Should Parents Spy on Blogging Teens?

Posted on May 29, 2005

The Christian Science Monitor has an article discussing blogging and teens and whether or not blogging is a dangerous practice for young people. There have been lots of articles published on the topic over the past few months as parents try and understand this world teenagers have immersed themselves in. Dr. Laurence Steinberg, an expert in adolescent psychology at Temple University and the author of The 10 Basic Principles of Good Parenting told the Monitor that parents might be taking causing more harm by trying to interfere with blogging teens:

"The downside of prohibiting it is worse than the downside of allowing it," Dr. Steinberg says. "A good parent-child relationship is based on trust, and trust is a reciprocal feeling. I think people do get especially worked up for some reason over the Internet. But snooping on what your child does on the Internet, to me in some ways, is no different from snooping through your child's dresser drawers or eavesdropping on your child's telephone conversation or reading your child's diary.

"Any of those things done without cause [for suspicion] are to me violations of what I think is the reasonable right that teenagers have, which is to have some aspect of their lives that their parents are not privy to," he says.