How to Track Your Child’s Phone Location: iPhone, Android and Mixed Families

If you’ve typed “how to track my child’s phone” into a search bar, here’s the short answer: you probably don’t need to buy anything. If your child has an iPhone, use Family Sharing and Find My. If they have an Android phone, use Google Family Link. If your family mixes iPhone and Android, use Google Maps location sharing or a family locator app on everyone’s phone. Whichever you choose, set it up with your child, not behind their back, and turn on arrival alerts so you don’t have to keep checking a map.

You’re not alone in asking. About half of U.S. children get their first smartphone by age 11, according to Common Sense Media, and in 2020 Pew Research Center found that a third (33%) of parents of 5- to 11-year-olds already tracked their child’s location with GPS apps or software. Here are the exact steps for each kind of family, for iOS 27 and current Android.

The quick answer: match the method to your family’s phones

Find your family’s setup in the table, then jump to that section for the steps.

Before you turn it on: talk to your child

The setup takes ten minutes. The conversation decides whether location sharing feels like care or like being watched. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner advises parents to talk with their child about why and when their location will be shared and how the app works, and notes that modelling respectful tech habits helps young people learn about consent and privacy.

• Under 10: keep it concrete: “My phone will tell me when you get to Grandma’s.”
• 10 to 12, first phone: use the script, set it up together, and let them see your location too.
• Teens: negotiate rather than announce. Our guide on whether parents should track their teenager’s location has a family agreement you can copy and a plan for tapering off.

How to track your child’s iPhone with Family Sharing and Find My

If you both have iPhones, Find My with Family Sharing is the simplest free option. It works best once your child is in your Family Sharing group.

Turn on location sharing

1. With your child, open Settings → Family → Location Sharing on their iPhone. (Family now has its own row in Settings; older guides tell you to tap your name first.)
2. Under Share Your Location With, choose yourself and any other parent or carer.
3. Do the same on your iPhone so your child can see you. If you’re the family organiser, your location is shared with the group automatically once location sharing is set up.
4. Open Find My → People to see your child on the map.

Get notified when they arrive at school or get home

1. In Find My → People, tap your child, then Notify Me → Add Location Alert.
2. Choose arrives or leaves, pick the place, and choose only once or every time. A larger radius tells you when they’re near rather than at the place.
3. For a school-day check, use a [name] Is Not At alert for set times and days, such as weekdays at 9:00.

These alerts have consent built in. Your child is notified when you set one up, recurring alerts need their approval the first time they arrive or leave, and “Is Not At” alerts always need their approval. You can create up to 25, and recurring alerts need two-factor authentication on your child’s account.

A lighter option for older kids: Check In

If your child walks home alone, Check In in Messages may be enough (iOS 17 or later on both phones). In your conversation, they tap + → More → Check In → Edit and choose When I Arrive or After a timer. It completes automatically when they arrive. You’re only alerted, and their location only shared, if their iPhone stops making progress or doesn’t arrive and they don’t respond.

How to see your child’s location on Android with Google Family Link

Google Family Link is Google’s free supervision app, and it includes location and place alerts. Your child’s phone needs Android 6.0 or later. You can run Family Link on an Android phone, an iPhone or iPad with iOS 16 or later, or a Chromebook, and you need to be 18 or older (or the age of majority where you live).

1. Set up supervision for your child’s Google Account in Family Link if you haven’t already.
2. In Family Link, go to Location → Set up location and follow the prompts.
3. Add family places such as Home and School, and turn on Arrives and Leaves notifications for each.
4. On your child’s phone, keep Settings → Location → Location Services → Location Accuracy → Improve Location Accuracy on (Android 12 and later). Place alerts switch off without it.

Family Link shows only the device your child uses most, and their location won’t appear if the phone is off, offline or hasn’t been used recently. Children under 13 (or the equivalent age where you live) can share their real-time location only with their parents. When your child turns 13, Google emails you both; until 18, your child needs your approval to stop supervision.

For older kids without Family Link: Find Hub or Google Maps

Teens who aren’t supervised can share from Find Hub (Google’s renamed Find My Device app) or Google Maps. In Find Hub’s People tab, they tap Start share and choose Until you stop the share. To add alerts, go to People → [your teen] → Get location notifications → Add a location notification and choose Arrives and/or Leaves. Your teen gets an email when you do, and these notifications don’t work for anyone under 13.

Mixed iPhone and Android families: what actually works

This is where most families get stuck, because the big built-in tools don’t cross over: Find My needs an iPhone on both ends, and Family Link can’t supervise an iPhone.

Your child has an Android, you have an iPhone

Easy: install Family Link on your iPhone (iOS 16 or later) and follow the Android steps above. Or your child can share from Google Maps, and you view it in Google Maps on your iPhone.

Your child has an iPhone, you have an Android

The best free built-in route is Google Maps location sharing, set up on your child’s iPhone:

1. Your child signs in to Google Maps with a Google Account, with your Gmail address saved in their Google Contacts.
2. They tap their profile picture → Location sharing → New share, choose Until you turn this off, pick you, and tap Share.
3. They check that Google Maps can use location in Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services.
4. In Google Maps on your phone, tap your child and add a place under notifications: Every time they arrive or Every time they depart. You can add up to five per person, and your child gets an email when you do.

The catch: Google may block location sharing for users who are too young or whose accounts are managed with Family Link, and arrival notifications don’t work when the person sharing is under 13. For a younger child with an iPhone, a family locator app that runs on both platforms is often the practical answer. Life360 is the best known: at the time of writing (October 2026) its free plan includes 2 Place Alerts and 2 days of location history, and paid plans, from $9.99 a month in the US, add more places, longer history and crash detection. Our guide to sharing location between iPhone and Android covers every combination in more detail.

Using a family locator app with school and home alerts

A family circle app gives the whole household one map, one set of places and one alerts feed, which helps once you’re juggling two children, a co-parent and grandparents. GPSforFamily, the app we make, is one example. It’s free, with no subscriptions, ads or in-app purchases. It’s on Android now, with the iPhone app coming soon, so today it suits families where everyone uses Android.

• Safe places with arrival alerts. Add school, home, practice or grandparents’ with a radius from 50 to 1,000 metres, and you’re notified when your child arrives or leaves. More on getting notified when your child arrives at school or home.
• Battery and connection. Battery level, charging, and Wi-Fi, cellular or offline status, with the time of the last update, plus an alert when a phone drops to 15% and isn’t charging. A flat battery stops looking like an emergency.
• Today’s arrivals and departures. Each person’s screen shows today’s arrivals and departures, and the alerts feed keeps 90 days of alerts. There’s no route history to scroll back through, and raw location data is deleted from the server after 30 days.
• SOS to family. Holding the SOS button sends an alert with your child’s location to the circle. It doesn’t contact emergency services, so your child still needs to call your local emergency number in an emergency.

It’s built for open sharing. Your child installs the app on their own phone, signs in with Google, and joins your circle with a six-character code (you approve the request) or an email invite. They can pause sharing any time from More → Share my location, and Android shows a persistent notification while it runs in the background. It isn’t a parental-control app: no screen-time limits, app blocking or message reading. See everything GPSforFamily does, or compare the best free family locator apps.

First-phone location settings checklist

When a child’s location stops updating, battery and background settings are often the reason. Go through these once on your child’s phone, together.

Then the non-technical part, which matters as much:

• Your child knows your phone number by heart, as the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) recommends. A dead phone can’t call anyone.
• A charging habit. As Common Sense Media points out, location apps don’t work when the phone is off or out of battery.
• An agreed plan for what to do if their phone dies or you can’t reach each other.

Still stuck? Our guide to fixing location sharing that’s not updating goes device by device.

Can you track your child’s phone without them knowing?

It’s a common search, so here’s a straight answer: the mainstream tools are designed so the person being located knows, and we’d gently encourage you not to look for ones that hide it.

• Apple: Find My sharing is switched on from your child’s own iPhone, they’re told when you set a Notify Me alert, and recurring alerts need their approval.
• Google: the person sharing gets an email when you add an arrival or departure notification in Google Maps or Find Hub, and Google emails both of you when a Family Link child turns 13.
• GPSforFamily: there’s no hidden mode. Your child installs it and can pause sharing, Android shows a persistent notification and iPhone shows its location indicator.

Apps that advertise hidden or undetectable tracking fall into what the FTC and the Coalition Against Stalkerware call stalkerware: software that lets someone secretly watch another person through their phone, including their location. It’s the kind of tool abusers use, which is why domestic-violence groups and security companies campaign against it.

Secret monitoring also tends to backfire. When researchers analysed 736 app-store reviews that children aged 8 to 19 wrote about online-safety apps, 76% gave one star, and children described the apps as invasive and as hurting their relationship with their parents (Ghosh and colleagues, CHI 2018). A well-known 2000 study of 14-year-olds by Stattin and Kerr found that parents learned most about their children’s lives from what the children chose to tell them, not from monitoring. That willingness to tell you is worth protecting.

So tell them, share both ways, and let arrival alerts do the checking. If you’re worried about something specific and serious, that calls for a direct conversation and, if needed, help from their school or doctor, not a hidden app.

What a location dot can’t tell you

• Whether the phone is with your child. A phone left in a locker or a friend’s car looks exactly like a child.
• Anything once the phone is off or flat. You’ll see the last known location at best. A dot that disappears could mean a dead battery, a settings change or a decision to stop sharing, so ask before assuming.
• Exactly where they are. GPS.gov says smartphones are typically accurate to within 4.9 metres (16 feet) under open sky, but less so near tall buildings, under trees and indoors. Google’s developer guidance suggests assuming Wi-Fi-based location is accurate to about 50 metres. A dot next to the school may be the shop across the road.
• Whether they’re okay. Knowing where someone is isn’t the same as knowing they’re safe, as Kaitlin Tiches of Boston Children’s Hospital told Scientific American. Children also need to know who to call, where to go, and that they can always ask you to come and get them.

Keep it in proportion

NCMEC puts it plainly: “families do not need to be afraid.” It supported 32,167 missing-child cases in 2025, with an overall recovery rate of 90%, and children who ran away accounted for 92% of incidents. NCMEC also tells families to be wary of expensive gadgets and gimmicks that claim to protect children, a fair warning for any tracking product, including ours.

Location sharing is a coordination tool: it answers “did she get to school?” and “where are we meeting?” For busy places, NCMEC’s going-out checklist adds the low-tech habits: take a photo of your child on your phone before you leave, remember what they’re wearing, and agree on a meeting spot older children go straight to if you get separated.