Lead
Attach a GPS tag to your child and a dot appears on a map. It is natural to want to trust that dot as your child's current location — but that trust only holds under specific conditions. In ideal urban conditions the margin of error is five to fifteen meters; inside a building it expands to twenty to a hundred meters or more; underground or in a mountain area, the device barely functions at all.
Location data is not a tool that gives you "your child's precise, real-time position." The more useful question is: knowing those limits, what can it actually do for you?
The Reality of GPS Technology
Most child-oriented GPS devices use A-GPS: Assisted GPS: location technology combining satellite signals with Wi-Fi and cell tower data for faster, more accurate indoor and urban positioning (Assisted GPS), which combines satellite positioning with Wi-Fi access point and cell tower data to estimate location. Outdoors in the open, error can fall to a few meters. In dense urban areas, interference from signal blockage and reflection off buildings brings practical accuracy to around ten to fifteen meters.
The larger problem is indoors. When a child enters a friend's apartment building, the GPS either shows a position somewhere within the building footprint or holds the last known outdoor coordinate. The same degradation occurs inside school buildings, underground shopping areas, and train carriages. In other words, the situations where a parent most wants confirmation of where a child is are precisely the situations where the data is least reliable.
Then there is the practical issue of battery. Children forgetting to charge the device, or leaving the tracker buried at the bottom of a backpack, is not unusual. Leaver (2017) examined what he called the "everyday lapsing" of digital surveillance tools and pointed to the gap between the level of reliability parents expect from these systems and how they actually operate [1].
AirTags and Bluetooth Trackers
Bluetooth Low Energy trackers such as AirTags do not provide precise GPS location. Instead they "report" their position by piggybacking on other nearby Apple devices. In densely populated cities, where such devices are abundant, update frequency can be high. In quieter suburbs or rural areas, coverage drops.
These devices carry a documented social problem: misuse for stalking. In 2023, Apple added an alert system to notify people without iPhones when an unknown tracker may be following them. That response to the concern of "someone might have attached a tracker to me without my knowledge" raises a structurally equivalent question about attaching one to a child. A child carrying a tag without knowing about it is, technically, in the same situation as a person being tracked without consent.
The distinction between surveillance and safety-checking depends not on the technology but on how communication around it is designed. Telling a child "I'd like you to carry this so I can check on you if something goes wrong" is meaningfully different from doing it quietly. Holloway, Green, and Livingstone (2013) argued that whether digital tools are disclosed and explained to children matters for the development of the child's autonomy [2].
Safety vs. Autonomy
A longitudinal study by Pettit and colleagues (1999) found that unsupervised after-school time was associated with behavioral problems depending heavily on age, neighborhood environment, and the degree to which parents actually knew where the child was and what they were doing [3]. The critical variable was not unsupervised time per se, but informed oversight: active parental awareness of a child's whereabouts and activities, shown to be more protective than passive GPS monitoring — which is a different thing from GPS tracking.
A structure in which rules are agreed on, return times are committed to, and the child knows they can phone if something goes wrong may offer more robust safety design than a map with a dot. Blum-Ross and Livingstone (2016) noted the risk that technology-mediated surveillance substitutes for children's capacity to develop autonomous problem-solving, and argued that "gradually stepping back from monitoring tools" needs to be designed into the plan from the start [4].
When you do use a tracking tool, framing it to your child as "something we can check if there's a problem" rather than "I can always see where you are" is more consistent with the long-term goal of building autonomy.
Practical Priority: The Phone Call
Before location data, secure the ability to make a phone call. A means for a child to reach a parent or trusted adult by voice in an emergency is more practically valuable than precise location information.
When choosing a child's phone or device, the first thing to check is call quality and signal coverage — not GPS features. After that comes the groundwork that no app replaces: walking the route to school together, knowing the time it takes, knowing alternate routes and their timings. These are things that a digital tool cannot substitute for.
What You Can Do Starting Tomorrow
- Calibrate expectations: Use GPS location as a rough sense of the area, not a precise current position. Understand that indoors, accuracy degrades
- Explain before you deploy: If you use a tracking device, tell the child why first. Describe it as "a tool we can check if there's a problem"
- Prioritize phone capability: Secure "can make a phone call" before worrying about GPS precision
- Walk the route together: Walk the commute to school or the path to after-school activities with your child. This is the foundation of safety that does not depend on a battery
- Plan to scale back: Sketch out how you will reduce reliance on the monitoring tool as the child grows — making that plan from the beginning is part of the design
Summary
GPS tags and children's phones are not tools that "guarantee a child's safety." They are supplementary tools that give a rough sense of what is happening. Used with accurate expectations of their limits, they have value. Treated as a substitute for other kinds of safety design, they create an expectation gap. Safe design for a child navigating the world independently is not completed by technology alone. It functions when communication, agreed-on rules, and the gradual promotion of autonomy are built alongside whatever device is in the child's pocket.
References
- Leaver T. Intimate surveillance: normalizing parental monitoring and mediation of infants online. Social Media Soc. 2017;3(2):1–10. doi:10.1177/2056305117707192
- Holloway D, Green L, Livingstone S. Zero to Eight: Young Children and Their Internet Use. London: LSE; 2013.
- Pettit GS, Bates JE, Dodge KA, Meece DW. The impact of after-school peer contact on early adolescent externalizing problems is moderated by parental monitoring, perceived neighborhood safety, and prior adjustment. Child Dev. 1999;70(3):768–778. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00054. PMID: 10368920
- Blum-Ross A, Livingstone S. Families and screen time: current advice and emerging research. Media Policy Brief 17. London School of Economics; 2016.
- Harries T. Feeling secure or being secure? Why it can seem better not to bother with the insecure technology. Technol Soc. 2008;30(2):116–130. doi:10.1016/j.techsoc.2007.12.009
- National Police Agency (Japan). Police White Paper 2023 — Child Safety. Tokyo: NPA; 2023.