Your parents should have access to your location 24/7

Daily Debate #617: "Your parents should have access to your location 24/7". You are arguing AGAINST the motion. Your opponent: Edward Snowden.

I believe parents may have an innate want to protect or look over their children but it's also important that they let their children exercise their freedom to hone their decision making skills in their actual life, which involves risk taking and dealing with any consequences that their risks might bring themselves. If parents have access to where their children are at all times, these children would then be more inclined to not do anything risky or out of their way because they'd be afriad to "get in trouble" with their parents for doing anything dangerous. This not only affects their ability to deal with problems and make their own independant decisions in the future but also heavily diminishes their ability to live your own individual life apart from your parents once you grow to be an adult due to always feeling like you have an umbrella or a surveillance on you at all times

You're smuggling in a false choice: constant surveillance versus total freedom. Reality isn't binary. Parents can know their kid's location without micromanaging every decision—a check-in isn't a cage. Your real argument is that *fear of consequences* stunts growth, but that's backwards. Kids who know parents can reach them actually take smarter risks, not fewer ones. They experiment because they have a safety net, not despite it. Here's the hard question: why assume awareness equals control? Doesn't a teenager who knows they're tracked but trusted anyway develop *more* independence than one hiding everything?

My opponent here isn't understanding what 24/7 access to location actually looks like, and is squirreling this debate as to restrict the room, This debate is about whether surveillance itself is something necessary to be accessible 24/7 and do the harms of children not being able to take independant decisions or being able to handle their struggles on their own outweighs it, My argument was rooted from the fact that lets imagine you're with your friends and all of you are hanging out and planning to go to a skate park, but as a child being constantly under surveillance, you will deny that choice because you know if your parents find you at a skate park, theyll reprimand you for putting yourself in danger, because parents dont understand the true motives or the need to "hangout" with friends when they see location, all they see is a ping on the map that tells them their child is going somewhere he could hurt himself, and that brings grounds to reprimand that child for simply making a decision or choosing something that he/she would like. On the other hand, if you were to get hurt or have something off with your location like it stopping because your car ran out of gas, these parents in their nurturing nature will instantly intervene and try to help their children instantly, im not saying this is a bad thing, but this directly harms the child's ability to deal with problems and struggles that life throws at him himself, he learns to completely rely on his/her parents to intervene and just get him out of trouble which when the child grows up to be an adult, can cause problems in his day to day struggles

You're right that I oversimplified, but you've just proven my case. Your skate park example shows the real problem: *parental irrationality*, not location tracking. A parent who punishes their kid for normal teenage activity is bad parenting—full stop. Tracking doesn't cause that; ignorance and control do. A rational parent sees the location, understands context, and lets the kid figure out scraped knees. Your gas tank scenario cuts the other way: a kid stranded alone learns resilience *and* knows backup exists. You're conflating surveillance with bad judgment, not surveillance itself.

The problem here isnt about parental irrationality being an extreme, its that there is much more room for parents to not only think irrationaly because now they feel an innate responsibility to keep a constant check over their child's location, which makes even moderate rational parents more worried about things that they normally wouldnt have even found out or cared much about, but it vastly increases the magnitude of control that irrational or skeptive parents have. Which means by having 24/7 surveillance, youre not only pressuring the children to feel like theyre being watched and cant exercise their individuality but also making it so the parents now innately feel responsible for even the slightest harm that could happen to their child whcih in contrast turns even the regular rational parents into control heavy ones simply because they feel its now their greater responsibility to exercise that control because theyre always aware of what their child is upto and if any harm happens to their child it is innately their fault that they couldnt intervene. So this inturn proves that 24/7 surveillance may not be equal to micromanagment but it opens a much larger room for parents to start micromanaging their children and micromanaging children to exercise complete control over their children whereas on the other hand, they could still ask for location when theyre going at dangerous places, or in an uber, just not 24/7. so that argument of security still exists on my side, just without the room for complete control over the child's individual freedom as a cost

Now you're actually arguing something defensible: surveillance *creates* the conditions for control, not just enables it. Fair. But you've abandoned the motion. You're advocating for *conditional* location sharing, not rejecting parental access entirely. That's not "parents shouldn't have access"—that's "access should be limited." Those are fundamentally different arguments. If you concede that parents *should* know location for genuine emergencies, you've already lost the absolute position. So pick: is some parental awareness justified or none?