Who would have thought, back when he was winning fistfuls of Grammys, that Lionel Richie would chiefly be remembered for his capacity to parent self-absorbed starlets. Fourteen years after Nicole Richie became famous for being sticking her entire arm into a cow, Lionel has done it again. Sofia Richie is 18 and has yet to stick her arm into anything tabloid-significant, but she is friends with the Jenner girls, and has 2.5 million Instagram followers.

In an interview last year, she praised Lionel for holding her back from the point where, aged 13, she decided she was ready for a pop career: “I just needed to grow up and learn about life and that wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought it was going to be.”

She made the point that she would have then had to transition from being a kid pop star into being an adult pop star. This is true, and represents a level of self-reflection denied to most celebrity spawn. Once you are fixed in the public mind as a child, if you want to be accepted as an adult you have to follow a painful and elaborate process of pupation that involves DUI mugshots, peeing in kitchen buckets, jiggling your buttocks at the MTV awards, and egging a neighbour’s house.

But the power-parenting hasn’t ended there. “My dad tracks my phone once a day,” Sofia revealed on Twitter this week. “Awkwardly enough, I get a notification every time. I think it’s funny so I don’t tell him I know.”

Save your Hello gags, please. This is a serious column about responsible parenting. And as with most responsible parents, Lionel knows that discreet tracking is the final phase of the care package before you truly set your tiny buds free. Until the age of 25, at the very least, the adult baby monitor is very definitely still “a thing”.

Like most parents, every day Lionel wakes up and sleepily slaps his iPhone to life. He stabs at it with his index finger in the manner of 67-year-olds everywhere, then waits for the pulsing blue dot, then the surrounding map to finish downloading.

Ah, Sofia’s in a nightclub toilet in Long Island. Ah, Sofia’s in the Mexican jungles, possibly with Blac Chyna. Ah, Sofia’s sleeping cradled in my arms. He knows. Always, Lionel knows.

And he surely knows that if the blue dot ever disappears on his map, then his daughter has possibly been eaten by a large carnivorous mammal in the Mexican jungles. Or else perhaps her battery is flat. Until that day, Lionel is out there, parenting. No wonder his daughters have grown up so well.