Cellular Privacy: Harmful or builds bonds?

An environment where the person feels safe and respected is necessary especially with family, they are supposed to be the ones you call closest to you. In any family, maintaining a healthy relationship is crucial for emotional stability along with personal growth. As much as love and care are the foundation of these connections, one of the most important yet often overlooked aspects of a strong family bond involves the setting of personal boundaries.

Boundaries allow for the individual(s) to interact with one another in a manner that shows they are both equal. Among these boundaries, having privacy is particularly important. Those who maintain clear personal boundaries, including phone privacy, within family relationships allow for an environment where the individual feels secure, respected, and reassured that their own space both physical and digital is heard and given. Personal boundaries are the emotional, physical, and mental limits we create in order to feel secure and define how we interact with other people such as our own family. Personal boundaries are vital in a family without them, drifts between the child and their guardian can be highly affected and turned into an unstable dynamic that doesn’t allow for any room for growth.

Setting personal boundaries does not only mean to allow your child to have their own room but also includes respecting cellular privacy. Cellular privacy is crucial for allowing children to have their own space online, where they can freely express themselves through words, posts, and interactions on social media. This sense of indepence promotes trust between parents and children, as it shows the child that they are trusted to make decisions about their digital presence.

For parents, the ultimate goal is to protect their child both from outside dangers and from potential risks in the digital world. However, the line between protection and over-suffocation can be pretty thin. When parents become too controlling or invasive, they may begin to act more like “helicopter parents” than protectors. Helicopter parents take an unhealthy amount of information from their children in order to know every single aspect of their life without allowing them to have a sense of self in their own lives.

This can create behaviors that even my very own parents adapted when I was a bit younger, such as banning certain platforms or insisting on knowing every password to monitor my every move whether it be texting my friends and wanting to know our conversations, or wanting to see my every move on social media. While these gestures may come from a place of care and concern, they can ruin trust and slow down the progress of a healthy relationship between parents and their own children. 

Over time, when the dynamic between a parent and child starts to become strained, it starts to feel as though everything you’ve known about your parents is suddenly just a false narrative. Personally, when I was younger, I would find myself doing everything I could to delay coming back home such as joining different clubs, and going out with friends whenever they offered to hangout. It was a temporary fix along with the feeling of relief.

However, the constant need to know my business and every move made my father and I’s relationship one that I wouldn’t want anyone to have. There were constant arguments whenever there seemed to be a glitch in my location, or anytime I caught him using my phone without asking me first. It was extremely frustrating to know my parents could use my phone whenever, especially when they were the ones who had created all of my passwords, including the one to unlock my phone. It felt absurd and ridiculous. While my parents would lecture me on the importance of my safety, it never felt as if it was for safety but more to have more control in my life and the things I do in my own spare time.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve found myself to be more discreet around my parents. I tend to find ways to not allow for them to know everything that is going on with me, it makes me feel more independent due to the fact that back then I didn’t have much of it. I’ve also grown to be more distant around my parents, when there are arguments I don’t feel as angry any more. While I do wish for things to be different it’s just how things have grown to be. 

However, I’ve come to realize that most parents genuinely want to support their children in every way they can, even if it doesn’t always come across that way. Which unfortunately does lead to them often struggling to understand why their children react so negatively when they try to monitor their activities, especially when it involves something as personal as checking their phone. Parents typically see this as an act of protection, not as a disturbance or a threat to the bond they share with their child.

My father once told me, “I’d rather have you mad at me than not being able to look for you if you were to ever be lost,” I couldn’t fully understand his over-suffocating behaviors since I have no children of my own but, I took his words into account. Even though he meant well, I didn’t and still do not agree with how he invaded my phone privacy. Before even handing me my first phone, he shared my location with himself and my mom along with installing two apps to ensure I couldn’t change or hide my location. While he did this to ensure I was always safe, it felt over-controlling and caused a lot of tension between us because I saw it as a violation of my privacy.

While phone privacy might not seem like a major issue within families, restricting or taking away a child’s cellular privacy can have more harmful effects than many parents and even their children may fail to realize. What might seem like a smaller issue now has the possibility to grow into a much larger problem over the years.

References

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