I doubt you’ll have any problems for a few years yet. She might fantasize about visiting him but she’ll almost certainly not be able to actually do it. This kind of thing is pretty harmless; I’d say it’s even common.
The things you have to be worried about:
a- He knows her high school, and her full name. He’s probably seen a picture of her, and he knows her address. If he’s not who he claims he is, and some weird old guy shows up at her house, I expect she’s smart enough to slam the door and call for help.
b- If he is a weirdo, he might try sending bus fare for her to visit him. Keep an eye on all her incoming mail. (I’m sure you do anyway. How did she get the necklace? Does she come home to an empty house and have first access to the mailbox?)
I suggest you follow WhyNot’s advice. Don’t be confrontational, ask her about her boyfriend, who he is and what he’s interested in. See if you can call and talk to him and/or his parents. (When I was in an online relationship, at a slightly older age, I certainly was okay with talking to her parents. Nervous, but okay.)
Who knows? It might be for the best. It might never amount to anything. It probably won’t ever amount to anything. Don’t alienate your daughter and wreck your relationship over something that probably won’t ever amount to anything.
With school and extracurricular activities she’s actually had very little spare time lately. But when she does have spare time, she’s on the computer. She does have a great circle of friends, but she seems to be drifting from them in recent weeks. I guess I know why. I’ll definitely encourage her to go out with her friends more.
Because gasp you just [insert Sarah Bernhardt swoon here] you just wouldn’t UNDERSTAND!!! gasp, sob
Seriously, it’s 14 year old girl drama. She’s created this forbidden love because it’s fun and exciting and people write plays about this stuff. Take away the forbidden part, and you take away 90% of her power here.
Remain calm and rational and don’t play the part of Overbearing Troll, and she won’t be able to keep up her role of Misunderstood Youth.
Right, but that same circle of friends is going to ask why she’s not spending as much time and then peewly sort it out.
Edited to add: hands WhyNot a kleenex There, there…
FTR, my daughter is 15+ and will be driving in February. I guess she’s a Mrs. Robinson.
I don’t monitor her e-mails. Never felt a need to. I did see a few months ago that she’d gotten a Yahoo e-mail account with her full name as the user address. That didn’t make me happy and I talked to her about it then, explaining that she should only give it out to her friends. Maybe this is how she’s been communicating with Romeo aside from the IMs on this gaiaonline site.
You know, a mildly insidious way to get her to change her email address would be to sign her up for a ton of spam. Then, when she complans about it, push her to make a new one.
No, I am saying that the odds of him being an adult predator are very slim. How you go about ensuring her safety must be kept in context of your relationship with her and her ongoing development. Invading a teenager’s privacy (yes, I think teenagers require and deserve a degree of privacy), and confronting her on her personal relationships, and banning her from teenage internet communication is not the approach that I would take, for I expect that the harm it would cause would exceed the minimal risk of her penpal being an adult predator. Instead, I would ensure that she is aware of the problem of adult predators on both the internet and IRL, and I would encourage her to voluntarily share her interests in her life, including who her friends are, both on and off-line.
By analogy, I would not ban a teenager from dating, but I would ensure that the teenager is aware of date rape, STDs, and birth control, and I would chat about who they were going out with and how their dates went.
Because teenagers require privacy. It’s a normal and healthy part of growing up. They need to carve out spaces for their own lives that are not a part of their parents’ lives.
This really kind of changes everything. If your daughter will be the one with access to a car (and possibly extra cash from parents or a part time job), this boy’s parents should be the ones worrying your daughter is corrupting their son.
I’m half joking, but the more you reveal, the more you make it sound like your daughter is (horror of horrors!) just talking to someone on the Internet with similar interests.
Which is exactly what you’re doing on the SDMB.
You worry now, but in a few years when she’s applying for real jobs after college having an email address that’s HerName@yahoo.com is much better than xxI<3Narut0xx@yahoo.com
Ooh. That actually changes things a bit. That’s an important two years of growing there, and I think maybe it is time for her to make her own mistakes and learn from them.
I still think you should have a conversation, and you should air your concerns and remind her that you’re there if she needs you, but I’m not so sure about taking away the laptop at that age. That would depend, for me, an awful lot on the particular kid. Is she an “old” 15+ or an immature one? This is the age where, as **Muffin **says, they do start to need some privacy and room to shape their own lives.
At this point, I’d approach it more like you’d approach an innocent and naive coworker who was downloading attachments without a virus scan. More, “I don’t know if you’re aware, but…” and less, “There’ll be none of this in MY house, young lady!” But that’s me, and my approach to parenting. You have to make your own way, I’m afraid.
I would also take the time to talk to her about how chatting with this guy makes her feel, how sometimes people are not what they seem to be, and how people may try to take advantage of her.
I have to agree with the others who said that she needs to know that she broke the rules, and that there are repercussions for that. Concerns for her safety certainly do trump any bad feelings for snooping. Sometimes you just have to be a parent.
I’ve used the Internet since I was about 14 years old and one thing I’ve found is that the vast majority of people are who they say they are. I can’t think of one instance of import where someone said they were whatever age/locale/inclination and it was a lie. I’ve met tonnes of people in real life that I first made contact with online.
Edit: PS, I’m glad my parents were unconcerned for the most part what I got up to!
I definitely don’t think your reaction is at all unexpected or inappropriate, but I also think that, after you have some time to reflect, this won’t seem like as big a deal as you think it is.
As to your last question, despite the fact that I’ve always been very close with my mom, the less she knows about my romantic life, the better! I’ve always felt this way and probably always will. I sort of see that as an adult part of me, and I always, on some level, relate to my mom as a child to a grownup. Maybe something similar is going on with your daughter - her secrecy doesn’t necessarily mean anything sinister is going on.
Just to add to my response, I think it’s important to assess the level of threat to your daughter. Because if you confront her with this, it will damage your relationship. If the biggest risk is that she will get her heart broken, it may not be worth the trouble.
The fact is that most kids prefer not to share their romantic relationships with their parents. (And most parents prefer not to share their romantic relationships with their kids!)
This is pretty much how it is at our house. I started out naively trusting my daughter to follow the rules and after a couple of reality checks (for me), evolved the rules so that I have access to passwords for email, MySpace, etc and she knows that I may look at any time to see what’s going on. Same with IMs. I have no illusions that I know every detail about her private life nor do I want to know every detail; I just want to be sure that what she does online doesn’t compromise her personal safety.
I think SomeUserName had good suggestions as to how to handle the situation. Treat the rules violation as just that and take away the laptop for recreational use for a period of time. The boyfriend is another matter; tell your daughter that safety comes first and that any future contact will depend on his truthfulness with her. If she has contact information for him and it can be verified that he is in fact a 14-year-old boy, then she may continue contact with him. (Personally I would insist on supervised contact at first, until I felt assured that the person on the other end really was that 14-year old boy and not an older man using the information of a 14-year-old boy, but that’s me.) If she can’t provide any verifiable information, I would start investigating further using the e-mail address as a starting point.
It’s a tough situation and you really have to go with your instincts on this because there are no solid rules to follow.
At first glance this might seem like the right approach, but the marriage proposal plus the gift plus the fact that she can travel definitely adds up to something you can’t ignore. You don’t know who the “boy” is or where he lives, so that if she decided to meet up with him you would have no idea where to even start looking. You have to find out who he is and where he is, because the gift and the marriage proposal and the fact that she didn’t spurn the proposal means that this much more than some romantic relationship.
Maybe it’s just me, but - do 14-year-old boys normally propose marriage? Even as a “let’s someday” sort of a thing? Because that sounds more like an older guy trying to find the triggers that will get the girl to focus on him - either that, or a much younger boy trying to sound older.
If it’s really a 14 year old, and he’s from a decent background, I would probably encourage my 15+ year old daughter to invite him over for a visit. Four feet on the floor at all times, of course.
Lisa, your Mommy sense is tingling for a reason. Don’t shrug it off. If everything is fine, a little investigating on your part isn’t going to hurt anything. If something is wrong, a little investigating now can save you a whole lot of heartache in the future.
And quite frankly, she’s the one that broke the trust first by breaking the rules. Privacy is earned…if she wants total and absolute privacy, she can pay the mortgage. Until then, you have a right to know what is going on under your roof. Since you say she’s naive, I’m going to assume that she’s doing this out of ignorance, and she’s probably feeling flattered that some “nice boy” is kind enough to send her necklaces and offer to marry her.
You know better than that. Normal 14 year old boys DON’T do things like that! Especially with some girl they’ve never met in person!
You’re scared for her; she needs to know that. You’re disappointed in her for breaking the rules; she needs to know that. She has lost your trust; she has to earn it again.
In the meantime, you need to protect her from herself. You’re older, wiser, and have more experience.
