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By Greg Bartlett

Are you the parents of a thirteen or fourteen year old?  Are you starting to think about how your life is going to change once your teenager starts learning how to drive?  What about after school jobs, activities, and friends?  Sometimes it is difficult to know how to balance between protecting your child and helping them grow into responsible adulthood.

Teen Driver Safety

The best way to keep your child / teenager / young adult safe is to maintain open lines of communication and set reasonable expectations for behavior and activities.  Even homes with wonderful relationships between parents and teenagers are subject to accidents and tragedy, however, and parents should not overlook dangers even to “good” teenagers.  Even responsible teenagers can quickly find themselves in dangerous circumstances.

For example, statistics show that approximately 100 children each year are abducted and murdered.  Another report claims that between February 2005 to July 2006, 403 kidnappings were attempted by “strangers” or “slight acquaintances” (these numbers reflect only ATTEMPTED kidnappings), and over 3,600 are kidnapped each year by a non-family member.  You may be thinking, “I don’t let my teenager roam the town by himself-this would never happen to us.”

What about after-school jobs?  Does your teenager have an early morning paper route?  Anything could happen.  Does your teenager close up the restaurant after closing each night?  This can be a particularly dangerous situation if there is money on the premises or if the parking lot is not lighted adequately.  Obviously, the answer is not seclusion and isolation.

One thing that may help to keep your teenager safe and to ensure your peace of mind is a GPS tracking system.  A GPS tracking device can keep an active or passive record of the location of the person wearing the receiver.  Satellites in outer space determine the latitude and longitude of the receiver and download the information to the internet or to a mobile device.  Active systems have 24 hour information that you can download at any time.

When your teenager is on his or her paper route and you want to check, you can simply download the information and make sure they are on their route.  If they are closing the store at midnight, you can log in and keep track of where they are until they drive up in your driveway.

If you are the parent of a teenager and are concerned about their safety, then investing in a GPS tracking device may be just the thing to help you find the right balance between “worried parent” and “successful parent.”