Should you check your Kids’ Phone?

Warning, this article will talking about topics of sex, pornography and sexual assault. ( I don’t recommend reading this if you are under the age of 14 and uncomfortable with the topics above)

This article will mainly be targeted towards parents.

I’ve been holding back on writing this for a while now because of a conversation I had with a group of girls about this very topic. For the sake of this article I will be calling these girls Sadie and Bella to respect their privacy. It was during lunch time, we were talking amongst ourselves when Sadie began to complain about her moms constant snooping on her phone.

Sadie believed it was a terrible invasion of her trust and privacy so to combat this invasion of privacy she began hiding her phone around her room in places she believed her mom would never find it. But to her dismay her mom began to in her words “ wreck my room trying to find it.” I quickly interrupted the conversation to give my thoughts on the topic.
“ I don’t think you should hide your phone from her because she’s clearly suspicious of your activity online so hiding your phone doesn’t help your case one bit.”

“ Yeah well I don’t like it, she does it way too much even in front of me” Sadie replied clearly upset I didn’t take her side on the matter.

“ Its not wrong to check your kids phones also if you didn’t have anything to hide you wouldn’t be this annoyed now would you?”

“They’re supposed to trust me and know I’m not doing anything” Sadie explained

My conversation with Sadie went back and forth with Bella occasionally dropping a few comments. Eventually Bella spoke up again.

“ When I have a child I don’t plan on checking their phone because I want to give them enough privacy. I might check it if they have suspicious behavior but that’s it”

I internally shook my head at the thought.

After I dropped a few more comments Bella began looking at me with clear annoyance.

“Why are you siding with the parents?”

We walked back to our lockers with tension in the air. I could hear them talking in hushed tones about the topic. The topic was something I felt very passionate about and wanted to write about but I didn’t want to receive backlash from my peers so I scrapped the idea. After a long discussion with my mom I was inspired to write about it again.

Is it an invasion of Privacy?

The short answer to this question is no. It is not an invasion of privacy; the majority of kids don’t know how to protect themselves on the internet, so it’s the parents job to do that for them. I can easily tell when most parents don’t do that because the result is always in their kids. I’ve seen tons of kids do a bunch of lude things. They talk about going on websites like pornhub, they make sexual hand gestures, etc. Do you honestly think they’re picking this out of nowhere? If you truly want to stop these things from happening it’s best to check your child’s internet activity and uproot the potential problems then and there. Another thing I see is that a lot of kids are on snapchat and I won’t lie and say Snapchat isn’t fun. Although the chats delete every 24 hours, snapchat has a set of parental controls which helps you monitor your child’s activity.If you think it’s breaking their trust just tell them you’re checking their devices this will help them with future decisions regarding the internet including texts. This helps a ton because if they think about texting anything wrong (ex. Nudes, deaths threats, bullying) they will back out of it. Kids can also begin to have suspicious behaviors at times so being able to check their phone can help if you want to understand the cause of it.

The results of not checking their phones.

If I still don’t have you convinced I’ll put it in a different way. When your child is on the internet so are child predators. The parents who check on their child’s internet activities are the ones who don’t have children driven to suicide because of cyberbullying or children recovering from online grooming. These things happen all the time, so stop thinking your child is grown enough to fight it, instead step up and be a parent. Kids are now getting phones at a ridiculously young age and getting access to different social media apps that predators are constantly on waiting for their next victim. When letting your kids go on this website I suggest communicating with your kids about online safety and encouraging them to talk about the people in their lives.

Conclusion
I would like to thank you all for reading this and I hope you will continue to read the many articles I have in store for the future