Is it in a parent’s job description to know where our children are at all times?mahiruysal/Getty Images
If your kid needs new running shoes, you might want to avoid Skechers. The shoe company has released a new line of sneakers with a special compartment in the heel that allows parents to hide an AirTag. This provides “easy tracking and peace of mind,” according to the product page.
The company doesn’t say outright that the goal is to track children; rather, it says you’ll “always know where their favourite shoes are.” The sneaky implication is that wherever their shoes are, so is your child (except when they figure out what you’re doing and toss them in a dumpster), which makes these shoes a creepy new form of surveillance technology.
A new line of Skechers shoes comes with a special compartment in the heel that allows parents to hide an AirTag for “easy tracking and peace of mind.”Skechers
There’s a lot wrong here. I dislike how this product line legitimizes an odd, new parental expectation that we know where our children are every minute of the day. Since when did that become part of our job description? It’s a recipe for obsession and paranoia. Rather than relying on technology for “peace of mind,” perhaps we should trust in the abilities of the young humans we’re raising.
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Air-tagging shoes validates one of the greatest parental fears — kidnapping — even though it’s statistically negligible. As How to Live Dangerously author Warwick Cairns points out, if for some strange reason you wanted your kid to be kidnapped by a stranger, you’d have to leave them outside, unattended, for roughly 750,000 years. You’re five times more likely to have a conjoined twin, so no, you don’t need special shoes to prepare for such an encounter.
A healthier and far more useful approach is to do the opposite of what the shoes imply — encourage your child to develop real-life navigation, communication, and coping skills that enable them to move through the world confidently on their own, without relying on parental mediation or a digital umbilical cord that could get lost, stolen, or run out of battery. Cultivate self-reliance, not dependence.
This defends against another nightmarish scenario and common justification for tracking kids — human trafficking. Vulnerability is a main attractor for traffickers, heightened when a child lacks practical skills and is accustomed to relying on adults for guidance.
As screen-time consultant Emily Cherkin writes on her blog, a more effective way to keep kids safe from prospective traffickers, assaulters and extortionists is not to let them hang out online, where many such individuals lurk. She writes, “Attempting to use surveillance tools is like taking medicine to treat the side effects of drinking arsenic-laced water, rather than, as Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath says, asking, ‘Why are we drinking arsenic in the first place?’”
If you’re worried about them getting hit by a car, what are shoes going to do? Nothing. The same goes for phones; a kid carrying a smartphone, whether for tracking purposes or emergency calls, will only be more distracted by the device and less attuned to risks posed by their surroundings.
The shoes are marketed for kids ages 1 to 10, which raises other questions. Surely, a toddler is being supervised directly and does not require geotagging. As supervision becomes redundant, it should make way for reasonable independence. Many nine- and 10-year-olds are capable of moving through familiar parts of the world without being tracked — and have the right to do so, just as many of us did at that age.
There may be long-term negative effects to tracking kids. Some fascinating research from France and the Netherlands shows that teens who know their parents can see their whereabouts are more likely to engage in risky behaviours and put themselves in unsafe situations because they assume they can always be found. It’s as if they abdicate responsibility for their choices because the parent is their de facto overseer, their externalized prefrontal cortex. They haven’t learned to assess risk on their own.
Tracking could undermine the quality of the parent-child relationship. It sends a message to kids that they are incapable and cannot be trusted to handle themselves or tell the truth about their whereabouts. And when does it stop? I know someone who still tracks their child at university. There’s never a perfect time to unfollow a kid’s location; maybe don’t start. Give them privacy.
Skechers’ shoes amplify parental fears in a disturbing way. They disrespect children’s right to reasonable independence and autonomy. They encourage parents to give in to their worst fears and give them spotty data to obsess over, all to make a profit. These shoes, with their creepy locator tag compartments, do the opposite of what we need as a society right now, which is to turn the magnifying glass on ourselves and ask, “Is this really a child safety problem or a parental paranoia problem?” And if you go to that uncomfortable place, you will discover it’s the latter.
Katherine Johnson Martinko is a Canadian writer and the author of the 2023 book Childhood Unplugged: Practical Advice to Get Kids Off Screens and Find Balance. She writes about digital minimalism, parenting and technology in her e-mail newsletter, The Analog Family.