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Your teenager has gone quiet and you know the phone’s passcode. Is it wrong to read the messages?

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Applied ethicsModern European#everyday-ethics#parenting#privacy#trust
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Its coordinates: 3.3 Applied Ethics

An everyday case, and a hard one.

Your fifteen-year-old has been withdrawn for weeks: eating less, staying in her room, snapping at everyone. You ask, gently, and get nothing. One evening her phone is on the kitchen table. You know the passcode, because you set it up for her two years ago.

Reading the messages might tell you whether something is badly wrong: bullying, a predatory adult, self-harm. It might also tell you nothing except that she has a crush, and she would be right to feel betrayed if she ever found out.

Some questions:

  • Is privacy something a fifteen-year-old has a right to, or something parents grant as children grow?
  • Does it matter what you are looking for? Is reading to check she is safe different from reading to find out what she thinks of you?
  • If you read and find nothing, have you done wrong? If you read and find something serious, does that justify the reading after the fact?
  • Is there a difference between reading the messages and telling her you are worried enough that you might?

We'd welcome answers from parents, from people who were that fifteen-year-old, and from anyone with a principle that survives the kitchen table.

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4 answers

  1. Thamarai Raman

    Fellow

    My children are younger, but I was a fifteen-year-old whose mother read her diary. I found out. What I remember is not anger about what she read. It was that afterwards I wrote nothing true anywhere, for years.

    So I'd put the cost on the future, not only on the moment. If you read, you may learn one thing tonight and lose access to everything after. I would rather say to her: "I am frightened, and if you can't tell me, I'm going to have to find out some other way." That's honest. It's also a threat, I know.

  2. Rowena Abellana

    Fellow

    I teach sixteen-year-olds, and Gabriel Marcel's distinction between a problem and a mystery helps here. A problem can be solved from outside, by gathering information; a mystery is something you are involved in, which can only be met from inside a relationship. Reading the phone treats your daughter as a problem.

    But I would not be absolute. Marcel was not writing about a child who might be in danger. If the signs are of real harm, the relationship has to survive a violation, and you repair it later. If they are of ordinary teenage misery, the violation is the harm.

  3. Baraka Mwakyusa

    Contributor

    I was that fifteen-year-old quite recently. My mother never read my phone, but my uncle once read a message over my shoulder at dinner and announced it. I still remember it.

    What I think now: it would have been fine if she had asked me straight, "Is someone hurting you?" I would have lied the first time. I would not have lied the third time.

  4. Grace Nakato

    Reader

    I'm a social worker, and I meet this question from the other side, after something has already gone wrong. In the cases I have worked on where a child was being harmed through a phone, the parents had usually not read the messages. In the cases where a teenager stopped talking to her family for good, they often had, in secret.

    So I don't think there is a rule that survives the kitchen table. But Thamarai's point and Baraka's point are the ones I would put first: what matters is what happens afterwards. Reading in secret and then acting in secret teaches a child that she is watched and not trusted. Saying "I am worried enough that I am going to look, unless you can tell me something first" keeps her inside the decision.

    Most of the girls I work with did not need their phones read. They needed one adult who asked twice.