Helicopter Parents - is this creepy?

In My Humble Opinion
61

[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
If that is the agreement with the daughter, yes. The daughter, under an agreement, has the ability to say “gee, Mom, that’s harsh and an invasion of my privacy” - and perhaps a compromise can be reached - i.e. show me your Facebook when I ask.
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Do the friends not get any right to their own privacy? I’m afraid it’s nonsense to say ‘well, the daughter has to tell her friends that her mum checks on the page’, because, apart from anything else, people forget or overlook such things. Also, apart from anything else, the mother might put herself into a very awkward situation by finding out things about the friends which she’d rather not know.

62

[QUOTE=GorillaMan]
Do the friends not get any right to their own privacy? I’m afraid it’s nonsense to say ‘well, the daughter has to tell her friends that her mum checks on the page’, because, apart from anything else, people forget or overlook such things. Also, apart from anything else, the mother might put herself into a very awkward situation by finding out things about the friends which she’d rather not know.
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You have no right to privacy once you’ve communicated with others. If teenage girls could keep the secrets of other teenage girls, you might have a point, but anything one teenager tells another should be expected to be generally known over the course of a day.

How is Mom looking at Facebook, with her daughters consent, any different than the daughter coming home and saying “Hey, Mom. Madison started dating this really skeevy guy. He’s got to be like 20 or something.” If Mom and daughter have that sort of relationship (and plenty of Moms and daughters do).

63

[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
You have no right to privacy once you’ve communicated with others. If teenage girls could keep the secrets of other teenage girls, you might have a point, but anything one teenager tells another should be expected to be generally known over the course of a day.

How is Mom looking at Facebook, with her daughters consent, any different than the daughter coming home and saying “Hey, Mom. Madison started dating this really skeevy guy. He’s got to be like 20 or something.” If Mom and daughter have that sort of relationship (and plenty of Moms and daughters do).
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Sorry, but that’s ridiculous. No right to privacy because the other person might prove to be untrustworthy anyway?

64

I teach high school, and I know my kids: I teach them for two years (AP Eng and then AP Econ), I read their college essays, counsel them on all sorts of things, listen as they sit around and gossip. And I will tell you that the level of reponsibility they can handle varies widely. There are kids here that I would honestly feel comfortable giving my debit card and PIN to and telling them to go get me $40 out of the bank (not that I’ve ever done that) and there are kids that I wouldn’t let out of my sight. Different kids need very different things from parents, and barring extraordinary evidence, I tend to assume parents know what they are doing. This is not to say that overbearing parents don’t exist, but it’s always a matter of what’s appropriate for a given kid, not a general rule. Furthermore, it’s pointless to try and project what you would have thought of such an arrrangement: there are so many variables within a family that no one facet means much in isolation.

I will also say that even the most level-headed kid is capable of stunning moments of misjudgment–it really is a frontal lobe thing–and so all parents ought to strive to keep two things: one, a trusting relationship so that if the kid is really in trouble (I think my friend has alcohol posioning, can we get a ride to the hospital?) they feel comfortable calling, and 2) a way to get to information if you decide something Very Serious (like suicidal depression or sexual abuse) may be going on so you need to check. Somehow, as personal space and boundaries are negotiated (and it is a constant process of negotiation, not a matter of coming to a final resolution), these two things need to be maintained. The actual details will vary according to what seems best for the kids and parents involved.

65

[QUOTE=GorillaMan]
Sorry, but that’s ridiculous. No right to privacy because the other person might prove to be untrustworthy anyway?
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No - i think what she’s getting at is that your right to “privacy” is negated when you open your darn mouth and talk about what you wanted “private”. If you wanted something kept “private”, you keep it to yourself. Or I could be totally wrong. I’m just a mom who has her kid’s email passwords - haven’t had a need to use them - but I have them. Because it’s my responsibility as a parent.

66

While I never would have stood for this, kids should learn that ANYTHING they put online is ‘public,’ screw passwords and privacy settings. It’s online, someone somewhere has the skills to access it, whether it’s a day from now or five years in the future when they’re applying for jobs. That being said, Mom shouldn’t be impersonating her daughter.

67

[QUOTE=GorillaMan]
Do the friends not get any right to their own privacy? I’m afraid it’s nonsense to say ‘well, the daughter has to tell her friends that her mum checks on the page’, because, apart from anything else, people forget or overlook such things. Also, apart from anything else, the mother might put herself into a very awkward situation by finding out things about the friends which she’d rather not know.
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You seem to think because the technology has changed, that a parents rights and responsibilities have as well. Part of the reason I’ve chosen to not have children is because it has become increasingly more work and more difficult for a parent to properly do their job.

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘find out things she’d rather not know.’. Depending on what it is, she probably should know and probably should be having a talk with her daughter.

68

[QUOTE=Manda JO]
Do you really see yourself entirely as a product of your parent’s parenting? There are six in my family, and me you could have trusted on the internet but there are a few of my siblings that had much weaker judgment.
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I don’t see myself entirely as a product of my parents’ parenting, but my personality does highly reflect my parents’ values and our home culture. I had a reasonable level of responsibility for my own actions from a younger age, so I may have learned not to do stupid things a little earlier than my peers. Yes, I did some mind bogglingly stupid things when I was younger than the person in question, but at the same time, I didn’t manage to get myself in trouble on the internet. Then again, my parents had trusted me by the time I had gotten to 14 to make a lot of my own decisions about the content I was exposing myself to, and this was something that was built up over time.

I just see the password access + logging on behavior in regard to the age of the student as being a helicopter parent behavior and I wonder what’s going to happen when this kid finally gets away to college. Is she going to crash and burn like a lot of the children of helicopter parents that I knew? I see a good deal of behavior like this as unnecessary handholding that is likely to turn out another incompetent adult who runs to their parents for every little thing.

As for the panic over sexual predators on the internet, if one reads the Highlights of the Youth Internet Safety Survey* at the US Department of Justice, you’ll find that the incidence of online sexual predation by adults is extremely low among their subjects. Almost half of the “sexual solicitations”** are from people in their own age group, and only three percent of those in the study received the type of sexual solicitations that most people associate with the “dangers of child predators on the internet”. I think that being a little more savvy about how to have a safe time on the internet with a bit of trust is going to go further in kids knowing how to handle themselves as adults and not get duped as soon as the parental controls are removed.

[sub]*People actually quote this a lot online, but do not actually link to the details and definitions of their study. Here’s the full PDF of the original study if you’re interested.
**This has the vague phrase “give personal sexual information” in it, which covers a really wide range that could include questions such as “do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend?” and “are you a virgin?”, which are pretty common questions that teens ask each other in person and online. Scholars studying teens and the internet have voiced concerns over the validity of the study for these reasons as well, so it’s not just me thinking it’s a bit ill-worded.[/sub]

69

[QUOTE=Cat Fight]
That being said, Mom shouldn’t be impersonating her daughter.
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Who said she impersonated her? What was said was that she was logged on her daughters page, checking up on it just like the daughter knew she could. A friend noticed the account was logged onto and called the daughter on the phone about it. I don’t see any impersonating going on.

70

[QUOTE=Missy2U]
No - i think what she’s getting at is that your right to “privacy” is negated when you open your darn mouth and talk about what you wanted “private”. If you wanted something kept “private”, you keep it to yourself.
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You’ve never talked with anybody about anything, ever, in the knowledge that it won’t go any further? Wow.

71

[QUOTE=GorillaMan]
You’ve never talked with anybody about anything, ever, in the knowledge that it won’t go any further? Wow.
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If someone has said to you “Look, I tell everything to my mom”, and then you tell them things, you’ve accepted that their mom will hear what you said. That’s the same as if someone says “Look, my mom reads my facebook sometimes” and you post things on their wall.

72

My kid has his own computer, in his room.

He’s six.

Now, am I crazy? No, because the only thing he can do right now is use a browser, and that works only to domains that I have white-listed. His MAC address is blocked at my external router, and so he can only get out by hitting a proxy server I’ve set up to do the white-listing. If he wants to go somewhere that isn’t listed, he asks me to add the site.

Now, as he gets older, undoubtedly I’ll permit more access, but I will always have the ability to know what he’s doing on-line. Non-negotiable.

I don’t believe he’ll be able to flout the security setup, although I’m sure the time will come that he tries.

73

I’ve run into parents like that…and I think that it’s creepy to be so involved in a kid’s life after a certain age, too. My parents were worrywarts when I was little, and it annoyed me, but for a variety of reasons, they backed off when I hit high school. I think it’s very important for a kid to deal with getting into college mostly by him or herself. (Assistance and some checking by parents is great, but when are you going to cut the cord if not then?)

As far as privacy, it’s reasonable for parents to check up on their kids, but there are less invasive ways to do it. What’s wrong with her mom getting her own Facebook account and friending her daughter to see what she’s up to? She can view most of her profile that way, anyway. That works with Livejournal, Myspace, anything else, for that matter. Why not ask her daughter about her life and see what she volunteers, or see if she seems like she’s worried or lying about anything?

Maybe her daughter doesn’t particularly care about that account, and if she doesn’t, it’s not really a violation of privacy. (For example, I’ll share my email password with someone if I need them to login and get something for me–other accounts are different.) If she does care, though, it’s excessive.

[QUOTE=Sleeps With Butterflies]
We all know all you have to do is tell junior that he can’t haul all of his friends around in his car and he’ll do it.
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I disagree with this. It’s going to depend on the kid. They’re all going to do stupid things, sure. But what the stupid thing is will be different based on each kid, and it’s not unreasonable for a parent to trust her kid, or for a well behaved kid to expect such trust from her parents. I found you crazy people when I was in high school, and I set up a few email pen-pal accounts through other websites. Somehow I managed to not set up a meeting with a total stranger in some alleyway.

I had conversations like this with my parents:
Dad: “Hey, whatcha doin?”
Me: “I’m emailing a pen-pal in the UK.”
Dad: “Oh, really, where’d you find her?”
Me: “Through a Terry Pratchett fan site.”
Dad: “Oh, ok. Don’t set up meetings with strangers, and don’t give out our address.”
Me: rolls eyes “Dad, I’m not an idiot.”
Dad: joking sad face “Ok, but we worry.”
Me: “Oh, yeah, and look, I found this thread on this messageboard about [whatever it was]. Isn’t it funny?”

Reading diaries and logging into password protected accounts seems like it’s desperate measures to be used when other avenues have failed and you’re worried about your kid. What’s wrong with a conversation first?

74

[QUOTE=Cat Fight]
While I never would have stood for this, kids should learn that ANYTHING they put online is ‘public,’ screw passwords and privacy settings. It’s online, someone somewhere has the skills to access it, whether it’s a day from now or five years in the future when they’re applying for jobs.
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Would you say that about, say, a Gmail account, in comparison to a Facebook Inbox?

75

[QUOTE=nashiitashii]
I don’t see myself entirely as a product of my parents’ parenting, but my personality does highly reflect my parents’ values and our home culture. I had a reasonable level of responsibility for my own actions from a younger age, so I may have learned not to do stupid things a little earlier than my peers. Yes, I did some mind bogglingly stupid things when I was younger than the person in question, but at the same time, I didn’t manage to get myself in trouble on the internet. Then again, my parents had trusted me by the time I had gotten to 14 to make a lot of my own decisions about the content I was exposing myself to, and this was something that was built up over time.

I just see the password access + logging on behavior in regard to the age of the student as being a helicopter parent behavior and I wonder what’s going to happen when this kid finally gets away to college. Is she going to crash and burn like a lot of the children of helicopter parents that I knew? I see a good deal of behavior like this as unnecessary handholding that is likely to turn out another incompetent adult who runs to their parents for every little thing.
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But what if you’d been a different kid? What if you had a tendency towards suicidal depression? What if you’d had a relationship with an older boy that had turned abusive? What if you’d lied to your parents over and over again?

Kids vary a lot, and parenting doesn’t just create personality, it also has to respond to personality, and it’s a poor parent that puts ideology over reality.

As a parent, I would be less worried about sexual predation and more worried about drugs, alcohol, older friends, mental health issues, etc. My parents didn’t always meet my friends, but there would have been a problem if they realized there was someone I specifically didn’t want them to meet.

76

Am I the only one who thinks it’s creepy that she’s trying to manhandle the son’s college particulars? Doing all that stuff for himself and perhaps ending up with (gasp!) an unpleasant dorm result, roommate, class schedule, whatever, is all part of growing up, and an 18 year old is generally VERY capable of handling these details for his or herself.

The facebook thing I have no problem with.

77

[QUOTE=Manda JO]
But what if you’d been a different kid? What if you had a tendency towards suicidal depression? What if you’d had a relationship with an older boy that had turned abusive? What if you’d lied to your parents over and over again?
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If the safety or well-being of a child is at immediate risk, then it’s an exceptional situation. But other than that - a tendency to be in a suicidal state? The last thing they would need would be covert observation, but rather the ability to talk openly and frankly (and not necessarily with the parent). An abusive relationship in the past? Likewise. Chronic lying? Well, they’ll probably start using MySpace instead without telling the parent…

78

[QUOTE=beanpod]
I’ve run into parents like that…and I think that it’s creepy to be so involved in a kid’s life after a certain age, too. My parents were worrywarts when I was little, and it annoyed me, but for a variety of reasons, they backed off when I hit high school. I think it’s very important for a kid to deal with getting into college mostly by him or herself. (Assistance and some checking by parents is great, but when are you going to cut the cord if not then?)
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The problem is that if the parents are paying for college, the kids have very little incentive to ensure that they are doing everything they can to get scholarships and good deals. Parents have a huge incentive. I can see wanting to make sure every step in the process is completed and no stone left unturned. Screw ups at this stage can be very expensive.

Well, used to be you couldn’t do that on facebook (had to have a college or high school ID) and the mom may just not be tech-savy enough to think of that. I think the idea here is that you establish the priciple of open access when they are 12-14 but as they age and become more and more responsible, you back off from actually using it unless you see danger signs. There are certain things–suicide and abuse come to mind–that can happen to the best raised children and that parents have to keep an eye out for. These are things you can’t trust a child to bring to you.

79

My 2d (of 3) is going to college this fall. Tho he graduated in the top 5% of his class and is going to a fine school next year, if my wife and I did not play a very active role in at least pushing him at countless steps in the college application process, I suspect he would likely have ended up at the local community college.

Now that is not to say that he would have been permanently and irrevocably damaged by such event, and that there aren’t lessons to be learned from such result, but it is not the result we desired, or that we thought was in our son’s best interests based on our 18 years’ acquaintance with him and our cumulative near century of life experience.

So I take issue with the OP’s description of the parental involvement in the kid’s college applications as undesireable “helicopter parenting” (especially if the Ps are footing the bill!)

With facebook and Myspace, it is very clear that my wife and I value aspects of privacy that are being thought archaic, unimportant, and unrealistic by increasing numbers of younger people. At the very least, however, I think there is a continuum along which a young adult becomes capable of making intelligent choices regarding such things. And parental input at an early stage may be useful and effective in helping a kid not make large mistakes at an early stage.

When our kids got more computer literate, we told them we required access to everything they did on their computers. The reality is we rarely - if ever - checked. I think a couple of times I asked my kids to see what they were working on and to review their history, just to let them know that the possibility existed that I could check up on them. But as with most aspects of their lives, if they seemed to be exercising good judgment and no red flags were raised, we didn’t see any need to pry. Not to mention the few instances where we saw what they were doing on-line, it just didn’t seem very interesting. More a waste of time than “dangerous.”

As a general rule I would never search my kids’ rooms or read their diaries, so long as they didn’t give me reason to do so. However, if I saw something that suggested to me that they were engaging in undesireable behavior, I could imagine doing so. Same holds true for their computers.

80

[QUOTE=GorillaMan]
If the safety or well-being of a child is at immediate risk, then it’s an exceptional situation. But other than that - a tendency to be in a suicidal state? The last thing they would need would be covert observation, but rather the ability to talk openly and frankly (and not necessarily with the parent). An abusive relationship in the past? Likewise. Chronic lying? Well, they’ll probably start using MySpace instead without telling the parent…
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You have a 14 year old who swallows a bunch of pills and doesn’t call anyone. Now they are 17, medicated, seeing a counselor, seem to be fine. Wouldn’t you still want to keep a closer eye on them? You can’t trust a depressed person to come to you. Depression by definition screws up your judgment. You also can’t trust a 17 year old’s friends to come to you if they are again becoming suicidal – kids have lousy judgment. Same for abuse from a SO or drug/alcohol abuse. If there is a pattern there, a parent needs to observe more closely than if it isn’t. And if a kid is a chronic liar, you don’t just wash your hands of them and let them do whatever the hell they want because it’s pointless to try to stop them, you do your best to monitor them directly because they won’t let indirect monitoring (i.e., conversation) work.