I don’t about legality or autonomous rights. My kids heard from an early age they had no rights unless I felt like granting them. And I could damn sure remove a right if I felt like it. I was always or tried to be fair. My older 2 are fond of saying I lost my edge with the baby. I have told them repeatedly she is a good girl, I have rarely had to discipline her. She wasn’t mouthy or rude. She was a good student. My older 2 were a mini pack and I had to be stricter. But they weren’t really bad. I was lucky with all 3. And I do classify it as a lot of luck. I did the work, but so do a bunch of parents and they have poor results. Sometimes kids are just trainwrecks no matter what you do. I don’t want to come off as bragging, but I am happy so far with how my kids turned out.
The way they thought when you were a teenage girl. All that’s changed is the communication tools.
FTR, I used to be a teenage girl way before ICQ (remember ICQ?) was invented, and shortly after I started High School my Dad complained that he had sent me to the Jesuits “to be taught, yes - but not dirty language!” My vocabulary hadn’t so much widened as done a split, no need for social media.
That’s more like “massive boundary violations”.
The fact that you say this, and the fact that you’re rightly proud of your kids (and BTW sincere congratulations on your great kids), doesn’t change the other fact - that the opinion you expressed right there is absolute bullshit.
Kids! What’s the matter with kids today?
Why can’t they be like we were,
Perfect in every way?
What’s the matter with kids today?
Oh, don’t mind me, I’m just pulling up a chair here with some popcorn and weiners and a stack of Hustlers and a pack of someone’s dad’s Black & Mild cigarillos and a bottle of Boone’s Farm that someone stuck up his pant leg, and some Nirvana cassette tapes
If you were my kid I would have handed you that book to make you think. (Unless the book was about how whipping kids was good for their moral development or something.) It would help a kid in self-examination while improving reading skills.
Do you have kids? It doesn’t sound like it. If you did you might find that pervasive monitoring is a kind of helicopter parenting. If a kid never makes a mistake, never goes beyond the boundaries, is penned in, they will fall apart when they go to college or move out to work. Penalties for kids are less than penalties for adults for a reason.
It helps a lot for a kid to know why something is considered wrong instead of just being told it is wrong.
Consider swearing. (I feel so quaint using that term.) It is far more important for a kid to know when such words are inappropriate than to be told to never, ever (well, hardly ever) use them. In the right company - or when hitting your thumb with a hammer - they don’t hurt anyone.
Back for clarity. The book was “Children, The Challenge”
“Children: The Challenge gives the key to parents who seek to build trust and love in their families, and raise happier, healthier, and better behaved children. Based on a lifetime of experience with children—their problems, their delights, their challenges—Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs, one of America’s foremost child psychiatrists presents an easy to follow program that teaches parents how to cope with the common childhood problems that occur from toddler through preteen years. This warm and reassuring reference helps parents to understand their children’s actions better, giving them the guidance necessary to discipline lovingly and effectively.”
Carry on!
I’m not afraid I’ll find porn on my son’s computer. I’m afraid my son will find the porn on *my *computer.
Great post. I have a seven-year-old son, and I’m saving this to consult someday. Though a few of the technical details might be different by the time he’s fourteen, I think you covered the basics as pithily as anyone.
Tripolar wasn’t judging you, he was giving you some rock solid insight. Don’t make this about you, your son needs a parent. Pull your head out of the sand and parent him. That doesn’t mean ‘control’ him. It means work with him to ensure he is aware of potential outcomes of his actions. In short, prepare him to behave like an adult.
Yeah, for all the airy “Oh, that’s just teenage boys!” it has become different than “back in the day”.
When I was a teenager, looking at naked women meant sneaking a Playboy or Penthouse. These days it’s everything from similar photos to rape/torture porn to revenge porn to pedophilia and bestiality. I’ve nothing against nudie pics but I wouldn’t want my kid’s perception and expectations on what sex is like based on girls tied up with five guys doing shit to them. But that stuff is out there, linked to the same sites with “pretty girl with nice boobs in lingerie”. You didn’t have people pretending to be a 15 year old girl from Montana trying to convince you to jerk off on camera so they could threaten or blackmail you with the video later.
When I was a teenager, I hung around with other like-aged people and we swore and said dumb shit. But we weren’t in an internet channel with a bunch of people trying to one-up on who could be the biggest troll/asshole and aggressively stalk people or ruin their lives. I didn’t have 50 year old dudes hanging around saying shit or feeding me lines like you get in internet communities today. If you had someone with dumbshit ideas, he was just the local dumbshit. These days, the 0.5% of the national community with those dumbshit ideas get together and make it sound as though those ideas are the majority opinion because you’re surrounded by people saying them even if it’s only one guy from each state in the union.
I don’t know what the answers are. Communication, obviously. And I don’t think it’s a mistake to have an open search policy on computer devices. It’s tougher when you’re a single parent, especially if your kids are a different gender. A son might feel differently about his dad seeing that he was visiting [shady porn site] than his mom. But you need to work with the hand you’ve got so communication about what he’s up to, talk about sex, etc as mentioned upthread. I just can’t get behind the blithe “Heh, teenagers am I right?” attitude.
That’s why I said in the next line
The lesson should be that posting (rather than watching) can screw up your life. Where I worked the criteria for NSFW was “would you mind your boss or a coworker looking over your shoulder at what you are viewing?” If not, it is okay.
That bad stuff doesn’t get any better when a kid turns 18 and goes away to college. Best for them to know why it is unacceptable sooner rather than later. And virtual stuff is still safer than real stuff.
Okay. Was your dad just saying “nyah, nyah, I get to control what you read,” or did he have a problem reading that particular book, which sounds fine to me.
For my parents anything in the public library was okay to read.
Why do you say it’s bullshit? That’s exactly what we did. And low and behold it worked. I was talking about cell phone and computer privileges, specifically. But other things like driving and going out with friends fell into it too. We live in a very small rural place, My husband knows everybody. They couldn’t do anything that we would’ve found out about, or so we believed. I am sure they got up to occasional mischief. Nothing serious. I was on them like a tight pair of jeans. Now early adulthood was hairy a time or two. But that was on them. I had done my job.
Saturday night in 1994 lol
In a mature sense. I took his statement then and now as “I’m an adult and you’re a child (my child)”, our relationship is not as peers. BTW, I brought up the book as a sarcastic way to say: “You’re reading how to deal with me, fix it!”.
Carry on…
That’s the problem with controlling them so much when they’re kids - they don’t learn to test boundaries and limits. Then, when you finally let them out from under your thumb, they go hog wild and do really stupid and dangerous things.
I think there needs to be acknowledgement in this thread that the online world (not just porn, but gaming or just participating in facebook or forums) can be highly addictive and is not just “what kids have always done.” Sure, they’ve always had the same general needs and deserve respect and privacy, but there’s a level of concern that’s much higher than it used to be.
This is an anecdote, but my cousin had a troubled teenagehood (got messed up about coming out gay among other things) and retreated pretty hard into porn as well as other online activities, some questionable - racked up some big bills but more importantly it just messed him up a lot and was an unhealthy environment - when he finally got a good counselor a #1 recommendation was banning his internet use to break the addictive patterns.
This is not to panic the OP certainly - this is likely a rare case - but we also can’t pretend that the fears are unfounded - the temptations are not the same as they always were as many internet sites are designed to keep the clicks coming.
If I felt that his/her activity required monitoring, I would make that a condition of the privilege and/or set that as a rule going forward. I would not retroactively monitor conversations that were made under the expectation of privacy unless there was reason to suspect the child’s safety or welfare was at risk. “Bad language” doesn’t fit requirement IMO.
But I don’t see an issue with saying, "Here is a computer, a smart phone, and internet. You can use it all that you want, but understand that I am monitoring all of your conversations and browsing activity, so don’t say anything or view anything you wouldn’t want me aware of.
I don’t necessarily think that a child NEEDS to be granted privacy. But I think it is messed up for a parent to give the child a certain expectation of privacy, and then betray it. Regardless of where I parent decides to set the privacy boundaries, the child should know where those boundaries are.
Demanding to view conversations that were made when the child thought they were made in secret–that’s messed up. Setting a rule that all conversations and chat accounts are going to be monitored–that’s different.