Nothing is more important to parents than keeping their children safe, but looking after teenage children is especially challenging—especially when they start driving on their own.
Parents want to make sure their teens are driving safely. They want to know whether their teen obeys the speed limit, slams on the brakes, starts swerving back and forth, and takes curves at dangerous speeds.
Parents want to know where their teens are and where they have been. And they want to know immediately if their teens have broken through those electronic boundaries parents can set up as geofences.
What is GPS Teen Tracking?
Teen tracking with GPS helps parents accomplish all of these essential tasks. But what is GPS teen tracking, really?
GPS is an abbreviation for the Global Positioning System. In its early days, GPS was just about being able to find your location without landmarks or a map. Over the last 20 years, GPS systems have been improved so that they can give you a kind of report card on your teen’s driving.
Most GPS teen tracking systems have a dashboard that acts as a daily report card on your teen’s driving safety.
This dashboard tells you how many miles your teen has driven today. It reports the number of times your teen braked too hard, or accelerated too fast, or hit the brakes.
But GPS teen tracking can also be set up to give you real-time information on your teens in their cars. GPS teen tracking can tell you where your child is right now. It can update speed and location as often as every 15 seconds. It can inform you in real time when your teen has driven somewhere outside their geofence, and it can also inform you when your teen has safely reached their destination.
And GPS teen tracking can tell you when your teen’s car comes to an unexpected stop, as can be caused by a crash.
Any car, no matter what the make, model, or year, can be fitted with GPS teen tracking.
Why Should You Have Teen Tracking?
You probably know the statistics on teen driving. Over 50 percent of all teens who drive will have the experience of a car crash before high school graduation. Teen drivers have the highest crash rate of any age group of drivers in the United States, and in 2019, the latest year for which there are statistics, over 1,600 teen drivers were involved in fatal car crashes.
The greatest risk of being involved in a wreck in any driver’s entire lifetime occurs in the first six months after they get a license to drive on their own. Parents teach their children to drive from the passenger seat. They pay for driver education. They buy cars with every available safety feature.
The problem is that parents can’t change one characteristic that is found in nearly every teen driver:
Teen drivers are naturally distracted drivers.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration analyzed video footage of 1,691 moderate-to-severe crashes involving drivers aged 16 to 19. They found that 58 percent of teen drivers involved in crashes were distracted immediately before the crash occurred.
Teens can be distracted by their friends in the back seat. They can veer out of their lane when they see classmates waving a “Free Carwash” sign. They can be distracted by the radio, the stereo, or missing a turn or an exit.
GPS tracking systems are never distracted. They operate in the background without any attention required. Instead of texting your son or daughter “Where R U?” you can use GPS to find the exact moment they entered or left the school parking lot, exactly where they went before and after school, and how safely they drove on the way.
Another way GPS tracking systems compensate for teen distraction happens during accidents. Remember the statistic that over 50 percent of teens will be involved in a crash before they graduate from high school?
When a distracted teen is involved in anything from getting a speeding ticket to totaling their new Lexus, there are two things that will happen. One, they will want you to come help them. And two, they won’t know where they are. When you have GPS teen tracking, you will always know where your children are.
How to Choose the Best GPS Tracking Option
GPS tracking systems for teen drivers come at a wide range of prices with a wide variety of features. The kinds of questions you need to ask yourself before you buy and install a GPS teen tracking system include:
- Where do I put the tracking device? (Hint: If you attach the GPS tracker to the frame of the car under either the driver side door or the passenger side door, the signal will bounce off the pavement and won’t reach your phone.)
- What will be the power supply for the tracker on my teen’s car? If it runs off my car’s USB port, can I conceal it from my teen? Will they be able to remove it?
- What kind of service plan do I need for my GPS tracker? How much will the device and service plan cost?
- How precisely can I set geofencing to keep track of my teen? Can I just draw an area on a digital map and get a notice when my teen drives outside it?
The best way to get the answers to all your questions about teen GPS tracking is to ask the experts at GPS Technologies.
GPS teen driver tracking devices can never replace parental supervision. They can’t keep track of other important factors like peer pressure to take unnecessary risks, alcohol, and drug use. But they can open the door to constructive conversations with your teen about driver safety. And they can help you find your teen when you are worried about their safety on the road.Â
Article Submitted By Community Writer
