Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”
I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.
I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”
Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.
Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.
It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.
It alarms me how quickly adults forget that children are people.
Apparently people are rediscovering this post somehow and I think that’s pretty cool! Having experienced similar violations of trust in my youth, this is an important issue to me, so I want to add my personal story:
Around age 13, I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me “not to joke about things like that.” I stopped telling my mother when I felt depressed.
Around age 15, I caught my mother reading my diary. She confessed that any time she saw me write in my diary, she would sneak into my room and read it, because I only wrote when I was upset. I stopped keeping a diary.
Around age 18, I had an emotional breakdown while on vacation because I didn’t want to go to college. I ended up seeing a therapist for - surprise surprise - depression.
Around age 21, I spoke on this panel with my mother in the audience, and afterwards I mentioned the diary incident to her with respect to this particular Q&A. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?”
TL;DR: When you invade your child’s privacy, you communicate three things:
You do not respect their rights as an individual.
You do not trust them to navigate problems or seek help on their own.
You probably haven’t been listening to them.
Information about almost every issue that you think you have to snoop for can probably be obtained by communicating with and listening to your child.
Part of me is really excited to see that the original post got 200 notes because holy crap 200 notes, and part of me is really saddened that something so negative has resonated with so many people.
One day, in the future, this entire system of tiered passports and immigration restrictions and second-class citizenship will be gone, a relic of the past, and the phrase “Immigration is a human right, moving is a human right” will seem as quaint and obvious as “Aparteid is bad” in an old sci-fi episode
one of my easily triggered rants is that it’s reactionary to hate sad endings and horror and kink and narratives that deal with unpleasant real world issues, because what you’re demonstrating is a reluctance to engage with discomfort. people who say “I just don’t see the point of sad endings, we deal with enough crap in real life,” or stuff of that ilk are doubling down on their rejection of discomfort and rationalizing it, and guess what, that’s a reflex that doesn’t just end with media consumption.
One of these things is not like the other.
if you’re trying to single out kink as not being worth defending, then no, it is exactly like the others. having a visceral reaction of discomfort and disgust when encountering kink in narratives, a feeling that you then rationalize and double down on, is reactionary.
this asshole had the entire city scared he was going to lead some kind of klan march and rampage through an immigrant neighborhood. he showed up yesterday with about 5 people and “marched” less than one city block before counter protestors super-soakered his ass in 10⁰ weather, pushed him back to his hotel, and ran him out of town. so so so proud of my city
accidentally got a site’s ai assistant bolted down, and I do believe I was personally responsible for it, if only because I found out how to ask it for clothing suggestions in just such a way that it kept trying to find visions of hell in its stock and describing offerings of assorted red and pink scarves as like, insect-mutilated infants
like I do really think I might be at fault if they ever looked at the logs and saw what happened
it is interesting that the heart themed darkners are the ones whose thoughts and feelings are portrayed via third person parenthetical narration. kris moment!
i’m pretty sure this is a reference to super mario rpg (x, x)
lostness mentioned!
susie constructs a similar scenario to the cross-shaped maze from dragon blazers in which the player must be accompanied by a particular character that happens to know the way through, or else become trapped forever. but,
lancer, who claims to know the forest like the back of his head, is actually the one that you should not follow. where else is there something pointy that should not be followed through the forest?
bonus: lancer claims to know the forest like the “back of his head”, but he actually can’t navigate it at all. so, he doesn’t know the back of his head. this makes sense because it is the back of his head, and his eyes are on the front. but, i think some extra meaning can be inferred from the phrasing of this line if we relate it back to ralsei’s description of the titan:
where titans are likened to “the shadow of the backside of your mind”… so, the literal back of one’s head, where buried memories might lie in darkness. the forest maze is littered with the very same red trees that obscure the forgotten man. perhaps the maze, the titan, and many of the events taking place in the dark world between are just a bit close for comfort to something that kris would rather not remember?
ALT
