The minute my daughter passed her driver’s test, I entered the ethical quagmire of stalking.

We downloaded the location-based tracking app Life360, both to see if she’s driving safely and to give her the additional security of help arriving quickly in case of an accident.

At that level, it seems as rational as using a baby monitor for an infant in a crib. But the idea of being able to follow her movements also makes me uneasy.

I surely wouldn’t have wanted my own parents to have this technology when I was a teenager. Isn’t part of growing up learning from mistakes and learning how to navigate tough situations?

Before this, I had never used a monitoring device on the kids’ phones, focusing instead on talking to them about the pitfalls of today’s technology.

But driving feels different.

Car accidents are a leading cause of injury and death for teens. It felt almost negligent not to take advantage of a resource that could give us peace of mind and possibly make her a safer driver.

I’m not alone in this decision, however reluctantly I came to it. There are 50 million families who use the Life360 app. Millions more use features like the iPhone’s Find Your Friends feature to keep track of their family members’ whereabouts.

I asked a dozen of my closest mom friends whether they used some kind of tracking app. Only one said no: She expects her kids to stay in touch with her via their phones, and they do a good job with it. She wants communication to be a two-way street between them.

The rest said it gives them peace of mind or a sense of security. After all, sometimes teens don’t or can’t respond to their parents’ texts. Phone batteries die. Practices run late. Plans with friends change at the last minute.

One mother with three teenage daughters with hectic schedules said that tracking them is better than having to nag them all the time via text to see where they are.

It’s true that many teens have more demanding schedules than we did at their age, and we live in a more anxious parenting age with the near-daily news of mass shootings.

Parents say their children also use the app to keep track of them, especially when they are late picking them up from somewhere. One mother tracks when her son leaves work and when he’s on his way home from school. Her daughter keeps track of her mom the same way.

The question becomes where we draw the line.

“I like to know that my college-age kid made it back to his dorm room at night,” one parent said, who continues to track her college-aged son’s whereabouts.

Another said she got a discount on their car insurance by installing a physical tracker on her teen’s car. It monitors speed, hard braking and other driving patterns. It gives the family a weekly driving grade, and their insurance rates are tied to the scores.

But do we feel comfortable knowing that these apps and tech companies are eventually selling all this data to make even more profits off tracking our movements?

Some of our children may call us dictators, or protest that they are living in an “authoritarian state,” as my teenager initially did, but I’m living under the same conditions. This is perhaps a more in-your-face reminder of how much of our privacy we have given away for convenience and security. It’s an uncomfortable reminder that our thoughts, relationships and consumption habits -- expressed through our search histories, social media posts and online purchases -- are tracked, stored and sold, often in ways we don’t even know. Now, we can add our very movements to the list.

At the end of the day, maybe we won’t even need this particular tracking app too much. Our daughter’s younger brother, who she now drives to school, seems to view his new commute as a daily gamble. He sends us a reassuring text upon arrival: “She got us here safely.”

Of course, we had checked our apps, and already knew.

Dear School Principals,

Parents tend to get excited about the start of a new school year. We’re ready for our kids to be back in the swing of learning. But there’s an issue we need to talk about before the school year begins.

We know principals are juggling lots of moving parts, academic and administrative, before the hallways get filled with children. Teachers are working on learning new ways to help their students achieve higher goals. School staff may be planning ways to deal with the traumas students bring with them and looking for additional resources to better serve them. And that’s not to mention the hiring, budgeting and scheduling that come together at the last minute.

We know that among your top priorities is to keep the young people in your charge safe -- physically, emotionally and socially. Many of us say a prayer when we send our children into those buildings. Every mass shooting brings another wave of fear.

This year, we have another urgent plea: Please pay attention to the world outside the school building and think about how it’s going to impact the students you serve. You know as well as we do that bullying related to race and ethnicity has increased since the last presidential election. Students have parroted hateful language as taunts on playgrounds, and racial slurs have shown up in students’ social media feeds. Studies are starting to bear out the stories from families who have experienced this fallout firsthand.

Researchers studied the rate of bullying in middle schools in Virginia and found that in 2017 teasing and bullying were significantly higher in schools located in districts that had voted for Donald Trump compared with districts that had voted for Hillary Clinton. This difference in the rate of bullying based on districts’ voting patterns didn’t exist before the last election. This upcoming election season is shaping up to be even worse.

Some of your students will bear the brunt of this politicized rhetoric.

Your students of color walk into their classrooms knowing that a white supremacist just massacred 22 people in El Paso. When one of their classmates uses the “n-word,” or draws a swastika on a bathroom stall or says “go back to where you came from,” think for a moment how that might feel against this backdrop.

In addition to insulting, it may feel threatening. Unsafe.

We know privacy laws prevent you from discussing consequences when students are disciplined, but have you thought of ways to address the incidents that hurt a community without singling out a specific child? When principals refuse to name or discuss these problems it feels like they are being swept aside, that the safety of some kids isn’t really a priority. When principals refuse to act by saying an incident happened “outside of school hours,” it sounds like a cop-out.

You are responsible for setting the tone of the school’s culture, and most schools teach values like respect and responsibility. When those values are tested this year, we want to hear you clearly say: This is hateful and racist. This is hurtful. This is not who we want to be.

How will you use these moments to teach the aggressor empathy and help him or her understand why these words and actions are destructive? If their parents push back, will you have the courage to stand up for what you know is right?

I believe most educators get into this profession because they care deeply about students. And in this time of deep division and rising acts of bigotry, we need to hear louder voices from the principals who lead our nation’s schools.

It takes courage to admit that adults may also say things they shouldn’t. It takes heart to recognize the hurt when a student or parent shares such an incident. The way you respond will reverberate throughout the school. Others will take their cue from you.

Teachers will watch how you respond. Students who want to be allies for their friends will watch how you respond. Parents will watch how you respond.

We are trusting you to know that racist harassment hurts more than the person targeted. It hurts the entire community.

Every student should know their principal has their back.

We are counting on your courage.

The divide between how Gen X parents grew up and how our children are growing up was already a wide chasm before the political world turned upside down.

Compare our coveted technology (a Walkman) to theirs (an iPhone), or our parents’ parenting style (benign neglect) to ours (hovering helicopter). Our ways of communicating and operating in the world are fundamentally different than theirs.

But the past few years have upended norms in a way our generation had never experienced before: Overnight, we went from electing the first black president to one whose rallies feature racist chants. Do our children grasp how strange things are right now, or is this their version of normal? What’s the best way to explain to them how far we’ve drifted from political and social norms without unduly terrifying them?

I asked one of the most prominent political voices on the internet, who frequently warns about the dangers of normalizing an acutely abnormal moment in our history. Sarah Kendzior is a progressive writer and scholar on authoritarian regimes, a frequent MSNBC commentator, bestselling author, co-host of the “Gaslit Nation” podcast, and has nearly half a million followers on Twitter. She’s also a St. Louis-based mom with two young children, 12 and 8 years old, who have heard her discuss difficult current events on TV and at home.

“I’ve flat-out told them, ‘This is not normal. This is not how the government is supposed to work,’” she said. “We’re in a turning point in American history.”

It’s not normal for the president to be retweeting white supremacists or tweeting racists taunts. It’s not normal to have a president who has lied more than 10,000 times in office, many times about things people easily can see and hear simply aren’t true. It’s not normal for an American president to dismiss a foreign threat to American democracy, and, in fact, openly encourage that foreign interference in an election.

None of us have ever seen a president behave like this before. And it’s unsettling to the majority of Americans who don’t support this to understand how others can go along with it.

It’s tempting for parents to simply want to seek refuge for their family life from the storms swirling outside. But Kendzior says that for many kids, especially those targeted by this administration, that’s not an option. Like most parents, she wants her children to appreciate the gravity of what’s happening, while maintaining a sense of security and hope.

Kendzior makes a point to teach them about American history by visiting museums and historical sites, so they can recognize patterns and see how the past impacts the present. She talks to them about how to stand up for others who might be getting picked on or suffering, and why that is the right thing to do.

She believes it’s important to validate children’s feelings and to reassure them that many people are working to make things better.

“Always tell your kid that you’ve got their back and that there are millions of other people who are fighting for them,” she said, adding that it’s normal to feel angry when children recognize things are unfair. “It’s a horrible thing happening,” she said. “We should be mad.”

There was an exchange during the televised hearing with former special counsel Robert Mueller that speaks to the fear that some things in our political system may have become permanently broken. Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, asked Mueller: “Have we established a new normal from this past campaign that is going to apply to future campaigns, so that if any one of us running for the U.S. House -- any candidate for the U.S. Senate, any candidate for the presidency of the United States -- is aware that a hostile foreign power is trying to influence an election, has no duty to report that to the FBI or other authorities?”

“I hope this is not the new normal,” Mueller responded. “But I fear it is.”

It’s a collective fear. What if pathological lying, racist bullying and open defiance of laws are what our children come to see as “politics as usual”?

To them, our message can be this simple: Yes, things are totally out of whack, but lots of us are trying to fix it.

We believe you can help.