This is long but very interesting.It's a true account of a mother's (SHONA SIBARY )dilemma when she found-out her 13 year old daughter has been flirting with guys after accidentally syncing her phone with her daughter's.She also narrates how she handled it,..I doubt that will happen here though ..lol
Late one night, lying in bed, I was on the verge of dropping off to sleep when my iPhone suddenly vibrated on the bedside table beside me.
It was nearly midnight. Who could possibly be texting at this hour? For a fleeting moment I wondered whether to just leave it. But with a teenage daughter 70 miles away at boarding school, a mother's instinct made me reach for the phone.
What I saw in that moment seemed, on the surface, innocuous enough. But it was to signal the start of a five-day rollercoaster of eye-popping revelations and enough parental angst to turn every hair on my head permanently grey.
The text - from a boy called Tom - read:
'Hey babe. OMG! Did you really escape last night? Your (sic) mad. AHAHA A... What time did you go into town?'
Then, before I had a chance to digest what I was seeing, a reply.
'2am! It was cool. AHAHA.'
By now, I was wide awake. For one tiny, lovely second I convinced myself I had experienced the equivalent of an old-fashioned crossed line - that the texts I'd received were meant for someone else's errant child.
But there was no denying the name on the top of this delightful exchange; that of my 13-year-old daughter, Annie.
You may wonder - as did I - why I was suddenly receiving all her text messages. The following morning, my husband Keith got to the bottom of what was going on. A few days earlier we had upgraded Annie's old mobile to an iPhone 4s. As anybody with an Apple device will know, there is this wonderful creation called iCloud, which can sync together Apple products.
Because of this, Annie's mobile number was automatically logged in my settings menu as the account holder and also ticked, unbeknown to me, under the messages option. I defy any responsible parent not to consider this a serendipitous turn of events. No mother wants to stoop so low as having to secretly spy on their daughter's online activity, but, deep down, we all wish we knew what they were up to when they have no idea we can see.
But it only took 24 hours before I was reminded of that old adage: be careful what you wish for.
Because later that evening, long after lights-out at her all-girls boarding house, the texts started up again.
The first was from a charming chap called Jake.
'Shame your (sic) not going to the party on Saturday night coz TBH woz gonna bring my condoms.'
Then one back from Annie:
'Ahaha. Your (sic) too kind but WTF?'
Speechless, I handed the phone over to Keith to read and watched as his face went puce. Then, in a moment of breathtaking innocence, he turned to me and asked:
'What does TBH mean?'
For those who don't have the time to decipher teenage acronyms, TBH means 'to be honest'. WTF means 'What the f***'. A suitably comforting response, I felt, from my daughter.
But things were about to get a lot worse
. 'Wanna play the truth game?' sent from Jake.
At this point everything was telling me I should turn the phone off and remain in blissful ignorance. Keith, echoing my thoughts, said: 'This is really bad. We should stop looking now.'
Then he paused. 'Pass the phone.'
'R u a dirty smoker?' Jake asked
. By now I had my hands over my face, peeping through my fingers. Two seconds later Annie pinged back:
'Pahaha. Not dirty, just normal.'
It's hard to know how, to react when faced with a side to your daughter you never thought you would see. Of all our four children, Annie has always seemed the easiest. Happy-go-lucky, sports-mad, not in the least bit rebellious.If I was to take this communication at face value, my lovely girl had morphed into a swearing, smoking, sex-mad escapologist with incredibly poor grammar. As usual when it comes to parenting matters, Keith's reaction differed to mine.
My gut feeling was to call the school, haul Annie out and interrogate her. He argued the texts could be teenage bravado. We'd brought this dilemma on ourselves. Do nothing and we risked never knowing what she was really up to. Confront Annie and we could alienate her.
I'm sure there are many parents reading this and leaping to judge our duplicitous actions. But let me ask you this. What is worse? Seizing a rare opportunity to get a glimpse into your child's life, or sticking your parental head in the ground?
Friends were firm advocates of the latter. 'I'd rather not know,' one mother told me. 'Frankly, it's the stuff of nightmares.'
By day three, I was inclined to agree. The world of teenage instant messaging is one you enter at your peril. For starters every other word is interjected with 'ahaha' or 'pahaha' - a demonstration of laughter. Harmless enough. Then there's the endless boy-girl banter. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. Except I naively assumed she didn't know any boys.
'U r fit,' one boy texted her. 'Thanx babe,' she replied with all the insouciance of a seasoned flirt. In another text she asked a boy called Ben: 'Do you like me?' I had just enough time to think: 'Well, that’s sweet,' before he pinged back: 'Yer, I'd do u.'
Throughout all this Keith was, I sensed, in paternal turmoil. Personally, I had no moral issue with what we were doing. We were, after all, paying for the phone.He, on the other hand, worried if Annie found out she would never trust us again. My concerns felt more fundamental.
What was keeping me awake at night, clutching my phone, was the concern that my daughter was turning into a tart and veering spectacularly off the rails.
Luckily, a weekend home from boarding school was approaching. As you can imagine, I was desperate to see Annie, but if her texts were anything to go by the feeling wasn't reciprocated.
'Have to go home this weekend (sad face). Boring.' This was a slap in the face but, probably, served me right. After all, what you don't know can't hurt you.
Things came to a head that following weekend. Annie's face went from shock, through to horror, through to outrage as the penny slowly dropped.
'Are you smoking and who are Ben, Jake and Tom?' I ranted as she cried. I stopped short of asking her if she was having sex - the very notion of it being a possibility was so horrendous I just couldn't form the words.
She made a breathtakingly brazen attempt to protest along the lines that what we had done was wholly unacceptable. She even tried to argue about privacy rights - something which caused Keith to take her phone and shove it in a drawer.
Afterwards, feeling frazzled, we went for a long dog-walk.
'It's just banter and teenage stuff Mum,' she told me.
I believed her. I know, ultimately, that Annie is a great girl with a sensible head on her shoulders.
Which, I suppose, just begs the question - what did all this achieve? Perhaps it is better to simply trust and leave things there. Teenagers will always behave differently with their peers. It's just, in my day, my mother luckily never knew anything about it.
So Annie has her phone back with a stern lecture on online behaviour. And I have unticked her number in my settings,. I did this with a huge sense of relief because my week as a tourist in the land of adolescent acronyms and hormonal repartee was such hell I never want to go back there again.
Source: Dailymail
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