Ah, my first term at university. The excitement. The heady sense of freedom. The food poisoning. The feeling of being totally overwhelmed by the shift to adulthood – which I dealt with, very maturely, by abandoning my designated room for the first month to cling to a boy I’d met that summer who lived on the other side of town, and who promptly dumped me just as the weighty reality of academic life was triggering my first student mental-health crisis. I spent a week under a duvet exhausting tissue boxes and watching the entire canon of Grey’s Anatomy, then got a new haircut and went on a date with his housemate to get even.
My mother reads this column and I think this will be the first time she’s heard that story. Which is as it should be. As the relationship guru Dan Savage often says, there are some things parents have a right not to know – among them, their children’s exploits in early independence. But for the quarter of a million new UK students starting university this autumn, the experience will be very different. According to Unite Students’ 2025 “Empty Nester Survey”, a staggering 67 per cent of parents use technology to track their university-aged child’s whereabouts. Unlike my mum 17 years ago, they will be able to see how many nights their offspring spend at locations other than their own bedrooms – whether that be in someone else’s bedroom or a nightclub until 4am.
Many parents will keep this knowledge to themselves, aware there is little to be gained from sharing their concerns with their now-absent teen. Still, I can’t get my head around what effect this has on the teens themselves, knowing that their first steps into independent life are being constantly surveilled. These are legal adults who have left home and yet remain bound to childhood by a technological tether. And judging by the numbers, many think this is normal.
I find it horrifying. Not because parents are anxious about their children once they grow out of their care – that’s natural. But because technology has normalised indulging that anxiety in the most invasive and infantilising way. Instead of processing feelings of separation-induced helplessness, we’ve given parents the tools to avoid it. The cost? A generation’s ability to experiment, to make mistakes and learn from them, without worrying what Mum and Dad will say.
This is just one example of how full adulthood is being pushed further out of reach. Last week, this magazine detailed the financial impossibilities young people face after decades of soaring house prices and stagnating wages. But it’s not just economic. From a law that prevents today’s teens from ever buying cigarettes to the campaign to ban young drivers from carrying passengers, people who, 30 years ago, would have been considered full members of society are being kept in a state of adolescence. Don’t get me started on the proposed midnight curfew for 16- to 18-year-olds – who can fight for their country – on social media.
In contrast to unaffordable house prices, these are all policies designed for the benefit of young people. Like parents using trackers, benevolent politicians just want to protect them. But over-protection comes at the expense of self-reliance. Keep telling someone they’re too immature to make their own decisions and some of that message will sink in. We coddle young adults – with privacy-busting technology and paternalistic policy – then turn around and wonder why they lack initiative.
I’m speculating, but I’d expect a graduate who has spent three years at university making their own decisions, however misguided, to show more resourcefulness than one whose mum still tracks what time they go to bed. I know which one I’d rather employ. So parents, however nerve-wracking it feels, maybe now’s the time to turn off the tracker. And to this year’s soon-to-be students, I wish you a first term as exciting, messy and experimental as the one I enjoyed. But ideally without the food poisoning.
[Further reading: Prince George starts at Eton and enters the belly of the beast]
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This article appears in the 10 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The World According To Ed
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentAnd yet, wildly, the age of consent remains at 16. Surely it should be raised to 18 (with some close-in-age exemption, perhaps).
Remembering being a teenager over 50 years ago, raising the age of consent to 18 would have have criminalized virtualy all my contemporaries, this is a very bad idea
It’s bizarre how much our view of young people has changed in the last 40 years. Most of my friends left education at 16, and had jobs and their own flats, cohabited or had house shares with friends by 17 or 18 and many became parents for the first time around that age as well. They were treated as young adults and most of them adapted quickly and very well. It was often the welcome end of a very unhappy period spent at school which back then only catered for a few academic children and left everyone else at a loose end for most of the duration.
I think the expansion of Higher Education (basically an extension of school) to the point of being almost an expectation rather than an exception and the raising of the compulsory school leaving age is mostly to blame for the infantilisation of young people, and overprotectiveness by the parents is just a reaction to the perceived ability of big children, no longer young adults, to cope in the wider world.