Last week as I was treating myself to a manicure, I saw several mother-daughter duos getting their manicures, too. Some of the girls were too young for a manicure, in my opinion, but I couldn’t help to think of how I hope Olivia will want to come with me to get manicures one day, when she is much older.
As one of the teen girls was getting her nails painted, her mother took her phone off the table (maybe it was to make sure her daughter didn’t lose it, either way, it seemed innocent to me). The daughter immediately snatched the phone from her mother. She rolled her eyes, sighed, and couldn’t shake the look of annoyance off her face. The mother looked embarrassed. I was embarrassed for her, but she smiled as if nothing happened.
What could the daughter have been so protective about?
It’s no surprise that kids, especially teens, have their own, private lives. Many of them even have their own sexual identities and that can make any parent nervous. These days, kids know a lot more than we did growing up, largely in part to all the “resources” (read: social media, gadgets, peer pressure, etc.) at their disposable. Sexting a crush is common, and bullying the new kid is not unheard of. Worst of all, everything is published on the internet for the world to see. It’s no wonder that a bad day in a young girl’s life can be traumatizing and lead to depression.
So how do we know how much privacy we should give our kids? Like my mother, I’m not huge on kids having privacy. A few years back, one of my mom’s friends was having trouble disciplining her pre-teen daughter. She would ask her to not lock her bedroom door, but the teen would repeatedly lock herself in her room, alienating her younger sister, with whom she shared the room. My mother advised her to remove the child’s bedroom door from the hinges. My mother was notorious for these types of extreme measures.
The woman never took my mom’s advice, or anyone else’s, and her daughter’s behavior eventually got worse.
My mother’s parenting style was strict compared to my friend’s parents. As a teen, I wasn’t allowed to go to sleepovers, have dates, stay out past 10 pm (on the weekends!), or watch certain TV shows. Recently, I asked my mother why I wasn’t allowed to watch “Beverly Hills 90210.” All my friends watched it and I always felt out of place for not knowing what was going on. She told me that she didn’t want her teen daughter watching a show in which girls talk about sex, drink, and experiment with drugs. Point taken. I get it now, but at that time it felt so harsh!
I hope I’m not any harsher than my mother was with me. I understand the need for wanting some privacy and space as a kid, but I also hope that Olivia never feels that her life needs so much privacy that she would distance herself from me or her father. If the time comes when she feels the need to snap her phone out of my hands, for fear that I will see something I’m not supposed to, I’d feel the need to get rid of her phone altogether.
