There’s a particular week in late August when the whole shape of a family changes. The alarms move earlier. Someone’s shoes don’t fit anymore. And a route that didn’t exist in July — house to bus stop, bus stop to school, school to whatever comes after — becomes the thing your kid walks five days a week without you.

That route is the reason most families start sharing location. Not fear exactly. More the specific, low-grade hum of not knowing.

This is our guide to setting it up in the last calm week, before the term starts and nobody has the patience for a new app.

Do it now, not in week three

The single best thing you can do is set this up before the first day.

Set it up in September and it arrives as a response to something. Your kid was late, or didn’t answer a text, or you heard about an incident two towns over — and now there’s an app, and it is unmistakably about them. That app starts its life as a punishment and rarely recovers.

Set it up in the quiet week before term and it’s just part of the kit, in the same box as the new timetable and the bus pass. No incident, no accusation, nothing to argue with. This is the whole trick, and it costs you twenty minutes in August.

Start with the conversation, not the download

Before anyone installs anything, agree on four things. This takes one conversation over dinner and prevents most of the trouble that follows.

What it’s for. Say the honest version: the world is large, the phone is the only thread through it, and you’d like to be able to follow the thread when it matters. It is not about doubting them. Being clear about this early saves the “don’t you trust me” argument entirely.

That it goes both ways. Everyone in the circle shares — you, your partner, older siblings, all of it. This is not a small detail and it is not a courtesy. A circle where only the youngest person is visible is a surveillance arrangement, and kids identify it as one immediately. A circle where everyone appears is something they’ll actually join.

What it’s not for. Ours is the rule we’d suggest to any family: location answers are you safe, and never account for your afternoon. The moment it shows up in a discipline conversation it stops being safety equipment and becomes evidence, and nobody keeps evidence against themselves switched on.

Who else is in it. Grandparents? The other household? Say it out loud now rather than having it discovered later.

The places worth warding

You don’t need many. Four or five well-chosen ones do almost all the work, and a wall of notifications gets muted within a week.

  • Home. The one that ends most of the day’s uncertainty.
  • School. Arrival in the morning is the notification that quietly replaces the whole 8:40 question.
  • The transfer point — bus stop, station, the corner where the walking group meets. This is the gap in the route where nothing is under anybody’s supervision, and it’s the one most families forget to mark.
  • After-school anchor. Practice, rehearsal, the childminder, the library.
  • The other parent’s house, if you’re running a split household. It resolves the handover question without a text thread.

Then leave it. The impulse is to ward everywhere; resist it. Each ward you add makes every other one quieter.

Let them draw their own

Hand the phone over and let your kid set up their own places. Their friend’s house. The skate park. The bakery they and three other people have decided is theirs.

This feels like a small thing and it isn’t. Setting up a ward is the difference between an app that was installed on you and an app you configured. It’s the shortest path from tolerated to owned, and it costs you nothing.

Older kids will often go further and set a ward on you — work, the gym, the supermarket — so they know when you’re on your way home. Let them. The day the app starts doing them a favour is the day it stops being a thing they resent.

The first week

Expect some noise. A ward set slightly too small will fire twice as someone walks past the edge of it; a phone that loses signal in a stairwell will show a stale position and briefly stop your heart. Both are normal, both settle.

Two things worth holding to in that first week:

Don’t narrate the map. The temptation to text saw you got to school ok! is enormous and you should resist it every single time. The instant your kid learns that each arrival generates a message, the app becomes a presence in their day rather than a quiet background thing. Watch, don’t comment.

Let the first missed check-in be nothing. There will be a Thursday when the dot is stale and everything is fine — a dead battery, a phone in a bag in a locker. How you handle that first one sets the tone for the entire year. Calm, once, and then let it go.

Where we fit

We build Protego, so treat this section accordingly.

We made it for exactly this moment — the family that wants the thread without the watchtower. Everyone in a Protego circle appears to everyone else by design; there’s no version where one person is visible and the rest aren’t. Places you mark are wards, and they confirm themselves quietly when someone arrives or leaves rather than announcing it. And the whole thing looks like a parchment map with wizard-style avatars on it rather than a dispatch board, which sounds like decoration until you’ve watched a fourteen-year-old decide whether an app is cringe.

Honestly: no crash detection yet, so if you’ve got a new driver and that’s the worry, Life360 has it and we don’t. iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Android — the Android app landed in August 2026. Free to download, free for a circle of two, paid plan to grow it.

A short checklist for the last calm week

  1. Have the dinner-table conversation. Four points, ten minutes.
  2. Install it on every phone in the circle, adults first.
  3. Ward home, school, the transfer point, one after-school anchor.
  4. Hand the phone over and let your kid ward their own places.
  5. Walk the actual route once together, with the app open, before day one.
  6. Agree out loud what happens when a phone dies — because one will.

That’s the whole thing. Twenty minutes in August, and the first week of term arrives with one fewer unknown in it.

The point was never to watch them. It’s to be able to stop wondering, so that when they walk out the door on the first morning you can think about whether they’ve eaten instead.

Frequently asked questions

When should I set up location sharing for the new school year? In the week before term starts, while nothing has gone wrong. Setting it up after an incident makes the app feel like a consequence, and that framing tends to stick for the whole year.

What places should I set up geofence alerts for? Four or five: home, school, the transfer point in the route (bus stop or station), one after-school anchor like practice or the childminder, and the other parent’s house if you have a split household. More than that and everyone mutes the notifications.

Should my child be able to see my location too? Yes, and we’d argue it’s the single most important setting. Mutual visibility turns the app from something aimed at one person into something the whole family is inside — which is the difference between an app that survives the term and one that gets switched off in week three.

What age should a kid start sharing location with parents? There’s no clean number; it tracks the route rather than the birthday. The usual moment is when a child starts covering some part of the day unaccompanied — walking to school, taking a bus, staying somewhere after hours. Our what is a family tracker page covers how the tools differ by age.

Will my teenager just turn it off? They might, and no app can truly prevent it. It’s much less likely when sharing is mutual, when they set up their own places, and when it never gets used against them in an argument. We wrote a whole piece on this: my teenager won’t share their location.