Okay, real talk. If you have a young adult living at home, there is a nonzero chance that at some point in the last year, they told you they were somewhere they were not.
Don’t panic. Don’t open Find My right now.
I want to talk about why this happens, why the tug of war around it almost never works, and what to do instead. And I want to do it from the side of the young adult who’s doing the lying, because trust and believe, I know that side well.
Let’s start with a story.
Meet Eli
Eli is 19 and living at home. (Eli isn’t a real person. He’s a composite of patterns our coaches see all the time.) One Saturday he tells his parents he’s sleeping over at his friend Ben’s. Ben’s house is ten minutes away, his parents love Ben, Ben’s mom makes homemade sourdough bread. Zero follow-up questions.
Eli is not going to Ben’s. He’s going to a party in the city, forty minutes away, with a group of friends his parents have made VERY clear they don’t trust.
His parents can see his location on their phones, so before he even pulls out of Ben’s driveway, he turns his location off. If anyone asks tomorrow, the plan is simple: his phone died. Classic.
He’s not planning anything terrible, btw. He wants to go, he knows his parents will say no, and he does not have the energy for a week-long fight about it.
Around 1am, his ride leaves without him. He’s had a few drinks, his phone is at 4% for real this time, and he’s in a part of the city he doesn’t know.
The obvious move is to call his parents. And it’s the ONE thing he won’t do, because calling means admitting everything. So he gets a ride home from a guy he met that night. Who has also been drinking.
He gets home fine. His parents find out a week later when Ben’s mom mentions, totally offhand, that she hasn’t seen Eli in a while. Oops.
Why they lie (from the inside)
When young adults lie about where they are, it’s almost always one of three things:
They’re doing something they think you won’t like.
They don’t want you to stop them from going.
They don’t want you to worry.
Number three surprises parents the most, but it’s a big one. A lot of the young adults we work with have watched their parents go through a LOT because of them.
Treatment, crises, late-night ER trips, the whole thing. By 19, some of them are genuinely trying to protect you from one more night of worrying, even if their method is, you know, lying.
Meanwhile, on your side of the house: not knowing where they are can feel terrifying, especially if the last few years have been rough. And finding out they lied feels personal. Like your worry doesn’t count. Like they don’t respect you.
So the tug of war starts. You add tracking, curfews, more questions. They get better at hiding. You tighten, they slip. Everybody ends up with less of what they actually wanted.
Why the location arms race is a losing game
Let me be the bearer of bad news here: you cannot fully lock down a 19-year-old. They have cars, jobs, friends, and phones. Legally, they can just…leave.
And the workarounds are honestly almost too easy. Turn off location sharing. Airplane mode. Let the battery die. On an iPhone, if they stop sharing their location with you, you don’t even get a notification.
Fun fact that might be painful to hear: a lot of young adults share their location with their FRIENDS all day long, no problem. The issue was never the technology. It’s what being watched by a parent feels like versus what sharing with a friend feels like. One feels like connection. The other feels like surveillance.
And here’s the part I really want you to sit with. Tracking tells you where a phone is. It doesn’t tell you if your young adult is safe, who they’re with, or whether they’d call you if things went sideways. The more watched they feel, the more likely they go fully dark, which is the exact moment you’d most want to reach them.
The scariest part of Eli’s night wasn’t the party. It was that the lie took his parents off the table as a safety net. At 1am, stranded and a little drunk, the people best positioned to help him were the people he’d built his entire night around avoiding.
It’s okay not to know everything (yes, really)
I know. This is the part where some of you want to throw your phone. Hear me out.
Think back to when you were 19 or 20. Did your parents know where you were every Saturday night? Who you were with? What time you actually got home?
For most of us, the answer is a resounding HAHA no. Some of those nights were dumb, a couple were risky, and most were completely, boringly normal. And figuring out how to handle yourself without a parent watching is a huge part of how people actually become adults.
When information is missing, an anxious brain fills the gap with the worst possible version. Silence after 11pm becomes a car crash. A vague answer becomes a crisis. Most of the time the real story is a diner, a movie that ran long, or a phone that actually did die.
Your worry is real, and I’m not dismissing it. But some of it is yours to carry, and your young adult can’t make it go away by reporting every move. Trying to manage your anxiety through them usually backfires. Getting some support for yourself (a friend who gets it, your own therapist, a parent group) helps more than another app ever will.
And what you actually NEED to know is way smaller than you think. For most families it comes down to two things:
You can reach them in an emergency.
They’ll reach you if they’re in trouble.
If those two are solid, the exact address of a Saturday night matters a lot less.
Okay so what do you actually do
⭐ Agree on a minimum, together. Sit down when nobody’s mad (so, not the morning after) and figure out what you each need. Maybe it’s the general area, who they’re with, a rough time home, and a text if plans change. Let them have a real say. Young adults stick to agreements they helped make. They find loopholes in rules handed to them.
⭐ Roommate rules > curfew rules. Adults who live together text if they won’t be home. They mention it before leaving town. They don’t leave each other worrying all night. Framing it this way treats them like the adult they’re trying to be, and gives you a totally fair standard to hold them to.
⭐ Offer a no-questions-asked pickup. Tell them, and MEAN it: if you’re ever somewhere you don’t feel safe, call me at any hour and I’ll come get you. No lecture in the car. The conversation can happen tomorrow, or never. Eli’s night ends very differently if he believes that call is actually an option.
⭐ Watch how you react to the truth. If they tell you they went to the party you hate and it turns into a two-hour fight, they will learn, very quickly, to stop telling you things. The calmer you are when they’re honest, the more honest they get. It’s annoyingly simple.
⭐ Handle the scary stuff separately. Drunk driving, substance use, people who might hurt them: those deserve their own direct conversation. If you’re seeing real patterns there, loop in their therapist or another professional instead of trying to solve it with tracking.
What happened with Eli
The first conversation after his parents found out? Bad. Like, really bad.
The second one went better. They stopped arguing about the party and asked him one question: what would you have needed to call us that night?
His answer was simple. Knowing he wouldn’t be in trouble.
So they made a deal. He’d give them the general picture of where he was going and who with, and they’d stop treating every plan like something that needed their approval.
A few months later, Eli called at 12:30am from a house he didn’t want to be at anymore. His dad picked him up. They didn’t talk about it until lunch the next day.
That’s progress. You might not know everything, but you’re safe enough to be their first call.
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OPLM GROUP
There’s a free weekly support group for parents that we built with Other Parents Like Me.
It’s called Launching Young Adults, and it meets every Monday at 6pm PT / 9pm ET on Zoom.
OPLM is an online community where parents of teens and young adults support each other through the hardest stretches of raising them.
Their Peer Parents facilitate the group and our coaches won’t be in the room, so you’ll spend the hour with other parents who are going through the same thing, talking honestly about how it’s actually going at home.
Any parent can join and it’s free.
Registration takes about two minutes, so sign up now to save your spot.
Not Therapy also has a Parent Facebook Group.
Join using this link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/4401990613346122/