Atlantic Monthly Group Inc.
11/09/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 11/09/2026 08:08
The Atlantic’s December Cover: Sarah Zhang Reports on “The Geo-Located Generation”
In The Atlantic's December cover story, "The Geo-Located Generation," staff writer Sarah Zhang explores how constant surveillance is stunting children and making parents paranoid. Parents today can functionally track their children 24/7 from the moment they're born through adulthood, starting with products such as the Snoo Smart Bassinet and Apple's AirTags sewn into toddler backpacks and moving to apps such as Find My Friends and Life 360. Zhang examines how this is affecting kids, and namely their resilience and independence--but also how it's affecting their parents.
Although one of the primary developmental tasks of adolescence is achieving a measure of independence, this metaphorical umbilical cord can limit that development. Zhang writes that "as parents, we are supposed to undergo our own transformation as our children grow, relinquishing the knowledge and control we once held … And here, we parents might be failing ourselves." She reports on seemingly extreme but all-too-common anecdotes of just how far perpetual tracking has gone: WhatsApp groups for parents of students on the same college-dorm floor, who text if they notice their child is late for class; adult children whose parents continue to track their location well into their 20s; and teens whose parents show up unannounced at their last-known location on Life360, when they don't recognize the address.
And the tracking is extensive: Zhang reports that three-quarters of parents with teenagers ages 14 to 17 had access to their kids' location data, according to one study. She writes: "Even among college students, one-third were being tracked by their parents, according to another study, conducted in 2021 by Michaeline Jensen, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Five years later, Jensen says, that number is even higher: More than half of college students are being tracked, per her unpublished data."
In Zhang's reporting, there is the sense that the world has become more dangerous and too many risks lurk out there, and thus the need for parents tracking their children. Zhang writes: "This is not borne out in the statistics: In just about every way, teenagers are living safer lives than ever. They are not only less likely to be victims of violence than in the 1990s, when crime peaked; they are also less likely to smoke, drink, use hard drugs, or get pregnant. The rates of all these behaviors have plummeted by more than half." Zhang continues: "By coincidence or not, the rates of depression and anxiety in teenagers have steadily increased …The cause of the teen mental-health crisis is a topic of debate, much of it recently centered on the role of social media. But it's hard to imagine that a diminished tolerance for risk and uncertainty in teenagers is not affecting their well-being."
Zhang writes: "Most parents agree-in the abstract-that kids need to confront their own challenges and make their own mistakes as they grow up. They need to learn how to ask for help when lost. They need to face the consequences of oversleeping for a math test before they oversleep for a job interview. But when you're hovering digitally, phone in hand, it is so natural to want to help and so easy to intervene."
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