Target Located

Newsletter 2024-09-09

It’s 11:00 p.m.. Do you know where your children are? That judgmental TV commercial, like cable TV itself, has been rendered obsolete. I know exactly where my children are. They carry a GPS tracking device with them wherever they go. It’s their favorite toy in the world.

I’m quite basic with how I create a surveillance state around my children. I use Google Maps. I went into the settings on my kids’ phones and made them all share their locations with me. It might not give me their exact coordinates, but it will get me within a house or two. If I start banging on doors, I’ll quickly figure out which place belongs to the friend hosting the sleepover and which one belongs to a confused neighbor. Hopefully that neighbor doesn’t have a big dog or mace.

There are more invasive apps that could give me a closer fix, but they’re not worth the trade-offs. On a trip to an amusement park earlier this year, the school group hosting it recommended that chaperones download a real-time location program. It could ping where kids were to within a few feet. That constant pulse of information was energy intensive. It drained ten percent of my battery in just a few minutes. It doesn’t matter how accurate your location data is if your phone dies and you can’t call anyone for help. I suspect the app was designed by serial killers or bears. The point was moot since I was so fun my group wanted to stay right next to me the entire time. Also, I was the only one with a credit card. Those overpriced snow cones wouldn’t pay for themselves.

I can’t count on my children sticking around me for food all the time. I need to know where they are when they’re not here. The location sharing feature on Google Maps has been a godsend. It has allowed me to be a slightly lazier parent. My big push since the start of the summer has been to get my kids to ride their bikes to places so I don’t have to take them. Dropping them off three-quarters of a mile away doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is. First of all, I have to even remember that they have a thing. That’s a problem when the number of things they have is nearly infinite and the number I can keep track of at any given moment is less than one. My policy is that the kids have to remember their own activities, which leads to situations where they tell me in a panic that they need a ride with about one minute notice. My minivan has left more than a few burnout marks on the street in front of my house. The situation is worse for pickups. Sometimes, I seem like a neglectful parent because I show up at the scheduled stop time only to find out that things unexpectedly ended fifteen minutes early. That’s better than the alternative, when activities run long and I’m stuck in the parking lot for an extra fifteen minutes. I might not have anything better to do, but I’d still rather waste my time at home instead of burning gas idling in a parking lot. Bikes solve all of those problems. The kids can get themselves to their events whenever they want, and they can come home the moment they’re done. On their travels there and back, I can see where they are thanks to an invasive network of satellites. There’s no need for me to call them to see if they arrived safely. That dot on the grid will tell me everything I need to know.

Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash

Location sharing isn’t just for kids. My wife Lola and I also use it with each other. She doesn’t need to text to see where I am in my circuit of errands. She can see that I’m halfway between the grocery store and the other grocery store that has chicken for two cents less per pound. My life is full of thrills. Likewise, I don’t need to text Lola to ask if she’s still at work or if she’s on her way home and forgot to text me first. Not that I have anything I need to hide before she gets here. There definitely wasn’t a pig obstacle course set up in the dining room. I merely need to know when to start dinner. I can check her location to see if she’s still at the lab or if she’s in transit. Like any good husband, I want to make sure those frozen chicken nuggets are piping hot when she walks through the door.

Sharing our locations is good for more than perfecting the most basic meals known to man. It also keeps us safe in emergencies. Saturday, Betsy was an hour away at a huge cross country meet. I can’t tell you the name of the town, but I can give you the GPS coordinates. I checked throughout the morning to see if she was on her way back yet. Sports and other events that need bags of gear require me to handle pickup and drop off duties like in the old days. In the early afternoon, we got a surprise message. Betsy’s bus broke down on the side of the interstate. I pulled up the app and pinpointed her exact location. She was still forty-five minutes away. Luckily, my intervention wasn’t necessary. The middle school team, which attended the same huge meet, had a bus coming up behind them. The kids walked in the ditch in groups of four from one bus to the other, then rode home together. The fact that I knew Betsy’s precise location did nothing to protect her, but it did make it seem like I was actively parenting rather than just waiting around for someone else to solve the problem. Being a good parent is all about the illusion of effort. I’m an expert at making things look harder than they need to be.

My GPS tracking scheme is less effective with the younger two children. They enjoy wholesome, old-fashioned fun, which is bad for new-fangled monitoring. My ten-year-old, Lucy, and eight-year-old, Waffle, have multiple friends within a two block radius. We often hear tiny knocks on the door, prompting one or more children to disappear outside. They ride their bikes up and down the sidewalk and play in nearby backyards. They never go far, but they don’t take their phones. They can’t hold them while steering handlebars. That deficiency requires me to act like a dad in the 1950s. When it’s dinner time, I can’t simply pull up their location on an app. I have to go outside and look for them, and by look, I mean yell. I stand on the porch and shout their names until someone shows up. Hopefully, it’s one of my kids, but I’m not picky. I’m required to feed the right number of mouths, but not necessarily the right ones. All that matters is that, by the end of dinner, those perfectly prepared chicken nuggets are gone.

Waffle is especially at a disadvantage in the tracking department. Her phone doesn’t have a SIM card. At first, we gave her Lola’s old one and configured it for Wi-Fi only. That meant we could only tell where she was when she was already in the house. According to Google Maps, my youngest daughter has never gone outside. Not long after she got it, that already limited phone broke completely. For a while, Waffle was without any device. Those were sad times. I’m sure that’ll be the topic of two or three angry chapters in her eventual memoir. Then our board game friend, Delilah, gave Waffle an ancient iPhone she didn’t use anymore. It was the same model found in Tutankhamun’s tomb when excavating the pyramids. Waffle loves it. It lets her watch YouTube and use simple apps, like Kids Messenger. I can communicate with her when she’s on a different floor of the house, but it still does no good outside. Her phone is always indoors. Often, that’s the hardest place of all to find her.

Summoning all four kids for dinner requires a mix of high-tech and low-tech options. First, I shout indoors. Then, I send a text in the family thread. If I don’t get enough children, I go outside and yell. After that, I send out search parties. Waffle can fall asleep anywhere at any time. That’s partially related to the phone itself. More than once, I’ve caught her staying up at all hours of the night to watch the same stupid video for the hundredth time. Then again, she used to fall asleep on wooden chairs and uncarpeted floors long before she had any device. The girl is blessed with a clear conscience that lets her immediately fall asleep without a single intrusive thought. If only we could all be so perfect. Often, she’s the only kid missing from dinner. Her sisters will claim she’s not outside, and she won’t answer the family Kids Messenger thread. That’s when we have to spread out and search. We’ve found her in all sorts of places, but the most common is fast asleep underneath her bed. She’s the inverse of Snoopy, who snoozed on top of his dog house. Why use that nice soft mattress when abrasive carpet will do? She’ll never need to use one of those sleep tracking apps. As soon as she closes her eyes, she’s in a coma.

Waffle is about due for her own all-intrusive, constantly monitoring phone. Currently, Lucy and Waffle go to the same elementary school. Lucy is an old and wise fifth grader. Next year, she’ll be at the middle school, and Waffle will be at the elementary school all alone. She’ll need a communication device in case something goes wrong getting on or off the bus. As a bonus, we’ll finally be able to find her inside the house. It’s a feature built into real phones. A few months ago, my twelve-year-old, Mae, lost hers when she was at home. She and Lola tore the place apart looking for it. Google Maps said it was at our address. Unfortunately, Mae left it on silent, so they couldn’t call it. When I got home, I pulled out a secret weapon. I used a parent control app that could force the phone to beep, even when the volume was turned all the way down. In less than a minute, we found it downstairs under a footstool in a room where Mae swore she hadn’t used it. If Waffle has a similar phone, we could locate her inside the house, no matter where she collapsed from exhaustion. It will make parenting her that much easier. It’ll be more than worth the money it costs for that extra line. I’m not paying for data; I’m paying for peace of mind. Take that, pushy 1980s TV commercials.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time. 

James