CIVIL DEFENSE, you may be God’s gift to the teenage years, but some of your peers are not. Some – not all, not most, but some – have serious problems, from a lack of maturity to emotional disturbance to addiction to alcohol or drugs, that do not make them prime candidates for the trust you expect and presumably deserve.
Since you post like an adult, I will treat you like one: Spare me. Just because people do not agree with your position does not mean they don’t understand it. We are all speaking English and using fairly short words; we see what you’re saying, we just don’t agree.
I would think that realizing that parents do not know anything and that they are just doing the best they can under difficult circumstances would make you more tolerant of errors in parenting, not less so. Ignorance and belligerence, of course, are irrelevant to the question of whether your parents would ever be justified in violated your privacy. And since you realize that even your parents don’t always know what they’re doing in regards to parenting you, you surely realize that you don’t know much about it, either, right?
Sure. But sometimes a child can show him- or herself to be unworthy of that trust. And sometimes parents can be facing concerns of such overriding importance – like the child’s health or welfare – that they legitimately believe that breaching the child’s trust to find out what’s going on is the lesser of two evils, if the other evil being to let the child harm himself or someone else.
If by this you mean that invading a teenager’s privacy is disrespectful – sure it is. The question is whether it is ever justified. Sometimes it is. Not in your case, apparently, but sometimes.
Again, if you were my kid and I thought you were in trouble, I would do anything – ANYTHING – to help you. And that includes invading your privacy. Not only would I do it under such circumstances, I’d do it without any guilt and without a second thought.
Parents are not always right, they do not always know what they are doing. True enough, but parents are in charge, by being the parent, they are morally and legally obligated to be responsable for thier childrens upbringing, welfare, and behaviour. Parents and Children are not a team, they are not peers. At work I am part of a team with my coworkers. My boss, is my boss. When parents fail to teach that concept to their children, that is when they lose respect, and the children pay the price when they have to deal with teachers, employers, and Law enforcement in the real world.
Parents lose respect when they try to hard to be thier kids friend and not thier parent. I love my son, and I hope to continue to have a good relationship with him, but I am his father and I know I will have to do things in his life that will piss him off. Thats part of the deal. I took on that responsability when I became a parent, and includes consequences when he does something wrong, making him do his homework when he doesnt want too, and later it may include searching his room if behaviour is such that it is needed. I hope it never is.
I don’t claim to be God’s gift to the teenage years, as you put it, but I do act as I would expect any teenage person to act. You’re right, not all teenagers live up to the inherent responsibilities they were given at birth, such as respecting others, and that’s when the time comes for reprimanding.
As long as the “adults” here understand the point of view from their child, that’s all I ask. Many parents are shortsighted to even recognize that it exists, much less respect it, which is my entire argument.
I wasn’t trying to offend parents here with my remark, I was more directing it at those who have posted that apparently regard themselves as God almighty when it comes to parenting and decision making. Please accept my apologies if I have offended you.
Yes, I do understand that every parent – mine included – are not experts on everything. But I do respect them for their best efforts, even if these efforts are not always justified or right. It’s simply human nature to make decisions based on how you feel about a situation. It’s the real parent that considers the feelings of the child when they make their decisions.
Very true, indeed.
Perhaps you’re correct in saying that extenuating circumstances may warrant more unconventional behavior, such as snooping. Granted that a parent should never “snoop” for the hell of it, if I was a concerned parent who had been informed that something was amiss, I may choose to look into it more closely-- all the time working with my child to ensure that our trust was not broken. I refuse to go ahead and snoop around in my child’s belongings just because I feel like something’s up. If that were the situation, God knows no one would ever have any privacy.
If I have children, I do plan to have a great bond of trust between us. Very often is it that there’s a gap in communication which makes trust collapse.
If you were my parent and I were in trouble, you’d have no need to violate my privacy to find out anything.
Perhaps it’s just me, though, and I’m a bit blind to the “rebellious, deviant” sterotypical teenager. I wouldn’t be able to judge from that side because, honestly, I don’t care one way or another about my own privacy, generally. Like I said, it’s probably just me, but the discussion is entertaining nonetheless, right?
I fully disagree. If you want any sort of cooperation from your child, you’re going to have to respect them like a teammate and work together throughout the parenting process. If not, you’re going to end up with a teen who may end up despising you for the rest of their life, as other posters with similar experiences have shared with us.
Just for kicks, I brought this up earlier with several of my friends, aged 15-18. We all reached a consensus that when parents try to be their kid’s friend, they gain more respect than through dictatorial and overbearing means. Believe what you wish, but as a teen who knows other teens, I think we have a much better idea about how we feel when our parents treat us various ways.
Being a part of a team or being someone’s friend does not mean you will never piss them off.
Also for example (and you probably don’t care), I was brought up the way that “if he doesn’t do it, he’ll reap the consequences”. I did. Until I learned to do it on my own.
It’s not necessary to hold your child’s hand throughout every moment of his life.
We are not talking about “reprimanding” kids; we are talking about when, if ever, it is appropriate to invade their privacy. These are two different things.
Ah. Okay. So you’re contention is that parents who invade their children’s privacy don’t know it pisses their kids off? I kind of doubt it, and I don’t find one post from one parent in this thread that reflects that misapprehension. Again, I’m not talking here about the sort of groundless, gleeful “snooping” that many have complainted of; I’m talking about legitimate grounds to investigate your child’s life – and, yes, invade his or her privacy – out of concern for his or her wellbeing. Two different things.
You didn’t offend me; as I said, I’m not even a parent. But it seems to me that recognizing that kids do not come with an Owner’s Manual should also alert you that parents – all parents – make mistakes.
Again, you seem to be complaining about some sort of heartless snooping. That’s different that a calculated invasion of privacy based on legitimate concern for the child. It may seem like the same thing to the child, but one is justifiable and the other is not.
Uhhh, okay. Here’s the deal: Your forteen year old daughter is acting in a way consistent with a person abusing drugs. She is sneaking out, hanging out with a rough crowd, her grades are slipping, she’s losing weight, she’s become surly and non-communicative and spacey by turns, and she no longer cares about her appearance. Warning signs that, singly, may not mean much but, cumulatively, indicate to you the real possibility of drug abuse. So you talk to her about it and she denies it (of course) with every indication of outrage at the very suggestion. But you’ve lived with her for forteen years; you generally know when she’s lying to you and you think she’s lying to you now. So what do you do? What is your reasonable “next step” that will both preserve her well-being (when you suspect she’s in the process of hooking herself on drugs) and “ensure her trust is not broken”? While you’re thinking about that, I’ll be upstairs, searching her room.
I guess that would depend on what it is you feel is up, wouldn’t it?
No, it’s not just you. There are lots of good teenagers who deserve all the trust and respect they can get – most of them, I would hope. But not all of them. Some of them get in trouble – BIG trouble, trouble they cannot get out of without a lot of help – and extricating them from that trouble must outweigh their expectations of privacy.
But this issue is not so black and white. There is a vast area of gray between “my mom is my very best friend who parties with me and buys me beer” and “my mom is a jack-booted Nazi who won’t let me out of the house without a chastity belt and a homing device.” Respecting your child as a child is not the same as respecting him as a teammate. Teammates are equal; parents and children are not. Acknoweldging that fact and treating your child appropriately for his or her age does not lead the child to “despise” the parent, and it’s ridiculous to assert it automatically does.
Right. Because none of us have ever been teens. :rolleyes: Again, there’s a vast difference between being a “friend” and being a dictator, and IMO parenthood can and should lie somewhere in between.
In my family of three kids, my father once said, “This family is a democracy in which each of you kids gets one vote and your mother and I get five.”
I fully disagree. If you want any sort of cooperation from your child, you’re going to have to respect them like a teammate and work together throughout the parenting process. If not, you’re going to end up with a teen who may end up despising you for the rest of their life, as other posters with similar experiences have shared with us.
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Im not saying a parent shouldnt show some respect to a child, just that it is not a peer relationship
Just for kicks, I brought this up earlier with several of my friends, aged 15-18. We all reached a consensus that when parents try to be their kid’s friend, they gain more respect than through dictatorial and overbearing means. Believe what you wish, but as a teen who knows other teens, I think we have a much better idea about how we feel when our parents treat us various ways.
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I see…You think all of us just sprang forth into this world as adults? I was a teenager once, and knew other teens at the time believe it or not) and at the time I would have thought it was cool if my parents just tried to be my friend and not my parent. I would have had the same kind of respect for them as I had for my friends, which means I would respect them as friends but if they told me to do something I didnt want to, or consequence me, I would have told them to piss off. My son at the age of 7 would think it was cool if I let him eat cookies for dinner and watch tv instead of doing his homework…
Being a part of a team or being someone’s friend does not mean you will never piss them off.
Also for example (and you probably don’t care), I was brought up the way that “if he doesn’t do it, he’ll reap the consequences”. I did. Until I learned to do it on my own.
It’s not necessary to hold your child’s hand throughout every moment of his life. **
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Unfortuneately my parents let me slide to much on the homework side of things…boy did I learn my lesson when it came time to get into colledge…to late to do anything about it, but…
No it is not neccesary to hold your kids hand throughout life. as they get older, if you have brought them up right you can let go more and more. But you have to teach them the behaviour in the first place. By the time he is your age, he should be able to take care of most things on his own.
I have seen the best and the worst results of differant parrenting styles. I had friends who’s parents did the I want to be his buddy kind of parenting, and those kids were usually pretty confused and miserable. They had no kind of structure to fall back on to help them make the hard decisions in life. Got to bury more of them than I would have liked. Some of them I still see occasionally still doing the same crap on the edge of being homeless. The friends I knew whose parents acted like parents for the most part came out ok. I got to work with all kinds of troubled teens in the psych hospital I worked in. Same findings there. They all can probably spell better than me though.
To the teens: I regret my statement has been misinterpreted as “teens think only about themselves” because it was “Teens, by definition, are more concerned with themselves than anything else.” Allow me please, reasonable folks, to explain what is meant by that statement.
It is by no means an exclusionary phrase. You hopefully and probably are concerned with a great and many things beyond yourself, but in your teen years you must be primarily concerned with yourself.
Now turn down the obstinance for a second. In order for you be prepared for being a responsible adult, you need to be focused primarily on: your grades, your career choices, your interests, your circle of friends, your role among them, your boyfriends/girlfriends, your personality, your style, your intellectual skills, your emotions, your activities and interests beyond school, and developing every attribute you possibly can to make yourself the best possible adult when it comes time to leave the “nest.” Any good parent will encourage their children to develop intellectually and emotionally as individuals and allow them to focus on themselves, including giving them plenty of privacy! This is the prime time in your life when you get to focus on you, because once you begin serious long-term relationships and/or begin to raise children, that luxury dwindles to near zero.
Of course this leaves plenty of room for you to be altruistic, to join Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, Key Club, play sports, volunteer for MADD or suicide prevention, to participate in blood drives, to babysit, deliver papers or hold other part time jobs, to join chorus/band/drama, or simply help out around the house with chores, cooking, and cleaing. Plenty of room for caring about others, your parents and siblings, your neighbors, your friends. All such activity builds great charater.
Please understand that the statement was not meant to be insulting, and please forgive me for not being clearer. To take the instant and total attitude of shunning without keeping an open and frank discussion about why you are insulted or demeaned sounds an awful lot like the teen who will demand to be heard but will not listen. We can all learn to be more open and communicative, can we not?
I don’t believe there is an answer to this. Both sides have said, “Teenagers do ‘this’ and we have to do ‘this’!”
The other side says the opposite, “No, teenagers are ‘this’ so we must do ‘this’.”
Well I don’t agree with either assumptions of what teenagers are or what to do. So I’ve come to the conclusion that teenagers are all different and different things work for different people. Mind boggeling, isn’t it?
With some teenagers, going through their things wouldn’t affect them. Some teenagers it will negatively affect. Personally, if my parents went through my stuff I would think that it was their right and wouldn’t lose their trust. I’m sure somewhere along my life something happened that made that so. I also know that the opposite has happened to other teens all over the world.
It all comes down to knowing your child. If you know your child then you will know what to do. You don’t need to know ‘teenagers’. Just your child.
I don’t think the people calling these parents dictators and bad parents have any right because you’ve never met their son/daughter. And I don’t think the parents assuming that snooping is good for everyone are right either. (not everyone in the thread, just a few)