Reply to Reading your teen's text messages

Forum Index » Tweens and Teens

Reply to "Reading your teen's text messages"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If you read your kids' texts, go through their room, etc., you have calculated that the benefit of losing their trust is worth the chance that you will find something. That is just not the case for me. I want to be the one they come to when they need help, not the one they hide everything from. I mean this as a parent, not someone who is trying to be a friend.

My friends with the snoopiest parents somehow were the ones who took the most risks. Those of us who were not so carefully managed seemed to learn how to self-regulate... [/quote]

You are isolating yourself to only one outcome in either scenario.

There are parents who hand their kids phones and are hands off and nothing terribly wrong happens. At least, as far as the parents know.

There are parents who are hands on and look through their kids' digital activity and successfully intervene and block irreparable harm from happening.

There are also parents who are hands off where something tragic happens and they WISH they hadn't been so hands off. Take the MoCo 15 year old high schooler who got entangled with subway surfing from social media, who was in contact with distant strangers who encouraged him to engage in the dangerous trend, only for him to end up getting killed: https://www.marylandmatters.org/2023/10/02/heartbroken-parents-warn-of-the-dangers-of-subway-surfing-an-online-trend/

[QUOTE]“When he posted his train surfing photos, he would get more likes than he normally did. So I think that certainly was a rush of people liking his scary adventures,” his mother said.

Jay’s parents also discovered that their son was in constant contact with other young people, some as far away as New York City, discussing and encouraging urban exploration and subway surfing.

“They would say to him, ‘You’re a legend.’ And gave him these great compliments. So there’s that sort of validation, a lot of it coming from the social media community,” his mother said.

In exchanges with fellow urban explorers, his parents discovered, their son and his contacts knew the risks they were taking. Some had tragically lost their lives during such activities.[/QUOTE]

His parents only found out the truth once they gained access to his devices. If they had been monitoring, they could have intervened and stopped their son from taking a risk that ended up with him losing his life.

So with either a hands-on or hand-off approach, there are negative and positive outcomes that can happen. You're not guaranteed one or the other. You just have to decide which one you can live with as a parent.

And for me, I'd rather live with my kid maybe resenting me for monitoring their digital communications on a phone that I pay for, than for them to end up dead or in jail because I was too scared to break their trust or sense of privacy to take a look at what they were up to.[/quote]

Subway surfing is not even within the realm of possibility for my kids. Imagining far-fetched scenarios like that is no way to live. Besides, I track them on Life360. That is usually enough to figure out if your kids are hanging out at train yards. Agree that this is all risk calculus. I def don't think snooping is worth it if I am just doing it for .00001% scenarios like this. [/quote]

M'am. Obviously subway surfing is not the ONLY trouble teens can get into via digital technology. It's just one example of many things teens get into when parents don't monitor their teens online behavior and how it can reach an irreversibly sad and tragic conclusion. But there are a range and spectrum of negative things they can get into. Pick whatever may or may not be relevant to your child.

The point of the example was not look at your kids' phones or else they'll get into subway surfing. It was an example of the trouble kids can get into that parents will be ignorant too if they take a completely hands-off approach. The fact that I have to spell that out for you makes me wonder about your analysis and comprehension skills.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics