this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Hey asshole, special needs kids are big and strong and smart enough to get themselves out in the world and need ways to get to them to keep them safe. There are plenty of reasonable reasons for tracking tech for your kid that aren’t helicopter parenting.
You don't need to be a helicopter parent to explain to your kids that you want to be able to find them if needed. And you don't need to monitor them just because that feature is enabled. A reasonable parent can require the feature be enabled and only use it when there's cause.
I maintain that if you need to hide your tracker from your child, you suck as a parent. And if your kid has special needs that make this untenable, that's obviously different from what I originally said broadly about most parents.
What an unnecessary and disproportionately rude response to what they're saying.
Special needs is not something every person out there considers daily along with its ramifications for you to be attacking whoever forgets when it's not part of their lives when it only affects a small fraction of school-aged children. Even I forget, despite growing up with a non-verbal autistic kid, and even then he wasn't running around getting in trouble for me to even consider this scenario.
I agree that it was rude and unnecessary, but I don't agree that it was disproportional. Saying that anyone who finds it a worthwhile utility to be able to find their kid with a geotracker is a shitty parent is an asshole thing to do; it's shitty, you might say. I mean, I don't assume that anyone who leaves their kids at the park unattended is negligent. They might just have a kid who's capable and responsible enough for that kind of privilege. But many kids aren't that capable or responsible and need to have a parent around at all times. One isn't necessarily a better or worse parent for it, they just have kids at different levels for ANY NUMBER of reasons. Maybe their kid is adopted, came from a history of trauma, has a history of elopement, is on the spectrum, or any other type of potentially "invisible" disability that might mean they appear to most as a "normal" kid, but actually needs some extra attention, focus, or restriction. I think calling someone an asshole for making a blanket statement about a pretty mundane and typical tool being used is appropriate. They were being ableist at worst, and just kind of ignorant at best.