Should a parent be allowed to look through their teenager's phone?

Poll - Total Votes: 28

Yes

You can only vote on one answer.

Personally, I think it's a total invasion of privacy that only teaches the kid, quite accurately, that they can't trust their parent, and that their parent doesn't trust them. I know from experience how damaging it is for a parent child relationship to lose it's trust.

I'm interested to hear other perspectives though, especially from parents.

EDIT 1: On the note of who's paying, it doesn't matter. Once you give the phone to the kid, it's either theirs, at which point they own it and it doesn't matter whether the money came from the parent, then child, or a damn alien, [i]they own the phone[/i]; or the phone is effectively on loan from the parent and so isn't owned by the teenager, which is just a [i]great [/i]way to teach your kid that you trust them. [i]Totally great[/i].

Talking about cost just dodges the moral question, and replaces it with one about ownership that is totally irrelevant.

This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »

SwarmSona · F

Parents own the device (usually)
Parents need have tthe right to be concerned
Parents neglecting to do that when there's alot of red flags could be detrimental

Life sucks as a kid just have to deal with it

RoboChloe · 26-30, F

@SwarmSona It's kind of part of a parent's job to make life suck as little as possible for their kid. And if they do their job right, they should be part of the solution to the suckyness, not part of the cause.

SwarmSona · F

@RoboChloe Parents only job is to make sure the kid survives

Everything thing else is a bonus. Children really aren't entitled to anything beyond the law. Not everything in life is going to be enjoyable and to deny children that reality is a disservice. At the point where most parents would go through a phone the child os clearly doing something they should not be. Sure there's paranoid parents, but there's also parents who are completely hands off when they shouldn't.

RoboChloe · 26-30, F

@SwarmSona I think that's quite a narrow view of a parent's job. I mean, I'm the kind of person that doesn't want parents to be too involved with a kid's life because they could be terrible people, or just not suited to parenting, but even I think they should have more of a role than basic survival.

Everything you do to or for your child teaches them something, and teaching them that their privacy is conditional on a whim is a great way to send a terrible message and possibly give them chronic anxiety.

Think about this scenario: A gay 14 year old boy comes out to his best friend over text, and looks at gay memes and support sites online, as many LGBT young people do. His parents, however, are quite homophobic, and notice that their son is getting quite close to a friend of his, and are genuinely concerned that he might be gay. They start hearing rumours from other parents about what people are saying about their son, and they become concerned enough to look at his phone, and they find out that it's true, at which point they kick him out over it. In this scenario, what the parent thought was a valid reason, to any sensible person, wouldn't be, and it resulted in this kid being homeless, or at the very least treated terribly by his parents. This is the problem. Parents can't be trusted to decide when their child is "clearly doing something they should not be", because they can have warped or horrible views on what their kids should or should not be doing. Guidelines and oversight are sorely missing.

Teachers have years of training and ample oversight for engaging with kids at schools, and have to be very careful with how they deal with those kids. Parents have no oversight at all, until they do something terrible enough to get it, and often have their kids taken away. Kids shouldn't have to wait until their parents do something bad enough to be separated from them to get fair treatment. Kids deserve better. They're people too.