If the child is a danger then you stop them
If you search repeatedly despite finding no dangers, that’s obsession
Never, as long as the junk in my room wasn’t leaking into the hallway, my parents were happy. Definitely no snooping. I had software on my kids devices when they were younger, but it just put blocks on what they could access, the only thing I “monitored” to any extent was time spent using the device.
I knew someone who had a parent
- place a recording device in their room
- installed spyware on their computer
- read their diary
- made them sign behavior contracts (They were actually a good child)
You are safe to assume they had a difficult time adjusting as an adult.
So no, not normal.
place a recording device in their room
Jeez this is worse than anything I ever had.
I got lucky I guess.
(But I also didn’t do diary/journals, if I did, I’d only do it in ciphers, I like to play around with ciphers a lot when I was a kid)
They would have 100% gotten in trouble for using cyphers.
Lol I’m currently like experimenting with steganography.
Like a very simple example is say:
First letter of word is A-M = bit 0
First letter of word is N-Z = bit 1Then count syllabels:
Odd number of syllabels = bit 0
Even number of syllabels = bit 1So this simple method can encode 2 bits with one word.
So, write this ciphertext as a free verse poem.
Write something very innocuous like… say, about nature
You need 5 bits to denote a 32 character space, enough for the english a-z
So: 5 bits = 1 English letter
You’d need 18 “cipher words” (aka: the words in the “poem”) to denote 36 bits, enough to write a “fuckyou”, which costs 35 bits (cuz 5 bits x 7 letters = 35 bits)
Doubt parents will find out unless they work for the NSA.
I mean, no parent actually ban their kids from writing poetry, right? It looks education related after all.
That is pretty smart, but that parent would have founds poems suspicious. This is the same parent that said their kid had somehow convinced all their teachers to lie about them going to chess club to cover for her, because of course they were outside being up to no good.
That shit isn’t normal. I think parents doing minor poking around from time to time isn’t abnormal, especially if there is real concern about the child.
TMI but I have the experience of my parents finding out I was suicidal because they looked around. I wasn’t about to say anything to them about it. Or anyone else. I was a sad and angry teen. They looked out for me as best they could.
However, I never knew for certain that they had until I was much older. I suspected a couple times but they didn’t drop hints or outright say anything. Just adjusted how they were raising me.
I do think some snooping is normal, especially given how secretive teens become. But as with everything there a lines to be drawn.
100% agree. It’s easy to do it wrong.
Basically never. Once I was old enough to walk to and from school on my own, my parents basically left my shit alone. They’d do the “I’m knocking to let you know I’m at the door, but asserting my authority as a parent by coming in without waiting for a response” thing for a while. But once they caught me jorkin it at my laptop, that went away too.
It probably helped that I was a pretty boring kid. I didn’t have a ton of interest in smoking or drinking, so it’s not like I had a lot for them to take even if they did go through my shit. I think they found condoms once, but it’s because I left the box out, and it’s not like it was a surprise; they had already met my girlfriend. They tended to take the “we’d rather they do it here where they can at least be safe” approach to things.
Is this normal?
Depends on your history. A few children need this sort of scrutiny, most do not.
Currently living with my parents, they don’t necessarily “search” my things. I’m pretty messy so their primary intent is just organize my stuff. They’re not “going through my things”
Yeah, they went into my room to look through stuff. My dad never let me have my own device, he had a keylogger and camera pointed at the desktop computer I was allowed to use. He had online blockers for porn and regularly looked through my phone and photos and I wasn’t allowed to have my phone at night or my iPad. It’s not normal and I’ve started working on it in therapy.
Zero times over my life.
I had great parents, who had a rule that I could just tell them any fuck ups and mistakes and they wouldn’t get angry and help me.
On the other hand, I was an incredibly boring teenager whose worst bad habits were staying up too late reading books in bed.
Same, never got searched. It was a shock when I got older and learned that some kids regularly had their rooms turned over. The idea had never occurred to me that this could even be a thing, because I always felt safe in my room and felt my ‘secrets’ were safe too - even if they were mostly harmless secrets.
I was also not a kid who caused much trouble however, and you might argue “well there’s the reason.”
That might be true, but i think it’s mostly the other way around.
The one time as an older child I actually did something pretty bad, my friends all got grounded by their parents, but I didn’t. My mum just looked me in the eyes after I’d confessed, and said “Don’t do that again” - and I felt so disappointed in myself that I knew I wouldn’t. I didn’t need to be grounded, because I loved my mother and cared what she thought, and the regret I felt in that moment was punishment enough.
If you ransack your kid’s room on the regular, you’ll only create a person who grows up to resent you, and learns to hide from you and lie to you. Everyone deserves a place they feel safe in, and is theirs, even children.
If you ransack your kid’s room on the regular, you’ll only create a person who grows up to resent you, and learns to hide from you and lie to you.
Can confirm.
My mother would do this when I was a teenager, pissed me off and made me a paranoid. It’s not normal and now I live 1500 km away from my parents, visiting them one time every 2 years just for the family obligation and saving face.
99% of the problems I’m trying to solve in therapy comes from my upbringing.
So yeah, not optimal situation, try to grow from this, learn to grow out of this situation.
All the fucking time. I hated it, and I have issues with trust now as an adult because of it. I’m super protective of my space, in so much that it takes a while to even let a partner in to my bedroom. My parents were constantly going through my things, looking for anything they could punish me for. I was raised super religious and they had it in their head that all teenagers hide porn, booze, and weed. When they never found any, they just looked more. It was a fucking nightmare. I moved out of there as soon as I could, literally into a closet where I slept next to the water heater. Anything to get out of that house.
It is not normal, and you need to have boundaries. The whole “it’s my house and my rules” is bullshit. You are a human being and should be treated like one.
It’s not normal.
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I can now discern the specific family member and their exact location relative to me just from the sound of their footsteps. Years of practice.
the risk of getting caught kinda adds to the experience though
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A few times but not often. Usually with the excuse of tidying my room but it was always done when I was out and without telling me.
Only my room though, they didn’t understand Linux so couldn’t really check devices for anything.
Constantly, until the day I moved out completely. Privacy only existed on paper. My room occasionally was searched while I was absent, and I only noticed because it was done sloppy (things were arranged differently). This was especially the case for all school related things, but included the occasional search for cigarettes and alcohol.
I’m really glad that the whole computer/ internet/ mobile phone/ social media thing started to happen while I was becoming an adult, and thus was on the brink of moving out. Maybe this helped me to spark a general interest in online privacy.
Sometimes at work we do have interns from a nearby school. They participate for two weeks, in order to prepare them for entering work force in a coulple of years, and to find out what these students are interested in. These students are around the age of 14 - 17 years old. To gain a school licence for our software we use at work, we make them to register with the software vendor to obtain such a temporary licence. This involves to register with the email adress they recieve from their school. Many of these interns struggle with that, because they cannot do this on their own, either, they don’t know how to, or, because access within their phones is restricted by parental controls. One intern told me, that their parents regularly search their phone - and the worst part ist, that this is seen as completely normal to them! They already have been conditioned to constant surveillance that it would be weird to them if they were left unattended regarding this matter.
If my parents would have had access to my online activities (if availiable back then), they certainly would have had a field day.
I jokingly used to say: If we [my parents and I] lived in the GDR [Eastern Germany before the fall of the Iron Curtain], we woudn’t just have had a car, but also a telephone. [The reason for this is that citizens who were actively involved in the suveillance of certain people, along with the spying of their neighbors and own families, were often members of the StaSi, and thus were rewarded for their loyality towards the party with a car whitout the long waiting time, and those who were within the party also would have had an own telephone at their homes as a reward for their loyal services.]
Never. They’re parents, not the police. As a long as I stayed out of trouble, they respected my space. When I was young they’d go through stuff, but that was more for cleaning the room (when I refused to).
Parents now have to be more involved with the “online” space and aware who their children are in contact with. There’s certainly boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed, the main thing is educating children about the dangers and go from there.
Parents now have to be more involved with the “online” space and aware who their children are in contact with
educating children about the dangers and go from there.
Good point, u/helpImTrappedOnline 👀
I never claimed my parents where good at the online part.
