One tug wouldn't bring them back no matter how hard you pulled
The mum who’s fitted a tracking device to her gap year student son, so that she can monitor his every move while he hikes the world, is deluding herself if she thinks it’s going to assuage her separation anxiety or even protect his safety.
It’s a GPS location tracker, the size of a credit card. 19 year old Harry says he’ll wear it, (well, his uncle did invent it!) and his Mum will be able to locate him by logging onto a website, which will even be able to alert her by text message if he strays into “unsafe” streets and dodgy areas of cities throughout the globe.
If he ever goes missing, God forbid, she will quickly be able to locate the “Traakit” – even if she were then to discover that he lost or abandoned it weeks ago in a wild, teenage bid for absolute freedom. As a mum who is forever replacing lost mobile phones, front door keys and bus passes, I doubt I could rely on my sons to keep their “Traakit” past the first customs post or airport loo.
More importantly, I wouldn’t impose it on them. It’s taking maternal love too far – into the realm of smothering and possibly even spying.
It’s not that I don’t put the safety and welfare of my kids at the very top of my list of priorities, like all mums. When I had my first baby, my own Mum said to me: “Now you will never stop worrying!” and reminded me that – even at my grand old age – she still worries about all of her three daughters – all the time! I worry about my boys all the time, I’m only really happy when they’re all home for the weekend, tucked up in bed or lounged around the sofas in our sitting room watching tv, and safely under my wing.
But I have learned to accept that they cannot be there all the time. They have to go out into the world. Nowadays that even means they have to learn what it’s like to cope in emergency and even danger.
It’s funny, isn’t it? With my older two boys, now aged 20 and 21, I don’t ring them every day and I certainly don’t ask them to ring and tell me when they get home from their nights out partying. They both live in London.
Statistically, they’re in greater danger of violence in a UK city than than hiking the hippy trail in south east Asia. You learn to let go – it’s part of the love equation. Yet when they are staying the weekend, I fret into the early hours if they’re still out.
So when you’re a mum, sometimes it’s better NOT to know what they’re up to.
You simply have to trust the investment you’re made in them when they were younger – and hope that they’ll be practical and sensible enough to stay safe.
If either of them were hitchhiking around the world, I think I would rather be there alongside them or oblivious to the detail of their experience.
Logging onto a website would actually be no comfort at all, it would drive me up the wall with anxiety.
Yes, I’d want them to take a mobile phone but I know that would drive me to distraction on the days when they didn’t text. Technology beguiles us. It promises easy and reassuring contact with our loved ones – but it actually makes it more difficult to cut the umbilical cord – something we must all learn to do with our babies, no matter how painful.
That’s not to say I don’t totally and completely empathise with this mum, Rachel Wilder from Oxfordshire. Along with finding drugs in his trouser pockets or empty bottles of scotch under her bed, it’s every parent’s worst nightmare having your bright eyed and bushy tailed offspring announce that they’re going to backpack through Vietnam for six months (and that you are going to fund it, too.) But surely you either say yes, and then try and ensure they do it with a reputable gap year company so they have friends and companions, or no – you can afford neither the money nor the grey hairs. But a half-way-house idea like a tracking device would, I reckon, provide little real security and tons of extra angst. It’s like expecting your kids to stay tied to your apron strings half way across the world. If the worst ever happened, one tug would not bring them back no matter how hard you pulled.
This article first appeared in Bella Magazine 2009 |
