Spying on your kids -- is it OK?

[Cavernio]

"They’d also do stuff like open the bathroom door (with a key if it was locked) even if I was using it, etc."

omg
I'm not sure you could call that 'spying' if it's so obviously overt.

I was going to be all like, 'if you stick to the definition of kids as being kids, then it's expected that your parents are going to spy on you. It's like watching over you, that's what they're supposed to do', but I guess if you have to call it spying instead of 'looking out for you', its clearly wrong.

I guess my mom overtly would walk into my room all the time, right up until I left home, and even then when I would come back for a term. But she always treated me younger and more immature than I was; she liked to call me ditzy when I was in highschool, even though none of my peers would ever have dreamed of calling me that. The only way for her to stop being on my back was to move out, and she still thought I was relying on her long after they had stopped giving me money. My dad never did that sort of thing though, but I'm not sure his laissez-faire parenting was necessarily any better, although perhaps if my mom wasn't so involved he would have acted differently.

Gah, stupid thread, reminding me about all those things about my parents I hate.

'No, I don't think it's effective to spy on your kids. If your kids are even halfway intelligent they'll consider it an insult, regard you as a villain if they have not already, lose whatever trust they had for you in the first place, and groan as your surveillance system becomes yet another method of control they must outsmart.'

I smiled when I read that. Sad as it is though, I have a friend who fully says she will do the exact same sort of shit her parents did to her to any of her kids (if she ever has any.) And her parents were the strictest, most overbearing people I've met. But she loves them, and clearly has a better relationship with them than I do with mine, so what do I know?

[Louis8k8]

If you never get caught then there's no harm done (but I don't think you can really closely spy on your children up until they move out without them realizing it).

There's a lot of harm done if you do openly spy on your kid. Like I haven't talked to my dad for 4 years or seen him. He always spies over everything I do and its so annoying I moved out (more like ran away lolol) when I was 16. He will literally interrogate about everything he finds suspicious and waste so much of my time that I would be failing my classes.

A current friend of mine is 20 and her parents still check up on her internet activities and chat logs. She also has horrible communication with her parents because she hates her parents as well and avoid them as much as possible.

On the polar other hand, there was a new report where a 14 year old girl was addicted to cocain and asks for $1000 a week from her parents and keeps packs of them in her room and her room is full of black grease and a mess. Her parents never knew a thing until the police came storming in and even after that the mother still say they police is lying and her daughter is not a drug addict. Makes me wonder wth the parents were doing.

Parents can invade into their kids privacy as much as they want but know their kids will hate them and probably for the rest of their life. This is NOT one of those things where you can just say "its because they care for me". They have no respect or trust and surveillance their kids like some sort of lab animal. This is one of those life skills that require moderation. Going either extreme way will do some sort of irreversible damage.


On a personal note I love my mom because she's always supporting me and giving me advice and my freedom. She was sad that I left at 16 but she agreed I can't live with my dad . She would come over to my apartment and teach me how to cook so I'd stop using the microwave.

[devonin]

If you never get caught then there's no harm done

So if I steal from you and don't get caught, there's no harm done? Not getting caught doing harmful things doesn't make them unharmful.

Further, if you do something morally wrong and while doing so, catch your kid doing something morally wrong, you don't exactly retain the moral highground to try and punish them.

"I was looking through your property without your permission and found cigarettes! You're in so much trouble!"

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by devonin

Further, if you do something morally wrong and while doing so, catch your kid doing something morally wrong, you don't exactly retain the moral highground to try and punish them.

You suspect your girlfriend is cheating on you. You snoop through her email. You find proof.

[Cavernio]

And if the kid bought those cigarettes with the allowance you gave them, is it still their property? There comes an age when going through your kid's things becomes wrong, and I'll be damned if I'm going to know what age that is for any of my hypothetical kids. It would just be much simpler if adulthood came at the same time as financial freedom.

"You suspect your girlfriend is cheating on you. You snoop through her email. You find proof."

I smack myself in the head for having a girlfriend instead of a boyfriend, and wish her well :-p

[Louis8k8]

Originally Posted by devonin

So if I steal from you and don't get caught, there's no harm done?

If in your "steal" = "spying", then I guess there is harm done. Not for me however.

Originally Posted by devonin

Further, if you do something morally wrong and while doing so, catch your kid doing something morally wrong, you don't exactly retain the moral highground to try and punish them.

You are basing that logic that it is already morally wrong. But that is kind of the topic

Originally Posted by Cavernio

And if the kid bought those cigarettes with the allowance you gave them, is it still their property?

That topic is such a headache. Laws try to enforce a specific age but they overlap and leave age gaps where parents just can't do anything. The riot in Vancouver for example, because some of the people are under 18, the court tries to charge the parents of the teenagers involved. Yet because the teenagers are over 16, the parents have no right to control what their kids are doing. <-- I probably worded this wrong, I don't remember what the 16+ law for kids are =(.

From a very technical standpoint, whatever money you give to your kids is theirs and what they do with it is not your decision. You can criticize but that's as far as you can go. The only thing you can do is not give them money again.

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Unlike a girlfriend/boyfriend, you will (or supposed to) always love your kids. I think its a big deal for parents to have that love returned. If you spy, your kids will hate you and distrust you just as you distrust them. I don't see spying (as long as they are living in your house without paying and living solely on the reason that you are their parents and providing free hospitality out of parental care and moral obligations) as immoral. That doesn't equate that your kids shouldn't feel offended by it and forgive you. I see it as a risky -win some and lose some- decision you can choose to make or not.

For me personally, I most likely will not spy because I know what it feels like and I hated my dad. I don't want to make my kids hate me. I'd invest more attention and effort in being a friend with experience to my kids than a supervisor so they would open up to me naturally without having me getting worried and suspicious. That's probably very hard to achieve in reality though =\, but it's not like its impossible.

[AquaTeen]

Spying on your kids is justifiable when they continually break your trust. If a parent keeps giving them chances to be trusted and they keep breaking them, there is a problem and the child should be spied on so that close tabs could be kept on them especially if they break the trust and lie about it that way if they are spied on then they really can't deny it because you'll have the records about their whereabouts and such but if a child is able to be trusted, I see no reason to spy on them.

[ScylaX]

Well, it makes the whole spying thing acceptable if once you found the reason they kept breaking your trust, you stopped doing that and calculate a proper solution to correct it. It's just an extreme mean to understand things and it shouldn't be abused in any way and be highly justificated. Parenting is all about understanding your kid and making the correct moves to avoid "bad occurrences" everytime it's possible.

[devonin]

I'd suggest that spying on your kids "because they've broken trust with you" is itself breaking trust with them. If their actions aren't able to be private or personal, then you're forcing them to break your trust by doing those things in a way you can't spy on. Kids and teens need some degree of private space in order to develop into proper adults. Taking that away from them is bad parenting.

[ScylaX]

True.
Well, it's a matter of possibilities of the occurrence, just as I said above it has to be used if there is nothing left to do, and if there is nothing left to do, the circumstances must be either really special or hopeless (or both huh), which isn't likely to happen (hence it needs to be "highly" justificated")