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Better Parenting
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Self Help Tips (Home) > Better Parenting > Child Privacy Right
Respecting Your Child's Privacy
Besides ensuring your child is healthy, learns right from wrong, does well at school and at play, being a successful parent also requires you to respect your child and allow them their privacy.
As pre-teens start into their adolescence, they naturally begin to separate from their parents and begin to assert their independence. This is one of the scariest experiences for a caring parent - how to know what's going on with their kid, ensuring their safety without alienating them. It's the kind of stuff parental nightmares are made of.
Pre-adolescence and adolescence is a testing time for parents, a time of change. Your kids are not as close as they used to be and you want for them to be safe as they venture out into the big world out there. It sure is a tightrope walk for you, respecting their privacy and knowing what's what with them. But it's something you have to manage as a responsible parent.
Given below are a few do's and don'ts in attempting the tightrope walk. Good luck!
- Walk in your kid's shoes: Recall when you were that age, how your parents dealt with you, or how you wished they had with regard to your privacy. Remember how you felt at that time, and deal with your child accordingly.
- Treat your kid as a responsible being: You've been a good parent thus far. You've brought up your child well to know what is right and good. So, allow him the opportunity to be responsible. Just be available when he needs you.
- Don't be nosy: Do not go prying through your kid's things, read his journal or listen in on his conversations. If you do, it's most likely that your kid will start keeping stuff from you which is the last thing you want happening.
- Don't try to keep your kid's friends at bay: Don't try to keep your teenager away from his friends forcibly in order to keep him safe. Instead create a strong and secure environment for him at home, so he doesn't need to rebel and join up with undesirable companions.
- Allow your child his 'space': Space, in this context means allowing your kid the physical, emotional and mental facility to just be his individual self. This is the time he's discovering himself as a separate entity. Respect his need to maintain it. In fact, be supportive by reiterating his individuality and not intruding into it.
- Enhance his self-image: Let him know that you consider him capable of making responsible decisions. This will build his faith in his own ability to choose what's best for him. Endorsing your confidence in him will give him the strength to make the right decisions when they really matter. Also, he won't be feeling like his privacy or individuality is being violated.
- Keep communication lines open always: This is a time of change, of discovery, curiosity and exploration. You are dying a million deaths, hoping your child will not venture into areas that are dangerous. You're always almost asking but you check yourself in time.
If your relationship with your child is healthy, he will, of his own accord, share what's going on in his life with you. He'll feel confident of approaching you to resolve any doubts or conflicts he's facing. He just needs to know that he can talk things over with you and that you will talk to him to about things you think matter, without being authoritarian about it. It's imperative at this time in his life that communications between you are healthy.
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