Marisa Geary, Staff Writer

Life 360 is an app that allows parents to have access to their child’s location when they’re not home. The app provides loads of information, from the speed of the vehicle the child is in to the battery percentage of the child’s phone. The program even goes so far as to give all family members a notification when someone leaves home. Although this concept seems useful for a parent, NHS students aren’t too fond of its extensive features. 

NHS Sophomore Olivia Connor and her family had previously used the app, and she wasn’t happy with the lack of independence it gave her. “It doesn’t give the child freedom, since it tracks your location it might teach your kids to try and figure out how to be sneaky” she said. This makes sense, given the stereotype that kids with strict parents are far more likely to go against their parents’ advice.

The extent of the surveillance that this app gives parents may scare children into hiding their whereabouts, even if they may not be doing anything particularly bad. Because they’re afraid that their parents might be angry with them for not going where they said they’d go, a child is more likely to make up lies to get themselves out of an otherwise easy-to-explain situation.

Some teenagers don’t absolutely detest it, they just feel as if it might be unnecessary. NHS Junior Brianna LeBlanc states that “I tell my parents where I’m going most of the time anyways; it’s just more accessible for them, so they constantly check up on it.” 

In this sense, the app may simply be a burden for the parent. Even if their child does well with notifying what they plan on doing, a parent who cares about their child can easily become obsessed with making sure their child is safe, causing them to frequently look at the app.

NHS Senior Stephen Grenham argues that children see the need for the app as an insult, claiming, “I think it’s more like they feel offended by a lack of trust from their parents.” In this sense, the monitoring that this app allows causes teenagers to feel as if their parents don’t trust them, which can be degrading. 

Teenagers feel an invasion of privacy from this app, along with a lack of trust from their parents. The software allows for the child’s location to be seen at all times, whether the phone is on or off, and this normally results in miscommunication and arguments between a child and their parent. 

NHS Junior Joseph Demarais, when talking about his parents’ use of the app, claims, “I’ll come home and they’ll question where I was because I wasn’t at the specific place I said I was going to...I’m a 17-year-old, I’m not in grade school.”

Even if there were a slight change of plans from what the child told their parents previously, it looks as if the child is lying if the parent sees them at a different location from where they said they would be going. This causes unnecessary arguing and an immense amount of stress for a parent. 

Overall, the app seems to create distance between a parent and a child, rather than allow them to be closer. In this sense, developing a closer bond with the child by easing up on them may be a simpler way to start to trust them.