A walk on the child side: Investigating parents’ and children’s experience and perspective on mobile technology for outdoor child independent mobility

Technology increasingly offers parents opportunities to monitor children, reshaping the way control and autonomy are negotiated within families. This paper investigates the views of parents and primary school children on mobile technology designed to support child independent mobility in the context of the local walking school buses. Based on a school-year long field study, we report findings on children’s and parents’ experience with proximity detection devices. The results provide insights into how the parents and children accepted and socially appropriated the technology into the walking school bus activity, shedding light on the way they understand and conceptualize a technology that collects data on children’s proximity to the volunteers’ smartphone. We discuss parents’ needs and concerns around monitoring technologies and the related challenges in terms of trust-control balance. These insights are elaborated to inform the future design of technology for child independent mobility.