It was one of those perfect parties where the company was convivial, the drinks were flowing, the music was loud and the conversation was scintillating. So it was easy to miss the constant ‘buzz, buzz, buzz’ of messages ­coming from my phone.

When I finally fished it out of my handbag, there was a stream of increasingly angry messages and missed calls from my teenage son in a panic.

‘Where are you?’

‘Pick up your phone?’

‘WTF? Pick up.’

‘I am getting worried here. Where are you?’

‘MUM! PICK UP!’

This wasn’t a new thing. He is a worrier and very protective of me, particularly when I am out late at night.

He frets about me getting the Tube and the bus in the dark on my own, and says he can’t sleep until he knows I’m home.

In many ways, his blind ­panics about my whereabouts drove me crazier than any worry I used to have over his.

Don’t get me wrong – my ­children’s safety is my biggest concern. But my teenagers, now aged 17 and 19, are ­streetwise London kids and have made it perfectly clear – in fact, they could not have made it plainer – that they don’t want their annoying mum constantly pestering them.

And that’s why a year ago we decided to start tracking each other’s whereabouts. So no more frantic texts or calls... or silent, ‘God, I hope they’re OK’ either.

It works brilliantly for all of us, which is why I’m surprised to learn health experts are now warning that tracking devices are making children more ­anxious and less independent.

They claim a ‘surveillance childhood’ prevents youngsters from developing the autonomy they need to ­navigate real life.

To my mind, they couldn’t be more wrong! My boys are ­completely on board with our new regime.

After all, fretting about me was making both them and me anxious. And now I have become a ‘tracking parent’, I’d never go back.

Even though my eldest is now at university 200 miles away, I sleep more easily –knowing he’s either at a pub (mostly) or in his student digs.

We track one another on an app called Life360, which ­creates ‘circles’ for family and friends using GPS to share locations and sends alerts for arrivals and departures from home.

It works well for all of us, although I must confess my sons weren’t always keen at the prospect of being tracked in their early teens but now see the sense of it.

My youngest has always been particularly bad at ­letting me know where he is and slow at answering his phone, so that led to some hair-­pulling moments.

One evening, shortly before we all agreed to download Life360, he didn’t come home at the agreed time after school and, as usual, wasn’t picking up his phone.

For nearly two hours, I ­frantically messaged the mums of his friends to see if they knew where he was; none of them did.

My eldest was in a panic, too, trying to find out where his ­little brother was.

Nothing. Nothing for a long, long two hours until he finally rocked up at home, shrugging that he’d simply lost track of time and hadn’t thought to check his phone.

Now knowing I can find him at the touch of a button gives us both freedom; he doesn’t have to call to tell me where he is. In some ways, he is actually using less technology, not more. And it actually makes both of us less anxious.

I have a few friends who are against our family’s approach to tracking.

One surprised me by ­telling me it was Orwellian, while another said that not only does it cause her children ­anxiety because she has ­hammered into them the importance of keeping the tracking on, but it makes her anxious too if her children are not where she thought they would be.

I can, of course, see why health experts might be ­worried about a new ‘surveillance’ style of parenting.

But I feel we need to see the world as it is, not as we wish it would be.

In reality, most teenagers can all see where their mates are almost all of the time via Snapchat, an app they all seem to use.

This is the world they are used to – constant surveillance, instant communication, and a greater awareness and knowledge of the dangers, thanks to the never-ending news cycle that comes up on their phones.

We can’t turn the clock back and pretend we live in an ­analogue world. It is digital tracking all the way for us.