For families

Sharing location with a teenager: agree the rules first

Location sharing works when everyone knows about it and has had a say. Settle these questions together before anyone turns it on.

VantageIQ Technologies · October 4, 2026 · 2 minute read

Say it out loud

Tell your teenager that you want to share locations, and why. Common Sense Media's advice to parents on monitoring is not to sneak, and to be wary of products that promise monitoring a child cannot see. It allows one exception: when you suspect something is seriously wrong.

Decide it together

The American Academy of Pediatrics says children are more likely to keep rules they helped to make. Where parental controls are used, it recommends combining them with open communication, as part of a family plan for online safety. An app does not replace the conversation.

Questions to settle

• What is it for? Getting home safely, pick-ups, emergencies. Write it down in one sentence.
• When is it on? All the time, or for the drive home, a trip or a night out.
• Who can see it? Parents only, or brothers and sisters too. Does it go both ways, so they can see you?
• What happens when it is off? A dead battery is not a broken rule. Agree what a missed check-in means before it happens.
• What is it never for? Checking up on friendships, or starting an argument about where they stopped on the way.
• When do we look at this again? Pick a date. What suits a 13 year old does not suit a 17 year old.

A dot on a map is not safety

Knowing where a phone is tells you where the phone is. It does not tell you who they are with or how they are. Keep asking the questions you asked before you could see the map.

Look at where the data goes

The Federal Trade Commission suggests talking with children about which apps need their location and when sharing makes sense, and sharing only with people they know in person. Common Sense Media advises strict privacy settings and no public location sharing, and notes that location apps also collect data for the companies that make them. We would add: check how long an app keeps location history.

As they grow up

What suits a 13 year old does not suit a young adult. A national poll from the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, published in June 2026, found that 52% of parents of 18 to 25 year olds said they track their young adult's location at least occasionally. Of those parents, 54% said they had given their child the option not to be tracked. Its authors say that agreeing when tracking is useful may reduce conflict and build trust. Our own view is that an adult should decide who sees where they are.