Quite a lot actually. How would you feel if someone read your diary? Or listened in on your phone calls for information on you, what you were doing, and who you were doing it with? Facebook and Twitter are the main places for teenagers to post every cough, spit, spat and attention-grabbing activity. Where we would have scribbled it down in a diary or had hushed conversations about what we were up to face-to-face with friends then five minutes later on the phone, teenagers in the second decade of the 21st century do it online.
But despite living much of their lives onscreen and through their phones, which is obviously open to spying, judgement or abuse from anyone, I still feel that teenagers are entitled to their privacy (an odd version of it anyway). And for me, that privacy takes the form of leaving my eldest son's online antics between him and his buddies.
When I was a teenager my diary had its own little lock, key, and its own little hiding place (under the mattress, not exactly genius concealment on my part), and I would have died of embarrassment if my parents had read about my first snog with whatshisface from the tennis club, or the first time I got into a nightclub aged 13, or the painfully passionate crush I had on Mike Read off of Radio One. But that's what social media is for our kids - it's their online diary, albeit shared with most of their peers, but it's there that their teenage lives are lived. Our children are digital natives - their social media activity is their personal life, and I for one am not going to hijack my son's right to one.
There's a point where you stop just walking in to your children's rooms, when it becomes not just a part of your house and therefore your territory, but the territory of your child. This is the point where you start to knock before you enter your child's room, usually around the time they hit the 13 mark. Now every time I knock on my 14-year-old son's door, I hear the small yet distinctive sound of a mouse clicking the little 'x' at the top right hand corner of the Facebook page on which he's logged considerable man hours. I'm not worried that he's hiding something from me - if he had any problems I'd hope that we have the sort of relationship where he can come to me and talk, and he usually does, eventually - and equally, I'm not desperate to know what's on that page.
This disinterest isn't a lack of regard for him on my part, it's to do with trust. I have to trust that he is ok online, that he is being respectful to others online, and that he knows that my respect for his privacy is something that he can rely on. This respect and trust works both ways - because I believe that if I treat his movements with suspicion then he will repay me by never trusting me with anything. Least of all his right to make his own choices, make his own mistakes, and develop into a responsible and respectful adult. What I do is make sure that he is educated on the risks of social media, so that he knows never to chat to, engage with or give personal details to strangers or idiots, of which there are many.
I once knew a woman, the mother of a school friend of my son, who texted me to say that she'd been on (ie stalking) her son's Facebook page, then she went on to tell me what my own son had been posting on there. As if I'd be interested on spying on my own son. I was appalled.
As far as I can fathom (because he told me), most of the time he's hanging around on Facebook to see what his mates are doing and tweeting stupid stuff. Then there's Reddit for the lols and pics of impossibly cute furry things, Tumblr for the blogs and the super massive black hole of the internet, mainly for the games. If he was in trouble, of course I would want to know. Which is why I talk to him. I have to stay vigilant though, I know that. But spying on your kids online, in effect finding, unlocking and reading their virtual diaries, is surely something else.
