Monitoring your children with the help of GPS trackers has become increasingly common – and in recent years sales of GPS watches for children have skyrocketed.
– If you have a tendency to worry, it can get out of hand – then you need to slow yourself down, warns psychologist Björn Hedensjö.
At Elgiganten, sales of GPS watches increased by 63 percent between 2021 and 2022. And so far this year, the increase has continued with a further 23 percent. According to the home electronics chain, it currently sells around 500 GPS watches for children a week. The company Netonnet also states to After five that sales have increased in the statistics between the year 2021 until this year.
A parent who purchased GPS watches for her children is Linda Wernholm, who says that she bought watches for the children after an incident where the children themselves went from school to a playground and disappeared for an hour. Instead of buying cell phones for the kids after the incident, the parents simply decided to buy the simpler GPS watch.
-Now when they go to and from school by themselves, you can see the address, where they are, so we can see that yes, now they are fifty meters from the school, yes, but how good then we know that they will arrive on time and so . So for us it works well in that they go through a forest and we can be sure that they will arrive, says Linda Wernholm.
A finger of warning
But even though the ability to monitor their children’s movements can often be good, psychologist Björn Hedensjö sees fit to raise a finger of warning to parents who use the technology.
– If you have a problematic worry, it works so that the more you control, the more you worry. This is the kind of thing I come across in my clinic all the time and have actually done it also specifically with this type of problem – that you have little monitoring options and then you go in and check all the time and the more you check, the more worried you become. If you have such a tendency to worry, it can get out of control and then you need to slow yourself down a little, says the psychologist.