Last week a journalist named Annie Hayes published an article for the London Times in which she wrote about tracking on her phone the movements of her 19-year-old son. Using a Snapchat feature called Snap Map, intended to allow users to see where their friends are, she writes of keeping a close watch on her son in his first week of university. She watches his tiny avatar make its way through the streets of Oxford, taking note of the pubs he is in, how long he spends in them. The following morning, staring again at Snap Map, she anxiously observes his lingering presence in his student accommodation, long past the point when he should be up and about and on his way to university (she has, she admits, also made it her business to know his timetable). Beginning to panic, she decides to call him, to wake him from his hungover slumber and get him moving. When he doesn’t answer, she becomes more anxious still. Eventually, he moves of his own accord, and all is well for now, though hours of Annie Hayes’s weekday morning have been squandered in this fretful, secretive observation of what her son supposes to be his private life.

This sort of thing, Hayes tells us, is very common – at least among her cohort of middle-aged, middle-class parents of adult children. “There’s a universal nod when I ask my friends if they’re also ‘phone following’ their grown-up kids,” she writes. “One has been up all night fretting over her daughter, Daisy, who is still out in Liverpool at 3am. Another, whose son is in his second year, knows a little too much about his love life and the ‘sleepovers’. We’re all stalking our grown-up children, even though we know we shouldn’t. After all, they’re supposedly adults now.”

There was, unsurprisingly, quite a strong........

© The Irish Times