Look, Ma... No Hands!

by Beverly Tjerngren

My daughter, who recently turned ten, is on the cusp of adolescence. She agonizes over wardrobe choices and preens in front of the mirror for what seems like hours. She begs for a cell phone and an mp3 player and a second piercing in her ears. Her loyalties have shifted from Barbie to boy bands. She still watches Nickelodeon, but now she eschews Spongebob Squarepants in favor of Zoey 101. And she wants her privacy.

It's this last that causes me the most anxiety as a parent. I understand that she's growing up, and as much as it pains me at times, I realize that she's entitled to her own space. So, when she gets a phone call and immediately rushes to her room and shuts the door, I don't say a word. When I happen upon her and her friends talking and the conversation stops abruptly, I do my best to look past their shifty eyes and offer up a drink and a snack as though I hadn't noticed anything. When I come up behind her sitting at the computer and she hurriedly closes the window she was reading, I resist the urge to wrest the mouse from her grasp and dig into the browser history.

But it's hard.

As we can't help but be aware these days, the world is a dangerous place and kids are having to naviagate through minefields full of sex, drugs, alcohol, predators, peer pressure, and more at earlier and earlier ages. I want to believe that my daughter's private chats with her friends concern sticker-collecting and hopscotch tournaments, but I know better, of course. I want to believe, too, that my daughter would come to me first with any questions or worries she might have about serious issues, but I've been a kid myself and I know better about that as well. Growing up I had a wonderful relationship with my mother and I knew I could talk with her about anything, and I did talk with her about a lot. But not about everything. I had secrets.

Secrecy worries me. Even the word sounds ominous, particularly when I think about it in relation to my fourth-grader. And though I want to respect her privacy, I'm having a difficult time defining the line between privacy and secrecy. When she closes that browser window before I can read it, is she merely embarrassed to be caught singing along to the latest Shakira single, or is she hiding something more sinister? How much should I pry? Too little could mean missing important clues, and too much could backfire and make her even more furtive. As it turns out, it's not only today's kids who are navigating through uncharted minefields; we parents are doing it, too.

Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any hard and fast answers about these issues. Right now I'm just trying to find a balance, to give her some freedom without giving her free rein. For instance, she's allowed to use the internet unsupervised, but she's not allowed to have a computer in her room. Anything she wants to look at, she has to look at in the common areas of the house, where her dad and I and her younger siblings might walk by at any time. She's allowed to email her friends, but she's not allowed to use instant-message programs. I'm doing my best to trust her until and unless she shows herself to be untrustworthy, but at the same time I'm trying to be realistic and observant. It's a tightrope walk.

Would that I had a net.