Quit tracking your kids’ phones when they head off to college

Many parents have a hard time letting go, especially in recent times. And with apps that can track their kids’ every move, they don’t have to let go anymore. Parents can maintain a digital tether indicating whether their kids are partying at a frat house or studying at the library, how fast they’re driving and even if their phone battery is running low.

The decision of whether to track college kids—through apps such as Life360 or a smartphone’s location-sharing settings—is polarizing. There’s the camp that believes tracking kids keeps them safe, allowing parents to send help when their children have been in car accidents or to guide them when they’ve gotten lost. And then there’s the camp that says it offers parents a false sense of security while stifling kids’ development.

Lupe Ruiz-Catala, a mother of two in Bergenfield, N.J., began using Life360 to keep tabs on her daughter, Victoria Catala, when she went to college. Victoria went to Greece her first semester of freshman year as part of a study-abroad program, and her mom freaked out. “I was sick to my stomach,” Ms. Ruiz-Catala recalls. “How would I keep her safe other than move to Greece with her?”

Ms. Ruiz-Catala looked into a number of apps but decided on Life360—a leader in the category, with more than 32 million monthly active users—because it could show her daughter’s location on a map, track how fast she was going in a car and report when her phone battery was low—which it frequently was.

Victoria says that she didn’t mind her mom knowing where she was but that her fretting was pointless. “It was the most ridiculous thing because it wasn’t like she could do anything about it,” she said.

What really bothered her, though, were her mother’s constant reminders to charge her phone. “My phone is always close to dying, and I get 50 billion texts every single time telling me to charge it,” she said.

Even when Victoria was back at Northeastern University in Boston, Ms. Ruiz-Catala says she woke up two to three times a night to look at her phone, only settling down to sleep when she saw that Victoria had made it back to her dorm room.

Victoria recalls riding in a car with a friend when her mom called to say her friend should slow down. “How ridiculous would I sound if I said to my friend, ‘My mom says we’re driving too fast’? It was embarrassing,” she said.

Although Victoria—now 20 years old and heading into her junior year—says her mom never used the app to punish her or restrict her from going places, she had enough of the surveillance. When she got a new iPhone a couple of months ago, she offered to share her location with her mom through the Find My app but asked to remove Life360, which provides far more detail. Ms. Ruiz-Catala agreed.

“I think Greece put things into perspective,” Victoria said. “I went to a different country and I survived.”

Still, Ms. Ruiz-Catala is unapologetic about tracking her daughter. “I believe kids do better when they understand what the parameters are,” she said, adding that as long as she pays the bills, her kids have to agree to her rules. When her 17-year-old son goes to college, she’ll install Life360 on his phone, too.

Mental-health experts say that all this tracking can hamper young adults’ ability to mature and that it signals to kids that the world is unsafe. “It’s letting fear drive the bus,” says Vanessa Elias, a certified parenting coach and mental-health advocate who endorses free-range parenting.

“Telling kids that we’re watching them, and that we want to know where they are in order to keep them safe, fuels fear in both kids and parents,” she said. “There is already an epidemic of anxiety among college students.”

A nationwide study of nearly 33,000 college students by a Boston University researcher found that half of the students last fall screened positive for depression and/or anxiety.

“We’ve always made Life360 opt-in, even for younger kids. The bottom line is if kids want to ‘trick’ Life360, they can,” Life360 Chief Executive Chris Hulls said. “So when kids go to college, it really is up to them about how they use it.”

He added, “What we find is that younger college kids have grown up in the smartphone era, and they actually want the connection to their parents. Life360 makes them feel safer, and parents naturally are less intrusive about it because there isn’t the ‘mom waiting up looking out the window’ stereotype to worry about.”

Mr. Hulls explained that many parents set up a place notification around a dorm or campus and receive an alert when their kids come and go, leading to fewer check-in calls. “The kids like it because they get that positive sense that their parents are still protecting them, but it is not intrusive,” he said.

Kids who are on Life360 can also track their parents’ locations—a setting that is turned on by default.

One evening, Sam Clarkson, a mom in Darwen, England, had gone to a wedding two hours from home and told her 19-year-old son that she, her husband and daughter would be staying the night. She told him he wasn’t allowed to have anyone stay over. But when Ms. Clarkson was unsatisfied with the Airbnb they had booked, she decided to drive home afterward instead.

When she was about 30 minutes from home, her son called, asking why Life360 showed her heading back. Even with the advance notice, he wasn’t able to get his drunk friends out of the house in time. He deleted the app soon afterward (with her blessing).

Some college students have made a dramatic show of their new app-free independence.

Beth McFadyen, a mother in Tewksbury, Mass., had all four of her children on Life360 when they were in high school. She and her husband told them they could decide whether to keep the app when they went to college. Her oldest daughter stuck with it until she graduated.

Their second oldest, Kendra, couldn’t wait to be done with the app. “I felt too controlled,” she said. After her parents moved her into her dorm at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, she walked them to the door and pulled out her phone. She made a show of deleting the app, then said, “Later, bitches.”

“I was joking. I knew I’d see them later that night for dinner—it wasn’t my last goodbye,” Kendra said. “But I felt a sense of independence when I deleted it. It was a big moment.”