I Begged My Parents To Track My Location at 16 & It Changed My Life

We have a saying in my very large, very Italian-American family: “I’d rather be paranoid than oblivious. Always be aware.” I was groomed to be paranoid, to look over my shoulder and scan the rooms I entered. It’s an exhausting life, filled with second guesses and calculations when you go to get your morning coffee. But when I was a teenager, I took an extra step in the caution department and ended up begging my parents to track me; and I’m convinced it saved my life.

While having your parents force the Life360 app on you and tracking all of your social media habits may be the norm now, it definitely wasn’t 10 years ago. Take it back to 2015: I was a junior in high school, experimenting with eyeliner and different eyebrow shapes. “Uptown Funk” and “Trap Queen” were blasting on every radio station, and Tumblr fashion inspo was alive and well. But in 2015, it was a time filled with many unknowns.

But let’s take it back a bit to the 1980s. My mother went through significant trauma in her teens, and while it’s not my place to tell her story, I can tell you that it influenced her parenting strategy as the mom of a teen daughter. Truthfully, my mother didn’t trust anyone, especially people my age. She’d ask for their names, phone numbers, a photo of them, and their license plate numbers. My father was also the anxious type, and would need me to send all the information to the group chat ASAP. It mortified me.

When I turned 16 back in 2014, like most kids, I started hanging out with a not-so-great crowd. I’ll put it to you bluntly, there was a lot of drugs, a lot of drinking, and a lot of random grown adults that would randomly hang out with us. It was a time of bending the truth to my parents, and even to myself, but at 16, you think nothing can touch you.

Now, I grew up with true crime and horror movies. My father would frequently show me Dario Argento films, and cheesy 80s films where the degenerate kids got punished for being who they were: teenagers. With my late grandmother, she’d always have Dateline on, looking over the details of the case and theorizing who the killer was.

Even in my compromised state of mind, with a bunch of people who were also not fully there, I could hear my parents’ voices in the back of my mind. The Datelines and Sleepaway Camp movies kept playing in my head. One wrong move, one wrong swerve on the road, and it could all be over.

Growing up in Florida made me very aware of my mortality, and as depressing as it sounds, I genuinely thought I’d be dead as a teenager.

While I was sick of the random phone calls from my parents, and trying to covertly take selfies to send to them, I needed them to know where I was, in case, God forbid, something happened. After so, so much deliberating, I decided to tell my parents, or rather begged my parents, to put a tracker on my phone.

We were all in the living room, my dad finishing up some work and my mom reading one of her historical fiction books, when I blurted out: “I want y’all to put a tracker on my phone!”

They looked at each other from across the room before looking at me. Eyebrows raised, my mom stared at me before finally responding with: “Of course. What brought this up?”

You may think, “Why didn’t they force that to begin with?” Well, like I said, tracking phones for your kids wasn’t the norm, it was considered a huge no-no, and even seemed like it crossed the line to my anxious parents. But today, that’s clearly not the case. And back then, it was me asking for it, not them demanding it.

Looking back, I wish I had told them all of it: the sketchy people, the close calls, but what I ended up saying was something along the lines of “You worry so much anyway, and this could help eliminate the worry!”

But the reality was that, to me, it was a safety net. They’d always know where I was at all times, places I trusted and ones I feared every step in. Even when I was annoyed, when I thought I was an adult at 16, it was almost like a security blanket. If I genuinely felt scared, I could send the SOS message and they would know exactly where I was.

When you’re a teenager, you don’t think a party or a meeting in the woods could be the last thing you do. You think you’re too young to have anything bad happen to you, and while a part of me felt that, a bigger part of me wanted that safety net.

Shockingly, my parents and I argued a lot less after the tracker was installed. They always knew where I was, and yes, of course, I’d fib about who I was with or why I was at particular places sometimes, but when I was petrified, I knew to send that SOS message.

Now, how did it save my life? Well, after a while, the partying got tiring. The drugs around me got harder, the places got sketchier, and I had had enough. I knew if I kept hanging with these people, doing the same thing over and over again, it wouldn’t stop. I was tired, and I wanted to go home. I was lucky enough to go home after all that. All I had to do was call and say, “Please pick me up,” and without hesitation, they looked at the tracker and got me out.

I had that tracker for years, well into my adult years, and when I moved states for college. I had it until I felt safe with a partner I trusted and friends I trusted, which, sadly, was a foreign concept for me for years up until that point.

I begged for a tracker because life is so unpredictable, and there’s so little you can control, but even as a young girl, I wanted some control. I wanted a chance to control the outcome, and I don’t regret begging for that tracker for a second.