To hit the roof

[Life350]

Just checked my dd’s Snapchat and she has accused me of looking at ‘underage minors’

needless to say Snapchat is gone as it’s been a nightmare to manage and hell but I’m so upset and disgusted she would say that to me

thanks all felt so angry i had to come on here to vent i’m reassured now i did the right thing. silver lining is no more snapchat yay

really!? it just makes me feel so vulnerable but i guess it’s similar to what happens in the mean girls film

100% behind you @Life350

You are doing the right thing
Don't be emotionally manipulated into letting her have Snapchat again.

Hee reaction was immature and defensive so you know there's something dodgy going on. You said someone gave her money ?

Honestly. Gimme 15 year old boys over 13 year old girls any day. It’s just hormones and a phase but they constantly gaslight, because they have the big feelings but don’t have appropriate responses to it yet, so they want to pull you down to their level of misery. She’s upset she got caught, that’s it.

i just had a funny feeling as she was given cash by someone.

A family member?

@GneissGuysFinishLast
Do you have a teenager? I don’t, but I teach 11-18 year olds, and 13 year old girls are by far the most challenging group. They say things like this a lot, for shock factor.

Yes I have teenagers and I'm a very experienced parent, with godchildren and an Aunty.

I know how challenging 13 year olds and onward ages are!

And I'm also a social worker

One of the issues that raises a bit more often than it should for apparently safeguarding trained professionals is teachers that minimise impact of unsupervised social media access to things like snap chat, with behaviour changes, that turns out to be grooming and other risks

I don't chose to disclose my role very often.

^^this

Yes not anyone else
I’m really on alert about things like that which is why I actually check her social media so much

I don’t know why you think I’m saying to give them unfiltered unsupervised access? I wouldn’t let my 13 year old on Snapchat as I know monitoring it is effectively impossible since things delete anyway. That ship has sailed for the OP. However, the Snapchat app is gone now, as it should be. My guess is that teen will just be smarter about covering her tracks now.
The child was NOT seriously insinuating her mother was a paedophile, it was a comment designed to cut and worry her parent.

She def didn’t understand the gravity
but it’s the latest in a long line of horrid comments to me
my worry is that she will set up a Snapchat that I don’t have access to and can’t monitor it now on say her school chrome book I’ll obvs check but I know that’s what her friends do

Just to point out Snapchat is free to download so what's stopping her from downloading it again and it's easy to hide apps on a smartphone either using the phone hardware ( private space) or by using a fake proxy app

@GneissGuysFinishLast
You misunderstand me
I reacted to you intimating that as a teacher you know better, it's not my experience at all. Not in your class of 30 children each lesson.

Yes teenagers say things for shock value but the point OP made was her DD made a defensive attacking comment, that had an undertone so she wa checking she wasn't BU to remove Snapchat.

It was enough to ring alarm bells that she should have Snapchat removed and OP shouldn't doubt herself

Minimising that is unhelpful

High school asked all parents to delete snap chat from kids phones as ots causing so many problems in school and outside of school

YABU - simply for going hyper at the start of the teen girl antics. Calm down and come down a few floors; she's only 13 so you've got a few years ahead before you might be climbing enough walls to actually hit the roof.

Freaking out now might push her more into 'rebellion', so stay calm and understanding at this pivotal stage. Might save you both a lot of trouble later on.

They shouldn’t be able to get and social media on a school Chromebook, I’d definitely feed that back to the school if that is indeed happening.
I was horrid to my mum as a teen. I really did not mean any of it. We are best friends now 🥰

Satin
Yea parents and agencies are trying hard to keep up with these kind of tactics

If you can share any new sneaky ways you know about hiding apps that'd be helpful.
OP should be able to check all her DDs phone and if they have a good relationship, her saying you can't have sc should be enough. But we know some teenagers are far more advanced than adults on this...

Do link anything you think is relevant

To be fair, as a social worker you probably have a skewed view of how common these issues are. My experience is based on teaching 250+ children per week for 10 years - the vast majority of them have absolutely no social work involvement and I’d say at least half of them make comments like this one at least once - not necessarily identical but similarly inflammatory/accusatory.

Im not sure why you are implying that I was minimising the Snapchat issue - I wasn’t. The Snapchat thing is obviously an issue, but the comment itself isn’t a concern.

So far up until recently she’s been honest with me

That's not true at all, research shows that a reasonably vigilant parent who cares and sets reasonable clear boundaries is a hugely protective factor, not an escalating one.

This is where the importance of grammar and punctuation comes into it.

Her accusing you of looking at underage minors = very serious accusation that you are a paedophile

Her accusing you of looking at (an) underage minor's messages = not at all serious teenage tantrum about privacy on devices

So, which is it?

@GneissGuysFinishLast
To be fair, as a social worker you probably have a skewed view of how common these issues are.

I don't (I'm also a parent and big family lots of friends), I'm as grounded as anyone else is and that's a bit reductionist a comment to make. I doubt you'd make same comment to professionals in other fields , it's rather patronising.

It sounds like you didn't mean your original comment quite as it came across as you've said twice now you would remove Snapchat too and don't like it either

I believe her words were

’ if you wanna see what my underage minor friends are texting text them of your account’

in response to my logging in and checking this message between her and a boy arranging to vape

@Life350
It's good that your DD is honest with you usually

It's very sensible to build on that and to keep communication open.

But not to give in to emotional manipulation over Snapchat if you feel it's not safe nor right for your DD

You are spot on to trust your instincts in this situation , that maybe it's best she doesn't have it as an app.

She’s very quick sometimes and can be cutting so I don’t think she’s thought this out before saying
to be honest there been such a change I really try and make this a home my girls can bring friends too etc but recently it’s been awful and iv been spoken to horrible in front of DD13 friends it makes me just dread it

I think you are the only one interpreting my comments in that way.