Hypothetical situation only - I haven’t done this, and don’t expect I ever will.
Your daughter, who’s under age 18, lives with you. She’s sent a postcard by a relative. The postcard arrives while your daughter is at school that day. You see the postcard and read it (quite common in your family - you’ve done it before and your daughter has never objected; she reads postcards sent to you, too, and you don’t mind). You know that the postcard will be very upsetting/objectionable to her because of the message written by the relative. It’s likely to make your daughter think unkind things about, or even hate, the relative. You know it’s unlikely that the relative will ever ask your daughter about the postcard, or even mention it.
Do you have either the legal (you haven’t interfered with the mail in transit; only once it’s reached your house) or the moral right to throw out the postcard and not tell your daughter about it?
If your answer would be different depending on the jurisdiction or some other factor I haven’t specified, please explain.
Morally? I’d say no. Not to destroy the card. Instead, keep it until the kid is old enough to understand. If the situation has some urgency, and shouldn’t wait, then you might prepare him or her for it, and use it as a teachable moment. Or summarize what was in the postcard, while explaining, “I won’t let you read it, because it contains language I don’t want you to be exposed to.”
(This is a wee bit of a benign fib, as it isn’t cuss words you’re protecting against, but emotionally harmful content.)
Years and years from now, when the kid is thirty or forty, he or she might really wish to still have that postcard from dear old Aunt Mimsy, the crazy one, who was so vicious and hurtful…“But, y’know, I always loved her. That postcard would have meant a lot to me now.”
Legally, I’ve no idea. Morally, no. Not only are you indulging in censorship you are setting them up for some kind of future disaster by ensuring they have a false view of what that relative is like. Ignorance is only bliss until you walk off a cliff you didn’t see coming.
It is impossible to judge the morality without more information. Depending on the message and on the specifics of the relevant relationships, it may well be that you have a moral duty to conceal the card from her. It might cause great harm to let her see it.
Or you migt have a duty to let her see. Or not. It all depends.
There’s certainly no problem with reading the postcard. By their very nature, postcards are not private - anyone can read them. I would also say if the recipient is your minor child, there is no strict legal violation in keeping the postcard a secret. Morally? That’s a bit murkier. I’d say it depends on the recipient’s age and maturity and the nature of the communication. Or, “it depends”.
I don’t have an answer for the moral question; in my view, it’s impossible to answer on the information given. Any answer is highly dependent on the specific content of the card.
Legally, I think a parent has broad power to act as a guardian, and that power includes managing the information your child has. But I think the card is the property of the child, not the parent, so strictly speaking the parent has a legal right to hold the card in trust for the child until the child’s majority, but not to destroy it or withhold it past that point.
That’s my shoot-from-the-hip, non-researched answer, anyway.
I don’t know. I think it depends on the content and the relative. I would think I would probably not interfere with the postcard addressed to my daughter. If some older great uncle lets say showed his bigoted side in his postcard of all things, I would let her see it and talk to her about it.
I might hold on to the postcard until I had a chance to contact the relative to explain my point of view and give them the opportunity to retract it. If the relative refuses then I’d go ahead and deliver it with some discussion to ameliorate the post cards effect. If you just censor it, then the relative is just going to repeat the behavior and eventually it will get through.
Whether you should give the postcard to your daughter depends entirely on your judgment as a parent. You have no ethical/moral duty to let something happen that you think she’d be better off without. So that’s your decision criteria: would she be better off not knowing, or knowing?
The OP really makes me curious about what’s on the postcard!
Not knowing any more, I have to think that the uncle intended YOU to see the message, else he wouldn’t have written in on a postcard. What do you think he expected you to do about it?
To me it depends onhow old the daughter is and exactly what the content of the postcard it. If she’s a four-year-old, I’ll throw it out. If she’s over 12, I’ll probably give it to her. If she’s 17, I definitely will.
Like Rachellelogram says, it really depends on the context. Receiving something sexually explicit from weird Uncle Henry is different from seeing 90-year-old Gramps casually throw around some casual racism. Likewise, the response to either depends on whether daughter is five or fifteen.
When I was 17, my mother concealed some mail from me because she thought it would upset me. Even though she was right that it was upsetting, I was absolutely furious with her when I found out, and still get annoyed when I think about it over 30 years later. I feel like it was a terrible breach of trust.
I wouldn’t just leave the postcard for your daughter to find. I would sit down with her, explain that she received some upsetting mail, and share it with her in context so that she can discuss it with you. I would gear my presentation of the information to my daughter’s age and my knowledge of her personality, but I wouldn’t just hide it from her.
First - I’m not a parent and I don’t have a good answer, but (I’m sure there will be a ton of “it depends” answer)…
To those of you who say at withholding the postcard is a bad thing, how is this different than telling your 12 year old that they can’t watch a TV show or read a book or buy a magazine that you find objectionable?
What if Uncle Fred wrote that he just had to tell your daughter that her beloved, dead, grandfather had run away with someone elses wife. Or Aunt Gertrude writes a venomous rant about the immorailty of homosexuality, and your daughter’s best friend is gay. Or how about Playboy somehow messed up their mailing list, and started shipping their magazine to your daughter.
I would probably give it to her, assuming she could read it. I would not feel obligated to shield her asshole relatives from her wrath. I would also not feel any hesitation in saying, “Yeah, Relative’s a real asshole. I’m sorry but it’s true.” I would also be on the phone to everyone in the family, saying, “Hey - guess what Uncle Asshole did this time.”
I would tell my daughter the truth. I would tell everybody in earshot the truth. I would also track down the one who wrote the postcard and tell him a few special truths, as well.
I tend to agree with a parent’s moral right to act as the kid’s guardian in a proper case, but I’d say this situation is far different from a parent refusing permission to watch a TV show, etc. - and much more serious.
The differences are two-fold:
(1) You are actively concealing facts from the kid, rather than simply refusing permission to view something.
(2) The facts you are concealing concern the kid’s relationship between her and her relative. That’s a pretty intrusive act, to come between two relations. It could be the case that what you consider “upsetting” the kid would find a “vital bit of information”, and be seriously upset about being deprived of it.
Not to say that the intrusion isn’t sometimes justified on the facts, but it is without a doubt a more serious and concerning intrusion than simply censoring her TV watching. Not something, in my opinion, to be done lightly.
But if the relative is an asshole, the child has a right to know that her relative is an asshole. Mind you: this is colored by how efficiently and for how long my mother managed to hide from her children and husband just how much of an asshole her father was.