Why I Cyber Stalk My Kids

While sane parents tend to celebrate their kids’ return to school every Monday morning by sneaking back to bed for an extra hour under the duvet, or enjoying a leisurely lunch, I am glued to my phone.

Every few minutes I find myself frantically refreshing the two most used apps on my phone, Find My Phone and Life 360, to check my 15-year-old twin sons’ progress as they travel across London unsupervised. 

I know, I know – I sound like the worst sort of neurotic tiger mum, and I swear that I have tried to stop, but I can’t. My name is Nadia and I’m addicted to stalking my own children.

In a bid to distract myself, I get on with work, drag myself to gym classes and do my best to keep the house tidy, but always with my phone inches away – just in case one of them calls to admit they are lost, or worse, the school to say they haven’t turned up.

Tracking children’s journey to school

Harry and Felix’s 30-minute journey to their secondary school requires changing trains at a busy station at the height of rush hour. And while this may sound fairly straightforward, when I did a dry run with them before they started their first term it was a disaster. 

After taking a cursory glance at the information board, they let three trains sail out of the station with a shrug – convinced that none of them were going the right way (they all were). And then, despite promising his phone was fully charged, Harry’s battery died.

So much for our confidence-building exercise. It did nothing but destroy mine, and any faith I may have had in my supposedly streetwise teens. They swore they had figured the journey out, and they would be absolutely fine without me breathing down their necks.

I came home a gibbering wreck, and lay awake imagining the phone calls I would inevitably receive from police as far afield as Brighton or Peterborough if they hopped on the wrong train and didn’t bother to look up from their phones until it reached the end of the line.

Of course, I wanted to go with the boys – just to be sure – but when I made the suggestion, the looks of sheer squirming horror told me all I needed to know. The last thing anyone wants is their embarrassing mother trailing them to the school gates. They begged me not to be so uncool, they would never live it down, they argued.

Would you cyber stalk your kids?

I relented, reluctantly, and waved them off with a golf ball-sized lump in my throat. By the time they reached the station, I had already checked their digital whereabouts three times. I had started to cyber stalk them. At one point the app came up with the message ‘No Location Found’ and my heart almost stopped.

That was three years ago, and I confess that I am still at it. My own mother mocks me mercilessly. ‘We never had any of this technology in your day’, she says, ‘and you always came home’. I am frequently accused of mollycoddling and helping to breed a generation of snowflakes not prepared for the harsh realities of life. My father usually mutters something about the nanny state, and Big Brother watching us. I can see their point, I am being overly cautious.

Without this level of surveillance at my fingertips, I would not have any choice but to wait it out, but the genie is out of the bottle. We can spy on our kids now – so we all do.

To be fair, the pair of them usually stick together as they zoom off without a backwards glance. Yet, there is something very grown-up about what is essentially a daily commute, so I struggle to accept that I can no longer be fully confident of their precise whereabouts at all times.

Letting go

Friends (who I know do the same) try to wean me off the habit with ‘helpful’ suggestions –from having microchips surgically inserted beneath their skin to tailing them from a distance wearing elaborate disguises.

In my defence, the excuse for all this deranged refreshing is that their much longed for independence came as a massive shock after years of Felix and Harry simply trotting around the corner to primary school, followed of course by endless months of homeschooling during the pandemic. 

As their teens crept up on us, I struggled to accept that it is time to let them make their own way in the big bad world. But I have to take a deep breath and a massive leap of faith that they will stay safe and street smart – after I have tracked their devices just one more time.