Would You Put a Tracking Device On Your Child?

Hugh Pickens writes "In 2007 businessman Russell Thornton lost his 3-year-old son at an amusement park. After a frantic 45-minute search, Thornton found the boy hiding in a play structure, but he was traumatized by the incident. It spurred him to build a device that would help other parents avoid that fate. Even though most statistics show that rates of violent crime against children have declined significantly over the last few decades, and that abductions are extremely rare, KJ Dell'Antonia writes that with the array of new gadgetry like Amber Alert and the Securus eZoom our children need never experience the fears that come with momentary separations, or the satisfaction of weathering them. 'You could argue that those of us who survived our childhoods of being occasionally lost, then found, are in the position of those who think car seats are overkill because they suffered no injury while bouncing around in the back of their uncle's pickup,' writes Dell'Antonia. 'Wouldn't a more powerful sense of security come from knowing your children were capable, and trusting in their ability to reach out for help at the moment when they realize they're not?'"

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A bit of a stretch.

[Revotron]

'Wouldn't a more powerful sense of security come from knowing your children were capable, and trusting in their ability to reach out for help at the moment when they realize they're not?'"

Sure, when they're 16 years old. Throw a four-year-old out in the middle of a large crowd of unfamiliar people and rational thought is the last thing you can expect. That's why it takes a rational adult to calm them down and ask "Are you lost?"

I wish I could be that parent that never loses their child, but I'm a realist and accept that it can happen, so these tracking devices sound appealing to me for use on very young children who are as of yet incapable of rational, level-headed responses to scary situations like getting lost in a shopping mall.

I wouldn't stick it on my 16-year-old's pants when he or she starts driving. That's a different situation involving a (hopefully) much more mature and logical person. Not to mention I probably don't want to know where those pants are at certain moments. ("GPS Location Update: on the floor at boyfriend's house")

Re:A device that helps find lost kids

[Tough Love]

Spoken well and truly like somebody who has no kids. So is your two year old going to speed dial you, or have they got your number memorized? You sure they won't drop the phone in a duck pond? Try to eat it?

Re:What are parents so paranoid?

[crazyjj]

Actually violence against children has been going down for a long time now. But the 24-hour news cycle has made abductions and other horrors seem like a common thing. You're a helluva lot safer as a kid alone in the mall today that you were 20-40 years ago.

Re:What are parents so paranoid?

[QuantumRiff]

No, things are not more dangerous. Today, kids are statistically safer than they were in the 60's.. But, we now have 24-hour news that needs to fill time... Lookup the book "Free Range Kids".. You are 20 times more likely to kill your own child while driving, than to have a stranger take off with them. Yet parents still, every day, pile little junior into the SUV to drive 1 mile to school.. (placing a child in a car is the single worst thing you can ever do for their safety, apparently)

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children flat out says "stranger danger" is wrong, and very dangerous to teach kids: http://us.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/NewsEventServlet?LanguageCountry=en_US&PageId=2034 [missingkids.com]

Re:What are parents so paranoid?

[HaZardman27]

That's what I'm constantly telling people who talk about "how when they were kids they could play in the street without worry." People tend to believe sensationalized media over sound reason and logic, even when you show them crime rate statistics for the last 50 years and show how much higher a risk they were at when THEY were a kid.

Re:No I would not.

[CanHasDIY]

I can see your point, but I don't think this is a slippery slope issue.

Then [usatoday.com]
You're [nytimes.com]
Not [nbcnews.com]
Paying [indiatimes.com]
Enough [wikipedia.org]
Attention [io9.com]

Re:What are parents so paranoid?

[wumingzi]

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!

If I had mod points I'd mod you up...

Here's how it breaks down (courtesy of National Center for Missing and Exploited Children)

About 800,000 kids go missing each year.
The vast majority of those are either family abductions (200,000/year), younger girls running off with older and bolder men, younger boys running off with older and bolder women, disgruntled teenagers who hitch a bus to Seattle to start a band and get real big, or whatever disgruntled teenagers do these days.

Number of honest-to-god stranger abductions? 115 last year. In a country of 300 million people.

I'm not quite sure, but I think your chances of running into an honest-to-God flying saucer are better than that.

Re:Just buy them an iPhone with a strap

[Nyder]

Just buy them an iPhone, with Locate on, long distance off, and Find My Phone on.

And a case with a strap that connects it to their belt.

Problem solved.

iPhone is crap.

Why not buy a fucking cheap ass phone that has GPS? You don't need to spend $300 on a fucking smart phone, when you can spend $50 on a cheap phone with GPS.

Fucking apple fans. To fucking enamored by Apple to actually think.