Parents should not be reading your journals
Parents should not be searching through your trash
Parents should not be snooping on your private social media messages
Parents should not be taking your bedroom door off
Parents should not be invading your privacy
reblogging this because when they go through my phone and find my tumblr they’ll see this
As an actual mom, I approve this message. If your parents say it’s a normal part of parenting, no. No it’s not. They are wrong.
As another actual mom, I also approve this message. The point is to have a good enough relationship with your kids that you know what’s going on in their lives WITHOUT going through their trash, because they talk to you and you don’t freak the fuck out.
I’ve had other moms ask me to tell them if I hear anything about their kid from my kid because “we moms have to stick together”… and no. I’m not ruining my relationship with my kid because you’ve trashed your relationship with yours. And I told my kid you asked. AND they shared more with me because of it. Because it showed I trusted them more than the other mom. Which I do.
As a former abused kid: Ato’s absolutely right. The only thing my mother did by taking my bedroom door was contribute to my already crippling fear of being seen in a state of undress, and the only thing she accomplished by going through my internet history was to push me into doing my browsing at school (and leave me with traumatic memories of having to plead that yes, the online source for college scholarships really was called FastWeb Portal, yes, I really was putting in three applications a day, please stop hitting me).
I will never forget when one of the neighborhood moms that I had presumed was safe ratted me out to my mom because I had posted some depressed poetry on my livejournal. I came home to my room utterly trashed. It looked like a tornado had blown through ONLY MY ROOM.
Desk chair broken, drawers ripped out of their dressers and smashed to pieces, my bookshelf ripped from its earthquake safe mooring on the wall, my bed destroyed, my sheet music torn to scraps, and my cats cowering under furniture on the far end of the house. I will never forget how my mother was more concerned with the fact that I made her look bad to the other moms for writing depressed poetry online than the fact that I was struggling with depression.
Now my mom wonders why I’m low-contct, and why I’ll only speak with her if Dad is also on the phone.
Don’t snoop on your kids, or you’ll reach your 70s and 80s and wonder why they want nothing to do with you.