Parents who have had a teenager or preteen child living in their home know that kids this age tend to be secretive. Social studies suggest that this is a normal part of teenage development as children seek to create some distance from their parents and establish an independent identity.
Although this may be a normal stage of human development, most parents understandably have concerns about their children’s behavior during teenage years. This is especially true in the age of the internet and smartphones, where other teenagers and even adults can have direct access to children without parents being aware of it.
These problems become more complex when parents get divorced. Even while married, parents often have very difficult ideas about how much privacy to give their children. After divorce, parents go their separate ways, and their parenting methods go with them. Unfortunately, this often leads to heated disagreements between parents as children move between different houses with different rules about internet and cell phone use and how much privacy the children can expect. Some parents might even find the other parent’s restriction of a child’s privacy to be abusive.