How to Track Your Child’s Phone with GPS

As a parent, it’s easy to stress about your children when you’re not with them, especially if they are involved in extracurricular activities outside school. One way to allow your child to have independence while still keeping an eye on their whereabouts is through a GPS location-sharing app like Life360 while they soak up some screen time.

Life360’s GPS Location Sharing for Families

Life360’s GPS location-sharing feature has several useful tools that make it easy for your entire family to stay connected. Along with valuable elements such as location history and smart notifications, the Life360 app allows you to monitor key locations with place alerts. 

Parents can define any essential area, such as the school or practice field, as a “place” in the app and receive notifications when family members enter these areas. With place alerts, there is an added peace of mind that your children have made it safely to their intended location. 

3 Ways to Use Life360 to Track Your Kids Phone

The versatility of Life360 provides multiple ways to track your child’s phone, including GPS location sharing, bubbles, and estimated ETAs. 

Let’s look at these features and see how they can make locating your children and other family members easier. 

1. GPS Location Sharing

The main component of Life360 is the robust GPS location-sharing capabilities across iOS and Android. Since the software utilizes the phone’s internal GPS and Wi-Fi or cellular data to triangulate a user’s position, finding your child’s location is possible within seconds. This will not work with live tracking if the phone is dead.

2. Bubbles

Bubbles are a unique optional feature that allows families to customize their experience with Life360’s location-sharing service. This feature allows you to create a temporary bubble that will only share a device’s approximate location instead of the exact location. 

Using bubbles, parents can give their children the privacy they need while still seeing their general location. It’s important to note that all safety and messaging features will remain on and active. 

3. Estimated ETAs

While the messaging features are beneficial, responding to family members when driving is challenging. Using the estimated ETA feature is one way to stay connected when traveling or commuting. This tool allows you to see your estimated arrival time when heading toward people inside your Circle.

Can Life360 Track a Phone without Permission?

The answer here is a strong ‘no’. Even though Life360 is a wonderful GPS tracking app for kids, the software can’t locate or track a phone without permission first. To ensure everyone is active and trackable, you’ll want to download the Life360 app, log into the account, and accept any invitation to join your family’s circle. 

Can Life360 See Phone Activity?

While Life360 does detect phone usage while driving within Gold and Platinum subscriptions, it does not track what users do on their phones outside of the app. This means Life360 does not track or report: text messages, social media activity, phone calls, search history, and more.

Utilize Life360 to Stay Connected with your Child

Whether your kids are driving themselves to school or participating in practices after class is over, knowing where they are can provide incredible peace of mind. With Life360, you can track your child’s phone while giving them the privacy and independence they need to grow. Try Life360 today and explore how it can benefit your family.