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Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”
I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.
I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”
Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.
Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.
It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.
It alarms me how quickly adults forget that children are people.
Apparently people are rediscovering this post somehow and I think that’s pretty cool! Having experienced similar violations of trust in my youth, this is an important issue to me, so I want to add my personal story:
Around age 13, I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me “not to joke about things like that.” I stopped telling my mother when I felt depressed.
Around age 15, I caught my mother reading my diary. She confessed that any time she saw me write in my diary, she would sneak into my room and read it, because I only wrote when I was upset. I stopped keeping a diary.
Around age 18, I had an emotional breakdown while on vacation because I didn’t want to go to college. I ended up seeing a therapist for - surprise surprise - depression.
Around age 21, I spoke on this panel with my mother in the audience, and afterwards I mentioned the diary incident to her with respect to this particular Q&A. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?”
TL;DR: When you invade your child’s privacy, you communicate three things:
You do not respect their rights as an individual.
You do not trust them to navigate problems or seek help on their own.
You probably haven’t been listening to them.
Information about almost every issue that you think you have to snoop for can probably be obtained by communicating with and listening to your child.
Part of me is really excited to see that the original post got 200 notes because holy crap 200 notes, and part of me is really saddened that something so negative has resonated with so many people.
“I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me ”
“’You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?’”
I found these quotes particularly interesting. OP’s mother refused to listen when she tried to talk about her depression, but snooped through her things to see if she was depressed.
It’s amazing to me that parents need to be told something that I GUARANTEE they experienced themselves. This is something that predates text messaging. You search your child’s room for drugs, and they will find a better hiding place for anything they may be worried about you finding - even if it’s as innocuous as candy. You try to snoop on their phone conversations with their boyfriend, and they will 1) Find a different way to communicate with him, and 2) Never communicate with YOU about their boyfriend.
My parents doing this shit to me didn’t make me stop doing it and didn’t make me respect them any more. All it did was make me better at sneaking around.
Parents that do this shit skeeve me out.
And oh god the amount of times this has happened makes me sad at just how many notes there are.
HOLY. CRAP. THIS.
This was the entirety of my teens and an infuriatingly large part of my early twenties. My mother invaded EVERYTHING. She listened in on my phone calls. She monitored my AIM conversations. She monitored my online activity. She randomly went through my room while I was at work.
And heaven forbid she found anything having to do with sex. Because it is in no way normal for a college-age girl to want to learn about sex, explore her own sexuality, and possibly even, hey why not, get her hands on some written pornography. Because girls aren’t supposed to be curious about that sort of thing. But it was kind of hard to get any sort of information elsewhere because she literally refused to let me see a gynecologist or ask her any questions.
And hell yes, I hid fucking everything from her because every time she invaded my privacy for any reason, it told me exactly that: “I don’t think you deserve privacy or autonomy or the right to your own body or opinions, and I refuse to see you as anything but a child, physically, mentally, and emotionally.”
It only got better after she sent me to a shrink, and after exactly one session, he flat out told her, “Get out of your daughter’s bedroom and get out of her pants.” Because I was 22 by that time and fully capable of making my own decisions. He also told me that she could not legally force me to attend any sort of counseling since I was over the age of 21.
We still battle occasionally over issues of privacy and I’m 31 now. Fortunately, I’m moving soon.

(via genderrogue-deactivated20180522)

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