I plan to handle things like my parents did. I knew that they had the right to search my stuff. I also knew that they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t have a damn good reason. I never gave them a reason.
Or if they did search my stuff without a damn good reason, they never said a thing about what they found. And there were things to find. But I doubt they searched. One of my mother’s tenets is “don’t ask a question if you dont’ want to know the answer.”
Can you encrypt or password protect individual folders? I actually do have a few things that I want to hide from my mommy. Or really, I just want to make sure that some random person using my computer doesn’t run across my…er…my collection of nature photos. I know that I can make different user accounts and all, but I really just want to put some sort of rudimentary protection on one folder. (I have some outdated version of Windows, by the way)
First rule of parenting - your children are doing things you don’t think they’re doing.
Second rule - they’re successfully hiding things from you.
Third rule - you don’t want to know everything they’re doing.
I’m just basing this on having been a kid (a good kid, in fact, who didn’t go out of my way to hide anything or do anything untoward).
What was the OP again? Oh yeah, snoop on your kids every way possible and create the adversarial parenting system that is so desirable.
As a parent in California I am responsible for the actions of my children in both Civil and Criminal cases. If my kid has a joint in a car in my name, I can lose the car. I can lose my house if my kid violates the law. If my kid downloads music or movies illegally, I am going to get nailed.
So I HAVE to be doing a little bit of parenting just for self protection. That is what parenting is - asking questions, and not stopping until you get the answers. Do I check the computer for downloads, application uses, and sites visited? Damned straight I do. When my son wanted a Facebook account, I made a deal with him. He could have an account, as long as he friended me. I also vowed to not tag him in photos without his permission nor would I ever post on his wall.
We have pretty open communications, and I play the carpool game where I just let them talk when driving.
I pay the cell bill, so I ask him who certain numbers represent for texting, and I also check the times that texts are sent and received.
NONE of this is a police state - it is simply parenting.
I’m not a parent and not a conservative whack job like Bricker and Shodan, but I actually agree with them fully here. If there is reason to snoop, then you’ve gotta snoop and demand answers. But it doesn’t seem like a good idea at all if there is no reason to. Spying is not the same thing as showing genuine interest in whazzup.
What about with all the noise going on about the sexting and whatnot? Kids being charged with child porn and parents being held responsible? At my kid’s school if he is caught with anything on his phone even if it was sent to him by someone else then he’s suspended.
My 13 year old just got his first cellphone for Christmas. One of the rules that came along with it is that I can look at the phone at any point and I will randomly check texts/messages. He knows if I find anything on there not appropriate for him to have then the phone becomes mine again.
I trust my kid but I also know he is a 13 year old boy that is going to push limits and it is my job as his parent to try and steer him in the right direction and help him use that brain of his.
I wouldn’t read his journal if he had one. My mother did that to me and I knew she was doing it so in a very not well thought out retaliation I wrote an EXPLICIT encounter I had with a boyfriend (that hadn’t really happened) and it did not turn out well with my parents nor his. I thought it would teach her a lesson and it ended up causing a world of trouble.
Certainly advancing age plays a huge role in how wise it is to exercise that authority. But in terms of if it exists? Nope. I have that authority over that child up to his 18th birthday no matter where he is, and past his 18th birthday is he’s living in my home, on my dime.
It certainly strengthens his claim. But it doesn’t extinguish my authority. It sharply curtails the circumstances in which I’d use it.
Yes, but my relationship with my wife is not the same as my relationship with my child. My wife is my fully vested adult partner in our home. My child is my ward, my dependent.
Of course. Again, I’m not talking about some deal where the kid’s private correspondence would be monitored as a matter of course. There would have to be some suspicion, some indication of a problem, before I decided to snoop.
I tend to knock VERY LOUDLY and pause and then announce again VERY LOUDLY, “I, your mother, am now opening the door and coming inside the room to bring you a towel (or whatever). I will be opening the door right now and walking inside. Here I come!”
I still avert my eyes and try to get in and out as quickly as possible.
I’ve got me a 13 year old girl now and it takes all my strength to not snoop. Couple days ago she referred to her mom as “The crazy one” and to me as “the one who just doesn’t care.” She was swiftly corrected. I told her I care, but that I’m going to trust her until she gives me a reason not to. She seemed to genuinely appreciate that.
I really don’t see the point in snooping apart from hypocritically stealing the moral high ground, matching my 42 years of life experience against her 13 and getting all superior and judgmental about it. The kids are going to do what they want to do anyway. If they get into trouble, well, part of life is solving problems and learning from mistakes. Frankly, I’ll be disappointed if she always follows the rules and is too passive to at least question authority.
I’d be interested in knowing to what extent parents on whatever side of this issue base their opinion on their own teenage experiences. Obviously methods of snooping (and hiding) are going to be different, but would you say your personal experiences help form a “baseline” level of trust?
Ha, that reminds me of one of the things I used to do in high school. I should preface this by saying I was a good kid, didn’t get in to trouble, didn’t hang out with a bad crowd etc etc…
From time to time I would clear my room of all contraband (cigarettes, pot, fireworks, lighters, porn etc…), then I would make my parents slightly suspicious, something that I hopped would ‘trigger a search.’ I knew my mom would tear through my room while I was at school and come up with nothing. The idea here is that if when I’m acting a bit odd, they can’t find anything to worry about then the other 99.9% of the time they really have nothing to worry about.
My father was a total jerk; a domineering petty tyrant of a jerk who didn’t trust either my sister or me. My sister married when she was 17 and everything worked out for her; my father interfered with my life until the day he died, which he waited about fifty years too long to do.
My child got all the love, trust and respect he asked for or needed. Still does.
Of course they are doing things we don’t want to know about. It fell on deaf ears when my 15 year old stepdaughter was lecturing me on her privacy when a 5 min search turned up 4 40oz beer bottles one half full, half a dozen used condoms, and 8 porno movies.
The search was prompted by finding the dog chewing on a used condom.
One other random thought on the subject. My son knows that I check on his actions. I have also told him that he is welcome to use my checking as a way to get out of something if he feels uncomfortable with peers.
“Dude, sounds like fun, but you have met my dad. He will kill me if I get caught doing X, and he knows ways to check.”
Peer pressure sucks, and sometimes being able to lay the blame on the evil dad can help you get out from under it.
My daughter didn’t like that, unlike many of her friends’ parents, I was very good at computers and knew all the tricks for hiding tracks. For most of his teens, I was able to do the same to my son. He was better than my daughter, and I learned a few thicks from having to monitor him (and he needed more monitoring than my daughter). But he went on to study the damn things. He’s also an adult now (and the daughter is 17), so no more monitoring, except as relates to the phone bill (you sent how many texts to 123-456-7890?!?!).
Or really, I just want to make sure that some random person using my computer doesn’t run across my…er…my collection of nature photos. I know that I can make different user accounts and all, but I really just want to put some sort of rudimentary protection on one folder. (I have some outdated version of Windows, by the way)
