If you could read all your teenager’s text messages, should you?
Texts started pouring in like out of a fire hose. At first, it soothed my insecurities. It seemed to give me back the insight and intuition I couldn’t hear for the chaos in my head. It gave me a view on how my daughter handled friendships and relationships, how she was reacting to slights and how she felt about her life. I also learned that teenagers kill themselves a whole lot these days. They want to kill themselves over soup that’s too hot or snow that’s too cold. They retell stories of trying to kill themselves jumping off the play structure at the park or kicking themselves in the face with a soccer ball. “I tried to kill myself 6 times last Summer…” I once read, completely mystified as to when and how this could have occurred, until it turned out to be “by jumping off the roof of the camping trailer.”
When I started reading her texts, my intention was to make sure everything was ok. You can never know too much when it comes to your teen, can you? It turns out that you can.
Reading someone’s private correspondence is yucky. I didn’t want my daughter to find out I was reading her texts because I knew it would embarrass her and it would reflect poorly on me. I could easily relate to the feeling of violation she would experience and I didn’t want her to feel that way. When my children start a sentence with “No offense but…” I tell them “… then don’t say something offensive.” As a parent, if you want to spare your teenager some embarrassment, don’t embarrass them. If you don’t want something to reflect poorly on you, don’t do it. Pretty basic stuff.
Reading someone’s correspondence, especially a teenager’s, is as addictive as it is yucky. It’s a false refuse, like drugs and alcohol. It gives us the insight into someone’s behaviour without the risks of entering into a relationship, of making ourselves vulnerable. When our teens start the journey of differentiation, it feels like a loss to many of us. We must resist the urge to lurch, grab them and keep them close by any possible mean. Parenting teenagers is like driving on ice: give too much gas and you spin one way, give too much break and you spin the other way. It’s a Goldilocks journey of not too much, not too little, just enough. Secretly reading my teen’s texts made me feel like I was still connected to her but without the work. I wanted to stop but I couldn’t.
In the tricky business of parenting teenagers, our intuition is our best friend. We don’t train that intuition by knowing every detail of their lives but by monitoring for disruptions in the flow of life. I eventually had to blow my cover when a matter of online safety had to be addressed with my daughter. And while I became aware of this safety concern by reading her texts, I realized — thinking about the preceding 5 days — that all the signs were there for me to see without access to her texts. My access to her texts and the barrage of information about her life had completely drowned out my parenting intuition, my spider sense.
When Paul and I tried to address the safety concern with our daughter, the breach of privacy overshadowed our concerns about online safety. We talked about rules and why we needed to have them to keep her safe and why we needed to trust that she followed those rules before we could let her have a phone. But all she could say was «How can you ask me to trust you when you read my texts? » In all honesty, it felt a little bit rich to talk about the importance of trust when we had been snooping on her private conversations for the last two weeks.
Brene Brown wrote: « Trust isn’t built in grand gestures but in the small moments when people treat what is important to you with care. » What is important to us is our values, our beliefs and maybe most importantly, our boundaries, the contour of our “self”. In the simplest of terms, boundaries are “what we need to feel ok.” At first, I felt like my daughter had to earn my trust before she could have her phone back, until it dawned on me that while I needed to trust her to respect my rules, I would need to earn her trust that those rules were reasonable. As parents, we wield the biggest stick. We get to decide how much agency, if any, we will give our children. It’s easy to hold their phones, their privileges, and their agency into our hands and tell them to “trust, or else.” What does it earn us but a performance?
Dangling privileges in exchange for trustworthy behaviour is not how real trust is built. Trust is an exchange of respect, care, and consideration. It’s making something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else. When my daughter lied about her social media accounts, and when she snuck her phone and computer into her room at night, she didn’t trust her parents enough to make something important to her vulnerable to their actions. She believed – rightfully so – that telling the truth would be a loss, that we would not understand why this was important to her. This lack of trust hampered our efforts to teach her about the threats and pitfalls of social media platforms.
So now what?