Do you read your child’s text messages?
As a parent it can be sometimes hard to know where to draw the line when it comes to giving our children privacy.
We want to allow them independence but we also want to make sure we keep them safe from bullies or online predators.
In this day and age with almost all children having some kind of access to mobile phones or the internet it’s becoming more important than ever for parents to monitor who they’re interacting with.
Mum Angela Hampton recently wrote an article about how she reads her child’s texts messages and it’s quite eye opening.
Hampton begins by saying that this isn’t something she sneaks around to do, her daughter knows that her mum reads her texts messages.
She also states that not only does her daughter know her mum will check her phone but because she knows she will she tells her mum what to expect in advance, even the bad stuff.
Hampton says that her daughter has informed her that she had been sent messages from a boy asking for ‘bootie pics’ and that some of her daughter’s friends were dealing with issues like eating disorders.
In fact the whole point of Hampton’s article was to make parents more aware of what is going on in their child’s life and to open up more dialogues for them to reveal this kind of information.
My eldest child doesn’t have their own phone yet and has limited access to the internet but there is no doubt in my mind that I will monitor what they send and receive on their phones in the future.
I had an incident as a teenager where someone pretended to be a child my own age to try and find out where I lived and to get me to send pictures of myself to them.
It was something that was happening under my parents noses but they wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t alerted them.
Situations like that have made me ever made vigilant when it comes to what I will allow my own children to do online and on any phone they might own in the future.
It is important to let our children lead their own lives but it is also our priority as a parent to keep them safe and that might include annoying them from time to time by checking up on them.
