Millennials and Gen Zers are now helicopter parenting their parents

Sherry Howard was eating at an Italian restaurant in Ohio last year when her 28-year-old daughter called asking for some food from the restaurant. Howard was stunned — not at the request but at the fact that her daughter knew where she was.

It turned out she was being tracked — and had been for two years. Ever since Howard went on a solo trip to the Caribbean and her children activated Find My People on her phone, without her knowledge, they had been able to keep tabs on her location.

"It was laughable, but I was shocked," Howard, 53, told me. "To be honest, I didn't know how I felt about it."

It's a reversal from when Howard's children were young — before the age of smartphones — and she was the one keeping close tabs on them. "If 15 minutes went by and they weren't at home, then that's when the panic mode set in," she said. "Then I'm peeking out the window looking for them or I'm calling their friends."

She added: "They knew, 'Mom's going to freak out if I come home a little late.'" Her kids were rarely late.

Still, she was taken aback by being tracked unknowingly, so she took to TikTok to jokingly express her grievances. "This message is for all the grown kids out there," she said in the video. "Stop stalking your parents!" Her post racked up millions of views — and comments claiming to be from adult children who keep tabs on their parents' whereabouts poured in.

While parents have used location-tracking apps to keep an eye on their kids since the tech was invented, millennials and Gen Zers are now turning the all-seeing eye onto their parents. Among some families, tracking one another with apps like Apple's Find My and Life360 has become the norm. They see it as a fun way to stay connected and keep aging relatives safe. But when relationships turn awry or people start tracking others in secret, location sharing can easily turn into an invasion of privacy that family members come to resent.

These days, monitoring goes both ways. The kids who grew up with extra watchful parents are now carefully eyeing their parents' every move. The trackers have become the tracked.

Most of the people I spoke with felt that tracking their family members afforded some relief about their safety. A 2022 poll by The Harris Poll and The New York Times found that one in six respondents reported always having location sharing turned on, and 37% of those who said they used location-sharing apps (like Find My) said doing so made them feel safer. Just last year, Life360, one of the most prominent tracking apps, reported 50 million monthly active users, with downloads in the US doubling since 2021 as it gained popularity among Gen Zers. And increasingly, safety concerns are extending up a generation — kids are now concerned about their parents rather than just the other way around.

Growing up in West Virginia, Kacy Shafer had "pretty protective" parents, she said. She was an only child and her dad served in the military, so it was mostly her mother who laid down the rules.

"I wasn't allowed to just go have playdates wherever I wanted — she had to call the parents, make sure they would be there," Shafer, who is 29, said. While phones lacked tracking technology when Shafer was younger, her parents set hard limits on which hours she could use her first cellphone and whom she could contact.

Now as an adult, Shafer tracks her mom's phone. "It's kind of funny how the tables have turned," she said. As her 61-year-old mom has gotten older, checking where she is at least once a day offers some "peace of mind," Shafer says. Her mother doesn't mind the tracking. In fact, they check in on each other and joke about it a lot. "Sometimes, I just check to see where she's at, and I'm like: 'Hey, are you at the store? Can you grab me this?'" Shafer said.

Stephiney Foley, 37, also had strict parents. Her family immigrated to New York from Shanghai when she was 8. She described her mom and dad's parenting style as "very typical of overbearing parents, especially immigrant parents." Tracking technology wasn't around when Foley was a teen, but her parents still kept a close eye. "My mom is constantly on my back looking over my shoulders doing things, even when I was in high school," Foley told me.

Like Shafer, Foley now tracks her parents, who are in their 60s and 70s. It's typically a safety precaution when they travel. One time her mother got lost driving her RV in the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and Foley was able to help her navigate out of the park.

"The roles are kind of reversed now in a way that I am kind of the parent," she said. Tracking allows Foley, who lives in Seattle, to feel more connected to her Florida-based parents and feel empowered to help in emergencies.

Kelley Roebuck, a 46-year-old living in Illinois, installed a tracking app on her son's phone when he was in junior high school to know his whereabouts after he lost his phone twice. At first, it was just a way to keep track of his phone, but it's since morphed into a more central part of their lives. Her son, now 20, tracks her back.

"One day, I didn't come straight home and he called me, 'Mom, what are you doing at Cousin Erica's house?'" Roebuck told me. She described her son, who is also her only child, as "very protective of his friends and family." When she used to go out of town often, he would check in when he didn't see her at the hotel or her friend's house.

Roebuck and her son now track each other "evenly." When he is out late, she wants to make sure he's in a safe place. Even her son's best friend, whom Roebuck considers her "bonus son," wanted to share locations with her, so he was added to their Life360 plan in high school.

Years later, her son's friend called Roebuck when she was out late to check in on her. When she asked how he knew where she was, he reminded her he had the tracker.

"I was like, 'Oh, I forget y'all still had it," Roebuck said.

Not all adult children had neutral views on being tracked by their parents when they were younger. Gabrielle Lask, a 25-year-old only child, has been tracked by her mother since she got an iPhone at age 13. Though she said her mom was acting out of love and concern, she also described being tracked as "incredibly annoying and, at times, a total invasion of privacy."

"I was a very good kid, very trustworthy," Lask told me. "She just has really bad anxiety."

Lask described her mom as very overprotective; she would often text her about her whereabouts and what she was doing even though she was also tracking her location.

Now that she is older and living independently, Lask has started to push back. "You're not using this as a safety mechanism anymore," she recalled telling her mom a few years ago when she was really upset. "You're using it as an invasion of privacy." Lask temporarily blocked her mom from seeing her location, which she said made her mom "freak out."

"I basically said, 'I will put you back, but this cannot continue,'" Lask said. "'You have to use it as what it's meant to be used for.'"

The excessive concern didn't get passed down to Lask. She doesn't track her mom's location — and she doesn't have much interest in knowing it. "She doesn't go out much, and if she does, trust and believe, she is texting and calling me nonstop," she said. "I don't worry about her because she worries about me."

Dr. Kanchi Wijesekera, a clinical psychologist in California, said helicopter parenting through methods like intensive tracking makes kids feel "suffocating and that parents do not trust them." She said it could ultimately add strain to the relationship as kids grow older and start setting boundaries. If kids — and parents — don't feel listened to, it can drive a wedge between them.

Sometimes, though, those conversations can be transformative in a positive way. When Julianne Goldfinger was 15, her mom ordered paper copies of her texts from their cell provider. Her mom had been worried about how little she knew about Goldfinger's life now that she silently texted her friends — but it still felt like an invasion of privacy.

"I was old enough when she did that to kind of push back at her and say, 'You really broke my trust here,'" Goldfinger, now 35, told me. "That was a turning point — my mom realizing that I was growing up and needed some space."

Goldfinger and her parents now track each other's locations when they respectively travel, which doesn't bother her since she's been able to have open conversations with her mom.

"I've really come to find my mom to be more of my friend," Goldfinger said.

Increasingly, parents and their adult kids are staying in closer contact than generations past. One Pew Research study published in January found that over 70% of respondents with children ages 18 to 34 reported speaking with their kids at least a few times a week on the phone. And more parents are tracking their kids in college to help quell their anxiety about the separation.

It's a big shift from the weekly or monthly check-in phone calls that ruled parent-child relationships in the past. But many families like the extra interaction. For more people, location sharing is simply a way to stay connected.

After Howard got over the initial shock of being tracked without her consent, she started to understand the appeal of the tech and began following her children's locations, too.

"My one daughter, she went out of town just a couple of weeks ago, and I'm watching her come down I-75, and I'm thinking in my mind, 'She's driving awfully fast,'" Howard said. She added that the mutual tracking gives her peace of mind that her kids aren't in danger.

Wijesekera said that attitudes around tracking are shaped by trust and communication. "If they have a really close bond, it's easier to see those behaviors from a well-intentioned place versus a sign of their lack of trust and wanting to hover and force their decisions on us." Kids who grew up being accountable for their whereabouts don't necessarily look back on the memory negatively, so long as they feel their parents trusted them.

That's certainly true for Joy Loverde. The 72-year-old shares and tracks locations with both her 49-year-old daughter and her two adult grandchildren. "We jumped on it early on," Loverde, who lives in Illinois, told me. "It was just a matter of wanting to remain even closer."

Loverde raised her only daughter on her own, and they've stayed very close — now Loverde, her daughter, and her daughter's daughter all track one another. They do it partly to check in, and partly just to know more about one another's lives. "We laugh — we think it's really funny," Loverde said. "We're poking in and out all the time."

For families like theirs, it's simply a new kind of love language.

Julia Pugachevsky is a senior health reporter at Business Insider.

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