just get a burner phone and leave the tracking phone in a safe zone. Kids aren't dumb

My kids just recently told me this is what their friends whose parent is a major cybersecurity expert do mostly for their real social media accounts and not for the dummy ones set up for that parent to track.

Edited by ShaggyBevo RIP
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I think some parents forget what they and their friends were like when they were kids. Whenever I want to go apeshit on my kids, I take a minute to remember all the shit that we did and then I'm not so angry. At least they are not dead, which we should've been based on the immense number of stupid shit that we did.

And it's good sometimes for kids to rebel against authority. Do you want Ferris or Cameron as a kid?

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Ferris for sure.

The difference is the hyper sensitivity to punishing mistakes and the fact that dumb shit you do can stick with you forever.

To wit, the 13 yo son of a friend of mine who is now facing child porn charges because another 13 yo girl sent him tit pics. True story. That wasn’t a thing for us as kids.

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