The Dark Side of Life360
That warm and fuzzy feeling of always being watched... (Part Three in a Series on Agency, Risk, and What Parents Often Get Wrong)
We say it’s about safety. But beneath the soft tone of digital parenting and real-time school intervention lies a harder reality: a generation raised under watch — not by distant authoritarian states, but by well-meaning parents, schools, and algorithms designed to care. What happens to kids when being observed becomes the baseline condition of growing up? What kind of person does the panopticon child grow up to be?
These two parallel perspectives explore those questions. The first, from an adult’s perspective, is a critique of how surveillance reshapes development. The second is a student’s quiet acceptance of the world that surveillance has built.
The Watchtowers
The adult’s view — surveillance as a culture, not a tool
One of my Public Forum debate duos was practicing in an after-school scrimmage and things were going south fast. They hadn’t prepped, frustrations bubbled over, and one of the pair typed into a shared Google Doc: “This sucks — I think I’m going to KMS.”
The next day, Counseling pulled her out of class. The school’s surveillance software had flagged the phrase, pinged a human moderator, and triggered a notification on her counselor’s phone. When I asked the student if it bothered her that her school had become Big Brother, she said:
“No. It just shows they care about me.”
That response haunts me — not because it’s unreasonable, but because it’s entirely logical. We’ve trained a generation to feel safe when watched and anxious when they’re not. Between Gaggle, GoGuardian, Lightspeed at school and Life360 and Find My at home, kids are growing up in an architecture of care-through-control. Most teens no longer rebel against it; they’ve adapted to it.
Surveillance has become the new scaffolding of modern childhood. In classrooms, Gaggle and Lightspeed parse student writing for keywords associated with self-harm, bullying, violence, or sexual content. Instead of spending money on an investment in social workers and counselors — people who are trained to detect this same behavior — student monitoring apps claim that schools can rely on these tools to do it with algorithms. These systems don’t assess tone or intent — they flag language. A moment of sarcasm, a joke typed into a shared Doc, an angsty lyric pasted into a private folder — any of it can trigger a counselor alert.
At home, Life360 picks up where the school network ends, an unchoreographed but seamless hand-off. A child’s location, movement, battery level, and driving behavior are all tracked in real time. A late arrival, a diverted route, a phone that dies unexpectedly — all generate notifications. Parents now know within 30 seconds if their child’s car makes an unexpected stop on the way to soccer practice or Chipotle or Disha’s house.
We tell ourselves this is about safety, but it’s just as much about control. The tools were built to flag emergencies — accidents, active shooters, suicide ideation, kidnappers — and parents and the kids rationalize them as such. But now they’re policing not just normal developmental turbulence, but mere, normal behavior. They respond to discomfort and traffic delays like they’re crises. The line between safety and supervision has been erased, and we’ve stopped noticing.
We are raising children who never get to be alone — and we’re calling it parenting. Psychologist Jean Twenge has shown that today’s teens are less likely than any previous generation to drive, work part-time jobs, go on dates, or spend unsupervised time with friends. The trend started before smartphones, but tech has made it seamless. There’s no longer a break between child and adult spaces — everything is mediated.
Peter Gray points out that free play — the unstructured, unsupervised kind — is where children develop emotional regulation, creativity, and resilience. But how do you experiment with freedom when there’s a tracking notification every time you leave the house? How do you learn interpersonal navigation when your social environment is algorithmically scrubbed for “concerning language”?
In theory, we want to raise capable, independent adults. But in practice, we’ve created a model where young people don’t make decisions — they receive alerts. They don’t assess risk — they avoid triggering a notification. Even when nothing “goes wrong,” they’re being conditioned to seek permission rather than to explore.
What’s more, some teens have come to see this as the cost of freedom — and willingly pay it. One student told me, “If losing some battery lets my parents trust me and go wherever, then it’s worth it.” Another said she lets her parents track her because it reassures them — and that reassurance buys her more independence. This is trust by transaction, autonomy leased back in exchange for visibility.
The most unsettling thing about all this isn’t that we’re watching kids. It’s that they’re grateful for it. We’ve built systems to track, flag, and intervene — and instead of resisting, many young people interpret it as love. To be observed is to be cared for. To be geofenced is to be safe.
When I was younger, the idea of a teacher or parent silently watching me outside of school would’ve felt invasive, even dystopian. But now, that surveillance is constant — and emotionally endorsed. I’ve had students thank counselors for pulling them aside after a Gaggle alert, not because they were in danger, but because they were “seen.”
We’ve replaced developmental challenge with algorithmic supervision. The safety net is no longer invisible. It’s in your pocket, on your lock screen, in the tabs you don’t open. And when you know you’re always being watched — not by a malevolent state, but by a well-meaning adult — you don’t just behave differently. You become different.
What kind of person does the panopticon child grow up to be, knowing they are always watched by an adult ready to swoop in and save them from their mistakes and other dangers?
The Watched
The student’s view — surveillance as background noise
I didn’t mean it. "KMS" is just something you say when stuff sucks. They pulled me out of second block and made me talk to Counseling. I wasn’t mad or scared — I figured it would happen. My friends were like, "Bruh, you got flagged." It’s not even a big deal. Everyone knows the system’s watching. You just learn how to talk around it.
It’s just part of school now. I know there are filters and alerts and stuff. Some people say it’s creepy, but no one really thinks about it unless you get flagged. Like that time during a mock debate, I accidentally typed to my partner "this round sucks so bad I’m gonna kms" in our shared Google Doc. Next day, counselor's office. I wasn’t surprised. Even though I didn’t mean it seriously, they were just doing their job.
I’ve learned not to type stuff like that — or if I need to vent, I say it out loud. Some people still get flagged, but most of us know how to keep below the line. We don’t write what we really feel. Not in Docs, not in emails, not where someone might be reading.
It’s kind of the same at home. I don’t need to tell my parents where I am — Life360 already does that. If I leave swim practice early, I get a text before I get to the parking lot. I used to try turning it off, but it wasn’t worth the hassle. Easier to just not do anything unexpected.
I used to hate Life360. It drained my battery and made me feel like I was always on a leash. But at some point, I realized: if giving up some battery lets my parents relax and gives me more freedom, I’ll take that deal. That’s how trust works now — I let them track me, and they let me go.
I’m 17 and I’ve never had a job. Not because I couldn’t, but because my parents said it might mess with school. I started driving lessons, but they said they felt better just dropping me off. And honestly, I don’t go many places anyway. Most of my life is online. Group chats, Discord, Netflix, Amazon. I don’t really need to leave the house.
People talk about independence like it’s this big thing you get all at once. But it doesn’t feel like that. I don’t feel unsafe, and I don’t feel free either. It’s just how it is.
It’s not that I feel controlled. It’s more like… I don’t think about it. The apps, the alerts, the people checking in — that’s background noise now.
Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to not be watched. Not forever. Just for, like, a day.
Just for a day.
But would I even know what to do with that kind of space?
What happens when one generation sees surveillance as a structure of care, while the next grows up not knowing anything else? These parallel perspectives don’t resolve the contradiction — they sit in it. We are building children for safety, but not for sovereignty. And we may not understand the cost until long after the notifications stop.
Recommended Reading: Play Makes Us Human “#52. Children's Rights and Adults' Wrongs”
In this letter, Peter Gray discusses the overreach of parental control and its implications on children's rights. A commenter notes the prevalence of tracking apps like Life360 among college students, highlighting concerns about privacy and autonomy.