A location app on her cell phone provided Angela Ladner of Jackson a sense of peace when her triplet daughters were inexperienced drivers.
She didn’t have to make any calls to the triplets to see if they had arrived where they were going but could just check the Life360 app. The app also offers crash detection and will send roadside assistance, something the Ladners never needed.
“It was a safety net for when they were traveling,” she said. “It wasn’t about snooping. They knew how to make good decisions about where they were going and what they were doing.”
Ladner continued to use the app when her daughters were undergraduates at the University of Mississippi.
“I could make certain that they were OK, getting up, moving around and going to class and that I wasn’t seeing them in some strange place,” she said. “I know it sounds like an invasion of privacy but as long as your parents are footing the bill, they should be able to make sure you’re safe.”
Now, two of Ladner’s daughters are in medical school at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and one works for a marketing firm, and their mother still uses the app.
Ladner checks the locations of her daughters so she can prevent calling them at the wrong time.
“I don’t want to call them when they’re in class or in an important meeting and risk having their phone go off,” she said. “And they can use it to see where I am.”
Many families use location apps to keep up with each other, and it’s not just parents with teens who want to monitor their driving or follow every move they make. The apps offer another way other than a phone call or text message to keep up with older adults who have cell phones.
Tommy Howington, a board certified psychiatric nurse practitioner at TrustCare, suggests parents with teens converse with them about the apps.
“You need to have open communication,” he said. “I can see where a teenager could think it’s too much parental control.”
Location apps aren’t all good or all bad, but it boils down to how the information they provide is taken into account, he said.
Life360 will provide information about how fast a driver is going and that could be useful to parents, he said. “An emergency can occur when someone is driving down a country road,” he said.
Howington believes parents who use a location app from just an “out to get you” punitive mindset will find that tough on family dynamics.
“If they’re used as just a disciplinary tool, then that family is going to have high blood pressure as opposed to using it as a monitoring tool,” he said.
The apps are not foolproof, Howington said. Teens can leave their cell phones in a location that would be pleasing to their parents, providing them with a false sense of security.
“Kids who are tech savvy could leave their cell phone behind and take an iPad with them for communication and not be where their parents think they are,” he said.
Michele Markow, director of learning diversity for the Middle and Upper Schools at Jackson Academy, said location apps have been useful for her family.
“When both of my children got a cell phone, we started using Find My app,” she said.
Markow said when her son, now a senior at JA, turned 16 and obtained a driver’s license, she and her husband, Mark Markow, vice president and producer at Ross & Yerger Insurance, downloaded Life360. “We go back and forth and use both apps,” she said.
Markow, who has never caught her son in a location where he should not be, said the apps can make life a little easier.
“I can look at it, see if he is on the way home and if he is near Kroger and then call and ask him to pick up whatever we might need,” she said.
She also uses the app to gauge when her son might be home when he is playing golf. “I can see what hole he’s on and have an idea about when he’ll be coming home,” she said.
Markow said she follows this general rule with location apps: “I try not to hover but use it from the aspect of safety,” she said.
She has not set up notifications in Life360, so she automatically knows her son’s location. “I don’t want a notification all the time,” she said.
Allison Peeples of Madison relies on Life360 every now and then to check on her sons, one of whom is a student in the clinical psychology Ph.D. program at the University of Louisville and the other who is a junior majoring in architecture at Mississippi State University.
“I got it when my oldest son got his driver’s license,” said Peeples, who is employed as a registered nurse. “We started to monitor his driving. It’s not accurate but it will give you an idea of if they are speeding.”
Peeples said she and her husband, Trip, who is the chief financial officer for Magnolia Health Plan, still have Life360 on their phones but turn to it if their sons do not return their text messages.
“We just want to know they’re OK,” she said. “I rarely use it unless I just can’t reach them.”
Peeples said she and her husband also use the app to check on each other.
A runner who often gets a workout in during the early morning hours in her neighborhood, Peeples likes knowing that her husband can use the app to see that she is on her training route.
She also likes the ability to know when her husband’s workday has ended without making a call. “I’ll check on my husband to see if he’s left work,” she said.
In her travels for work, Ladner finds the flight detection that Life360 provides valuable “When I’m traveling, the people in my circle, my immediate family, will get a notice that my plane has landed, which is cool,” she said.
Both Ladner’s mother and mother-in-law had the app installed on their cell phones. “We wanted to know their whereabouts, that they were up and moving and safe,” she said, noting she also would call them.
Markow convinced her mother to download the Find My app on her cell phone when her mother was traveling with her father during bad weather. “I wanted to know they had made it to where they were going,” she said.
Her parents returned home, Markow said, and her mother decided she did not need the app. “She unshared it,” she said.
