Should I Snoop on My Teen?

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Reena Ninan:
Episode 171. Should I Snoop On My Teen?
Is there an age where you think roughly, children stop telling you things, like they shut down?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yes. It depends for kids, but usually it’s around 12, 13. They just become more private. They want to hold their cards much closer to the vest.

Reena Ninan:
Why? Because I still want to know everything. I know I’m going to be the 82-year-old mom who still wants to know everything from a 45-year-old kid.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
There’s so many reasons. One of ’em, which we’ve thought through before, is they suddenly want their independence. They’re trying to become independent while living under our roofs. And so a big part of how they do it is they become more psychologically independent. They just start keeping things that they used to tell us. They stop telling us. Nothing has really changed or nothing much may have changed, but we just don’t get to have the information in the same old way.

Reena Ninan:
And that’s when some of us start to snoop.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Some parents do. Some parents do.

Reena Ninan:
We’ve got this letter we want to tackle this week. I want to read it to you. It says, “Dear Dr. Lisa and Reena, I have a question about respecting kids’ privacy versus being an informed aware parent. A few of my kids keep journals, which is something I’ve suggested as a way of processing their day, their emotions, etc. I myself have been journaling since college and find it an incredibly helpful way to work through my feelings. In general. I do not believe that it’s a good idea to read other people’s journals and diaries. However, having teenagers has changed that. Although I try my best to have open communications with my children. As you know, teenagers can push parents away and want nothing to do with talking to them about their concerns, worries, stresses. I try to keep the line of communication open, but also respect when they’re not wanting to share with me. I found myself taking a peek at their journals as a way of checking in on their mental health. Is this okay? Is it snooping where I shouldn’t be? I never tell them I do. And if there’s something that I had no idea was bothering them, I gently try to bring it up without revealing that I’ve read their journals. I have mixed feelings about doing this. Would love your thoughts. By the way, I’m not an overbearing helicopter parent at all, but I’m definitely an emotionally aware parent and feel stuck sometimes when I know teens have so much swirling in their brains. But close us out. Thanks for any insight you have.”
We got to tackle the first one. Is it snooping? Is it okay?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well yeah, it’s snooping. I think if you ask the kids, they’d say it was snooping and given that it’s their journals, I feel like they get to be the the decider on what constitutes snooping in this situation. What do you think? Do you think it’s snooping?

Reena Ninan:
It’s definitely snooping, but I guess is there a valid reason to do it as a parent and especially it sounds to me like there’s nothing, no red flags.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
No red flags.

Reena Ninan:
It’s just the parent is kind of curious and wants to make sure they’re not missing anything.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
This is loving, right? There’s nothing in this letter that I’m like, whoa, what’s the matter with this parent? I mean, I get it, I get it, I get it. I don’t agree with it. Right? I can tell you that right now, but I get it, and it is important to acknowledge. There are situations I think where desperate times call for desperate measures and if a parent is seeing, has all sorts of concerns and cannot get their hands around something and is really freaked out and strongly believes that critical information is going to be somewhere in a kid’s journal that could be, you know, life or death or major, major issue. I can picture scenarios where it’s worth it to violate the kid’s privacy in the name of safety. I’m not saying those scenarios don’t exist. This doesn’t sound like it to me.

Reena Ninan:
So remember we talked about cell phones and one of the things you said, sometimes it’s good to have a contract or rules and lay it down so that everyone is aware. One of them is I’ll be looking at your text messages. I’ll be like, don’t think it’s a violation. I’m just letting you know I’m going to do it. Obviously you probably don’t do that with a diary. You want them, and here it sounds like processing your emotions, a free space, but it’s not free. There’s no red flags, but you’re concerned because they’re of the age where they’re shutting you out. So is that reason enough to be okay to start snooping?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I don’t think so. And let’s actually think through telling a kid you’re going to look at their cell phone versus getting information from a diary.
One of the things, and this is something that I think came up in our conversation about telling kids that you’re going to look at their cell phone is if you’re going to look at your kid’s cell phone, you should tell them because one of the things that happens is sometimes parents who haven’t told their kids and are snooping on their kid’s cell phone come across information that is suddenly very critical and then they’re in real trouble because they’re like, do I out myself that I have been looking at my kid’s phone or do I continue to snoop to get more information and try to nail this down? So if you’re going to look at something your kid considers to be private, which many kids consider their phones to be private, I don’t think that’s necessarily true.
I think you should be above board about it because that’s fair to the kid and it also means that if you come across information you can ask and try to get a handle on it.
Now the diary or the journal, here’s, Reena, here’s an interesting worry I have that comes up. I actually think looking at a kid’s journal or diary could make a parent more anxious than they need to be. The parent is going for reassurance, but one of the things that we know, and you and I have talked about a lot, is that part of how kids manage emotions well sometimes is by expressing them and sometimes they will express their emotions into a journal or a diary.
And sometimes what they express is pretty rough and ready or pretty dark or pretty frustrated and by expressing it into the journal, the kid gets all the relief they need that it’s actually this wildly adaptive thing to be like, “I hate everybody. Nobody wants to be my friend.” I mean whatever. I think we might see it sometimes as dramatic, but it’s real to the kid. Whatever intense emotional download the kid needs, if they take it to their journal, take it to their diary, dump it there, leave it there, walk away feeling relieved and better. This is the picture of mental health. This is what we want kids to do, find adaptive harmless ways to express emotions, even sometimes very dark and negative ones. And so my worry Reena, actually, is that a kid who is thriving and using dumping emotional garbage into their diary as part of that thriving, if you just read the diary you might be like, oh my gosh, this kid has this dark double life. That would not necessarily be reassuring. So I think there’s also that hazard.

Reena Ninan:
So if I hear you correctly, you’re saying just because they dump something into their diary, it could be just a way they’re processing, a way they’re going through, it’s getting the stress off. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to act or do it or be going down that path. It could be really therapeutic the way, you as a therapist say, this is great, right?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Absolutely. It’s just instead of venting to their parent because they don’t want the parent to carry the information they vent to their diary and say all sorts of stuff that they wouldn’t say in public and need to get out. So I think that, I’m not saying this is how kids always use their journals, but I think you and I know that’s often how people write the letter, they’re never going to send, people are allowed to have places where they say things that are meant just for them and I could easily see this going down a wrong path.

Reena Ninan:
And it’s clear the parent does the same. The parent values having a journal and being able to do that.
One thing that really surprised me in one of our podcasts was when you got some spicy information about someone else’s kid, do you reveal that spicy information? I was surprised by your advice. You said the most important thing here obviously from safety of a kid, as long as a kid’s fine, it’s not going to jeopardize their wellbeing. Is your relationship with your kid, is it worth sacrificing that? And I’m just wondering as a parent that my need to know, is that worth sacrificing my trust with my kid? You’re so emotional. If that trust is broken, do I get to recover that? But I really just want to peek and I just want to know, so what does the research tell us on this?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, well, so you know how I love the nerds who ask these questions and actually this has been studied this question of snooping looking in kids’ private communications and there’s a few things that we see. So first of all, one really, really clever study actually found, it was a Dutch study, looked at parents who were snooping on their kids and parents who are not snooping on their kids and looked at actual behavior in the teenagers. And interestingly, all the teenagers were acting the same. The kids who were getting snooped on were not misbehaving more or more worrisome than the kids who were not getting snooped on.

Reena Ninan:
So you’re saying the parents just need to cool it?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well I’m saying the parents’ urge to snoop is probably, based on this one study, not a good measure of how much the kid needs to be supervised by snooping. So we know that.
I think more important and something that gets right to the heart of what you’re asking about. We also have a study came out in the Journal of Adolescents showing that if kids catch on or suspect that the parent is snooping, they do exactly what we would expect teenagers to do, which is they withdraw, they shut down, they share less information, they see it as a breach of trust, because it is a breach of trust, and that harms the relationship with the parent. So the summary of that study is like this can totally backfire on you. And I think as careful as this parent thinks, she’s being in subtly bringing up the thing I found in the diary. Our kids know us cold, they know us inside and out.

Reena Ninan:
Very true.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And so I think it’s a stretch to imagine that if you do that more than once, maybe not even once that the kid wouldn’t be like, okay, I think a lot of kids are going to know what’s going on there.

Reena Ninan:
So Lisa, I want to ask you if you do feel worried and then this letter we got from this parent, there’s no red flags to us that there’s concern, but if you are a parent and you got this feeling that something is up and you think you might get clues from that diary, should you still do it? And Snoop?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think you should actually take it right to the kid.

Reena Ninan:
Don’t even look at the diary, just call him?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
No, I think it would be a very extreme situation where I say you do an end run around the kid and go right for the diary.

Reena Ninan:
But what if I know I’m going to ask and they’re just going to stonewall me?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, I would give it a shot anyway.

Reena Ninan:
Ask ’em.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I would give it a shot and I would think about how to do it in a way that actually sets you up for success. So I think you can say to a kid, “Listen, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something doesn’t feel right. I am feeling anxious about you. I’m getting the sense that things are not okay or something’s not okay. Am I barking up the wrong tree?”

Reena Ninan:
And do you find that they respond to that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think you can give that a shot, right? And again now Reena, we’re into this intimate relationship between parent and teenager. You can see your kid’s face, you can see the look on their face, you can see you’re getting information even, whether the kid opens their mouth or not, you’re getting some information. So I think it’s important to start with the kid. And if the kid is like, everything’s cool, I dunno what you’re talking about, leave me alone. I think a second pass is “Look, is there something that’s getting in the way though I do feel like there’s something here. I, maybe I’m wrong. If there were something here, is there something that gets in the way of talking with me about it?” So you can sort of retreat back to that position of I don’t even need to know the thing. I need to know what the barrier would be to talking with me about it if there were a thing.
If you can have that conversation, you’re in a good position, you’re moving in the right direction. Now Reena, let’s talk about the scariest thing. The reason this is so scary, but I think sometimes when parents feel compelled to snoop, they’ve heard a headline about suicide or a kid in their community died by suicide. I mean if you want to know what I think gets parents to do this, I think they are like, I am scared for my kid’s safety. I don’t have anything to go on. I need to go check. I need to go check.
Here’s what I will tell you. Even here, even around questions like suicide and actually especially around questions like suicide around suicide, our guidance is you ask the kid directly, you ask them straight up and what I think is important is to have some hook to hang it on. I mean I think it’s actually not okay to randomly ask kids out of the blue if they’re suicidal. I think that that makes them more weirded out than anything else.
But if a parent is like, my kid does not seem like themselves or they’ve been in their room for two days or they were super upset about that thing and I’m anxious about their safety, we have total consensus in the field, Reena, that the best thing to do is to say because of, and then you fill in the blank about because you’ve been in your room for two days or whatever, “I need to ask you a question. Have you had any thoughts of harming yourself or ending your life?”

Reena Ninan:
So you just ask them straight up?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You just ask. You just ask. Okay, now here is why we are reluctant to do it and I get it, parents are afraid they’re going to give the kid the idea that the kid wasn’t upset, but if I bring up suicide, now they’re thinking about suicide. So I’m not doing that. That’s the worry parents have. Here’s what’s really important. We have research showing, first of all, teenagers know what suicide is. They know and more important, we have research showing that if a kid is thinking about it, they’re glad you asked.

Reena Ninan:
Really? Because this is a hard, is just a difficult conversation to have.
One, I feel like I’m going to be shut down, so why am I doing this? Two, like you said, I’m putting the thought in their head that they might not have already had.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I know, right? Really scary. So Reena, as much as I have been taught this and know this to be clinically the right thing to do, it’s not that I haven’t shared those questions myself and I’ve had those worries. What if you do bring it up and the kid’s not thinking about it? Or could I cause more trouble? Okay, so I had this thing happen that was one of the most moving things I’ve had happen in a really long time, which was a few months ago I was presenting to a school on Zoom, to a community of parents on Zoom, and I shared the advice I just shared with you that if you’re worried about your kid, just straight up ask. In the chat privately, a dad messaged me and he said, “I was that teenager and it would’ve meant so much to me if somebody had asked because that would’ve told me that they could see how much pain I was in.”
So any questions I had about this guidance, that incredibly generous man sharing his story, set those to the side and I think it brings us right back to where we are with this question of snooping. If you think something’s wrong, it is a gift to give your kid to say, “I can see that you are in pain about something.”

Reena Ninan:
Acknowledging it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
“What’s up? How can I help?” And think about what that guy shared with me about what it would’ve meant to be seen in that way?

Reena Ninan:
It’s that perspective that makes me aware that the fears I have, it’s totally different. And when you haven’t gone through an experience the way this dad did, boy wow, that is just incredible, really incredible. You talked a little bit about why teens close you out at the top of this podcast, but I just want to get into it a little bit more because this dad sharing with you that if someone had just reached out, it could have made all the difference.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And it did. I mean, well luckily, luckily he lived to tell the tale, but he really would’ve wanted that and it would’ve meant so much to him.

Reena Ninan:
I think sometimes we don’t do it and reach out. Because we think in our minds it’s not going to help. So why even go down that road and we stop ourselves. But wow, that’s so powerful to hear that dad say that just that acknowledgement could have made, did make such a difference.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It would’ve made such a difference. Would’ve difference if somebody had done it for him. But like you say, Reena, kids get private and they make us anxious because they’re teenagers, they have access to all sorts of risks. They have access to all sorts of new possibilities.
The other thing I would say, so we’ve got, okay, we have anxious parent, right? Anxious parent sitting there worried about their kid. Options for what to do, one, go look in the diary, could backfire, could make you unnecessarily nervous. So let’s set that one to the side. Two, ask the kid directly, things don’t seem right. Are you okay? I get the sense that you’re in some kind of pain, I don’t know what’s going on. Am I missing something?
A third option that’s halfway. That’s just a good one for folks to have. Check in with other adults who know your kid, whether it’s…

Reena Ninan:
Like who?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
…a wonderful teacher at school or a coach or if there’s some family member that they’re close with and just say, “I’ve just got this feeling or something doesn’t seem right. Are you seeing things?” Schools have a ton of information about students. They see them all day, they see them in all settings. They can measure them against other kids their age. I think there’s a half step where you can say, “Look, don’t let ’em know I called. I just have to sort of feel this out a little bit.” And I would use it judiciously. I don’t really like going around kids in this way, but it’s certainly I’d prefer that to a diary peak and if a parent doesn’t feel ready to raise it with their kid, that’s an option to consider.

Reena Ninan:
Is there research on parents who snoop and just how it affects the relationship and the kids? What do we know? What more do we know in your research bag? I’m so curious about this topic.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, I mean I think that the key finding is the one that it can backfire. It can back actually put you at more of a distance from your kid. And I’ll tell you a story clinically Reena that really, really captured this and I saw it happen. I actually wrote about this in “Untangled”. It was such a lesson for me when I was a young clinician. There was a 12-year-old girl I was caring for who at 12 as they do started to close her bedroom door and to do I am almost a hundred percent sure all the exact same stuff she used to do with the door wide open. This really freaked out her dad. He was like, she must be up to something. She must be up to something. Why else would she close the door? So when she was out at school, he went into her room and he found a diary with a lock on it in her closet and he was like, bingo. I knew there was something more here. So he was even more freaked out. So she came home and he insisted that she open it and he insisted that he be able to look at it. It was like a lot of kids text threads. It was like totally, there was nothing there. There was nothing there. It was just her crushes, her 12-year-old take on the world. This did so much damage, so much damage to their relationship and what got them to me is this kid started to get super sneaky. She started to get super sneaky, not being honest about where she was trying to throw them off her trail. And so she actually did become dishonest. She actually in the end did start to do things that were dishonest and sneaky with her family. But as you got the story in retrospect, you’re like, I think the parents had a pretty, or the dad had a pretty heavy hand in creating the condition of her becoming sneaky. So this is to say, teens deserve privacy because human beings deserve privacy.

Reena Ninan:
If you’ve gone down that path of that, dad, can you repair?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think almost anything can be repaired. I think that’s a really key question though. I think it was a big rupture. I mean it was a big problem. I think it can be repaired. I think the parent has to really, really own that they crossed a line. I think they have to be honest about their regret about it. I think they have to show their kid that they can withstand that their kid will have some privacy. I think they have to trust their kid and sit with the anxiety. That is absolutely part of having a teenager. I mean I think that that’s the thing. Reena, having a teenager is an anxiety provoking situation. There is no getting around that. I think it can be repaired, but I think you got to really own it and you got to really play by the rules going forward.

Reena Ninan:
These years, the teenage years and the tween years, we’re aware that we’ve got finite time in a way that when they’re two or three it doesn’t feel that way. And we want to get things into them and get them to understand the world and what’s important. But we often don’t think about how important’s building that relationship, and that’s something you’ve taught me is these years are also important for building trust, but it’s so easy to lose that trust even as a parent. What’s your advice for parents who feel like they want to go there because it is almost the easiest route to take. No one’s going to know I looked at the journal.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Right? Right. My advice is if you feel the need to do that, I think it’s worth stepping back and asking yourself why.
I think that that’s really the question. If you’re like,

Reena Ninan:
Why am I snooping?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
why do I need to look? What is it that is making me feel like I want to look? Don’t just jump to the behavior. Really ask, is there something I’m worried about? Is there something that has raised my Scooby sense and made me anxious? I think it’s a why. I don’t think you should do it just because you can, right? I really, I think the costs are potentially too high. The benefits are unclear, right? So I think it’s really you want to ask yourself why you’re doing that. I also think, Reena, if we can hold ourselves together, withstand the kids become more private around 12, 13, not take it personally. Treat them in a dignified manner, extend to them the privacy that all humans deserve. They will come back, right? Kids don’t stay distant forever.
They have to establish some separation and one of the things you raise, they are encountering all these new and difficult challenges. In my experience, if parents have been very mindful of boundaries, kids will bring those challenges to them. The 14-year-old will walk in the door and be like, “You’re not going to believe what happened,” if they believe the parent’s not going to blab it all over town. The parent’s not going to make a bigger deal of it than it needs to be. The parent’s not going to come at the kid for having been anywhere near something inappropriate. Which of course all teenagers are near inappropriate things. So I would actually think about it as a short-term, maybe gain, maybe not with a huge long-term consequence. If you rupture trust early, I would say working to establish trust, working to establish that you honor a kid’s autonomy is actually what’s going to keep the kid over time feeling much more likely to come talk with you about things.

Reena Ninan:
Because sometimes it feels counterintuitive, almost what you’re saying, you lay it out so beautifully. But we think, no, no, no. We’ve got to take the shorter route of snooping around and that’ll get us to the truth of what we want. So what do you have first, Lisa, for Parenting To Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Our conversation just made me think about something. I do want parents to consider saying to their kids, which is to say to them, home is a vault. If you want to come home and share things that happen during the day, we’re not going to spread it around. We’re not going to tell other people. If there’s a safety concern about someone, we’ll deal with that and we’ll work with you to deal with that. We won’t make an end run around you, but if you need to come home and just share some weird thing that happened, something you saw online that was disturbing to you, something like, this is a place where we’ll treat it as your private information and we won’t share it around. And if we do, we’ll do it with your full awareness and only under extreme conditions. This is a great gift to give to kids because they do see and hear a lot and their days are long and their classmates can bug ’em sometimes. And to be able to use homos a vault, and then honor that, if you say it, you got to do it. That’s the kind of thing that I think can also help keep the lines of communication open.

Reena Ninan:
Home is a vault. Never thought about telling them so they know. I just think instinctively they should know that. But it’s important to have.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
They need to hear it.

Reena Ninan:
They need to hear it. I’ll see you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.