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“Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”

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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:

1. You do not respect their rights as an individual.
2. You do not trust them to navigate problems or seek help on their own.
3. 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 follow the motto that
Overprotective parents only lead to sneaky children

I came out to my parents as trans when I was 14, and they told me I was too young to know about stuff like that. In the same conversation, my mum talked about topics that I had only revealed in my diary, which I kept on a USB stick in my room. On it, I’d talked about my feelings towards my gender, about a boy I was stealth to that I’d met at an event me and my mum went to, and about someone on tumblr who had been reassuring me that my parents would be accomodating, and that if they weren’t, I’d eventually be okay.

My mum told me that the person online was manipulating me for their own gain (they lived in Canada, and could gain literally nothing by giving a scared kid some strong words of advice), that I was wrong for “lying” to the kid I’d never see again anyway, and that she used to hang out with boys, and it was exactly the same thing. They both straight up refused to let me talk about my gender and made me feel guilty for writing my personal thoughts in a personal space, while never actually admitting to reading my diary.

She also found my tumblr, where I had expressed irritation about my family being openly transphobic, and voiced concerns that they would react badly if they found out about me. My mum made me delete the posts, while she watched and I cried out of shame, because she felt that they put her in a bad light, and refused to let me online without her sat directly next to me for two years.

For years after, they kept asking why I was so isolated from the family, why I never talked to them about anything any more. The repeatedly called me selfish and ‘sneaky’ for doing things without talking to them about it, causing a problem with honesty that I still have, five years later. 

DO NOT READ YOUR CHILD’S PERSONAL WRITING. IT WILL MAKE THEM LOSE ALL TRUST IN YOU AND FORCE THEM TO INTERNALISE ALL OF THEIR THOUGHTS WITH NO WAY TO LET THEM OUT. IT HARMS THEM.