Would you microchip your children?
As more and more schools are banning smartphones, keeping track of youngsters can be hard, says Harry de Quetteville
FEATURE
As with almost everything, it can be tempting to believe that the French do it better. And childrearing is no different: over there, we are relentlessly told, les enfants are dressed beautifully, eat properly, behave nicely. Why can’t our screaming, food-throwing nightmares be more like them? So now that France is banning smartphones in schools, it is perhaps inevitable that two separate polls this week have shown a majority of British parents think we should follow suit.
It sounds like a no-brainer.
The only problem is that while, naturellement, we don’t want our children to be prey to cyber-bullying, inappropriate content and the sheer mind-dicing distraction of smartphones when they should be concentrating on lessons, we parents do like the comfort of knowing where the little blighters are. About a quarter of those polled said they would feel anxious if their children’s phones were banned altogether, believing that they should be allowed to carry them to and from school and use them in break-times.
When they’ve got a phone, you can call them. They can call you if they get in a spot of bother. And, for the more tech-minded parent, there are a host of apps that allow you to track your offspring and make sure, as they all head off back to school, that they do indeed make it to the bus stop safely. As Carolyn Bunting, chief executive of the child safety group Internet Matters, puts it, a phone brings “many digital challenges”. But, she adds, “it can give parents peace of mind”.
So is there a middle ground? Or rather, a way we parents get to have it all our own way: reassurance for us, with none of the smartphone angst or digital disturbance for them?
It seems there is. As an increasing number of schools frown on phones, parents are now turning to GPS trackers. “Some worry because they are sending their children a distance to get to school and find it hard to be out of contact,” says a parent from Shoreditch Park Academy, part of the City of London chain of eight schools, which has banned phones. “I can see why they’re tempted by GPS trackers.”
Clip one on to your little darling’s satchel or jacket, or slip it under the insole of their school shoe. Open an app on your smartphone and a reassuring little blue dot will appear, notifying you of their whereabouts.
“We’ve been selling children’s trackers for about 16 months and we’ve seen an exponential growth, as the academic climate has turned against smartphones,” says Miles Waghorn, founder of Tech Silver, which specialises in tracking devices. “GPS trackers are more schoolfriendly and we now sell thousands. The market is huge. We’ve got tracker watches, insoles, belts, you name it.”
They are not just for older children who travel without their parents. A tracker would have been useful in the de Quetteville family this week when, on the last day of the summer holidays, we took our two boys, aged four and five, to the park. After helping one off his bike, we turned to find that the other was missing.
Every parent knows what it feels like in that split second as you search the foreground from left to right while, inside your head, alarm bells are going off. With every second that passes, you know that the problem – if there is a problem – will only be getting worse. For the truly paranoid, that’s when the delusions fire up. What if he hasn’t wandered away, but is being led by someone? How much easier would things have been if our little monster had even a basic tracker watch, which can be found online for a mere £30. Or one of the cheery ladybird clips that emit a 95db alarm if a child moves too far away. Or those with a feature allowing users to “geo-fence” zones, marking out areas on a map and receiving alerts if their charges stray beyond the boundaries.
The array of devices on offer is endless – an Orwellian range that is not to everyone’s liking. Matthew Rice, director of data privacy safety group Open Rights, believes that giving in to the temptation to track your children just “normalises monitoring and instils in children an anxiety that they live in an increasingly dangerous world that is not backed up by the evidence”.
Even Justine Roberts, founder of the online platform Mumsnet, adds that many will “find the idea of constant monitoring a little creepy”.
Technology, she says, “has a way of throwing up parenting conundrums in the grey area between being responsible for your children and invading their privacy”.
That shows no sign of putting off many parents. “Some of our clients are ultra-high net worth individuals who consider their children abduction risks,” says Waghorn. “They frequently ask me if we can implant tracker chips under the skin.”
The answer is, for the moment at least, no: GPS trackers require batteries that would be far too large.
Even so, back in the park there came a moment when we would have happily chipped our boy. Then, up bobbed his little face.
“Well done,” my wife said. “How did you spot us?” “I just looked for your coat,” he replied.
For some reunions, it seems, you don’t need a dot in pulsating blue, so much as a jacket in Hi-de-hi! yellow.