14 yr old daughters diary

[Welshy40]

Advice please! Im not proud to admit this but this morning whilst making my daughters bed I found her diary and read it. We've had trouble recently with cyber bullying and so my reasoning was to check she is ok. God do I regret looking. To cut a long story short it seems as though she has been sending nude photos to a boy (who is to say he is who he says he is?) she has never met and is planning on losing her virginity this week to a boy in her year who i have previously told to stay away from her as he was calling her vile names. What do i do? do I confront her with this? My mother found my diary at 14 and we've never had a close or trusting relationship since. I should have known better than to snoop but gut instinct that something is wrong takes over. I don't want to push her further away but feel i cannot let this go.

If you found it by making a bed it wasn't hid well and perhaps this is her cry for help... you are her Mum jump right in and help. Tell her you read it and your sorry but not cross and you need to talk about age limits, boundaries, risks of the photos bein sent and implications of what she is doing/ done.

Ps my mum read my diary when I was this age and I am much older now and don't care one bit ! She helped me and answered my questions

You shouldn't have read her diary. DD is going to have to learn the hard way that writing her thoughts down rarely ends well.

Having said that, you can't undo what you know. You have a parental duty to DD and doing nothing is effectively aiding and abetting underage sex, and possibly putting her in danger. You know what you have to do, assert yourself as a parent and be prepared to deal with the fall-out.

In this instance I would tell her you have read it, ground her until she is 50 and message the boy telling him she is underage.

She may accuse you of breaking her trust but OP, theres a bigger risk at stake here. Tell her that you had a heads up from someone that she was sending naked pics and that's what made you look in her diary.

Tricky one - come clean, you need to deal with what you have read. Maybe she wanted you to find it?

Wondering, like Odd, whether she wanted you to find it. I think you need to tell her you read it, apologise for invading her privacy, stress you aren't cross but do want to talk. She may well get very angry but if you open a door, maybe she'll walk through and talk.

I don't think you can let on that you read it.
Can you approach her with a general conversation about boys and relationships and see if she opens up to you.
You could also consider getting her onto some kind of birth control just in case.

Is the content actually true though? Teenagers often write things down as a way of exploring them rather than them being reality.

My mum read my diary when I was 15. It was full of teenage nonsense about what I was up to with a lad who was older than me. All fantasy. My mum read it and believed every word. Didn't really believe me when I tried to explain.

At the time, I thought it was a dreadful invasion of my privacy. 27 years later and a mum myself, I can see why she was concerned. But it was still an invasion of my privacy. And looking back, it did serve to break some of the bond between mum and me.

So tread very, very carefully.

She will be mortified and I also think it is most likely to be fantasy. Keep a close eye and ear out, make it your duty to know where she is at all times when not at school. Perhaps tell her she needs to hide her diary a little better if she wants to keep it private as you noticed it when tidying - don't say you read it, obviously.

well i confronted her calmly last night - i said that i had found it and read just a little as it looked like a regular note book. she was mortified obviously but i tried to stress the importance of keeping safe and that its my job to protect her. There were tears and we have binned the diaries and deleted snapchat and instagram and for the foreseeable i have her mobile and laptop although she is going to need these back there will be even stricter controls in place. I have been through her phone today and I'm horrified at the content.... boys sending pictures and the general way that teenagers seem oblivious to the mess they are getting themselves into and how flippant they are about sex and relationships and their bodies. no self respect. I'm trying to be calm and supportive and non judgemental which is hard but i know only too well from my mothers reaction to my teenage years that a lack of love and support and heaps of shame can drive you the other way. God although i don't want to wish their lives away i want these teenage years to hurry up and go - i think I've aged 20 years in 24 hours.

Well done for talking with her. I suppose it must feel overwhelming, particularly if there seems to be no safe space from it.

Im glad you spoke to your daughter but I can't see how taking her phone off her and deleting apps is really going to actually help change anything for her? And why bin the diary?

As for the comment "how flippant they are about sex and relationships and their bodies. no self respect."

Those things don't mean they have no self respect. Choosing to be sexually active isn't showing lack of self respect necessarily... though at that age it is illegal.

I would be trying to be more open and honest with your dd now rather than avoid or ignore that this is her reality.

What Isadora said.

the diary has been binned as i have younger children in the house and don't want them to come across it....as for deleting apps i want her to have a break from social media for a short while so that we can sort things out and she can have time to reflect on how she uses them i think my comment on a lack of self respect is a fair one - from what i have seen and heard in the last couple of days it seems as though a lot of teenagers feel massively under pressure to be sexually active and to partake in sexting due to social media 'normalising' it. we're a work in progress here, sadly kids aren't born with an instruction manual and they are all different. we are all just doing the best we can.

Not sure underage sexual activity has to be op's daughter's reality.
Time out in a safe space , namely at home with a supportive mum sounds just what she needs.

You did the right things about telling her, and I think that it's not so much that you read her diary, it's how you reacted to her, and to me it sounds like you have done really well.

From my own experience as a teenager I can only say that it is the way you handle it that matters. When I was 25, my mum overreacted and shouted and screamed at me when she thought I had been taking drugs (I hadn't) and refused to believe me. After 10 years of her shouting at me, I had NC with her for 5 years.

So I try really hard with my 12 year old to be calm if I need to confront her with something, and so far it has gone well.

Binning the diary seems like a strange idea. Younger children should be taught not to go through peoples' private things.

My mum read my diary when I was that age. I had written about similar, unsavoury things and she was extremely angry with me. It completely ruined our relationship for years; I felt that she had betrayed my trust. I couldn't see past my anger to listen to her advice.

We are best friends now, and I honestly can't say that I wouldn't have done the exact same thing in her position, but it made for some very tumultuous, unhappy years.

I would act based on the relationship that you have with her at the moment. Teenagers can be the most unreasonable creatures on the planet. Will she be able to see past the 'breach of trust' in order to listen to your good parenting and caring advice?

you have given too much freedom to a 14 year old - instagram and facebook and snapchat are not really good for anyones self-esteem nor health at that age.

get her an old nokia.

I've posted that before reading the whole thread. It's been a long day. To repeat what others have said; you approached it really well. I wish my mum had approached it in a similar way!

Well done for handling a good conversation with your daughter - that was quite a dilemma. I'm not sure about the resulting actions re binning the diary and taking the phone and apps - but as you say these are temporary measures. They are part of teens' lives so the really important thing is not denying access to them but helping them to be wise about where to set their personal boundaries and refusing to go beyond them - this will equally apply to sexual issues, drugs and alcohol and all manner of other scrapes.

MY DD is very wise about avoiding sexting etc (a couple of her friends have slipped into sending pics) but mostly they are all really aware of the dangers and have had big discussions about this at school. At home we talk about such things quite a lot without being too alarmist but now that she's 16 she is very capable and sensible. I think the most important thing is to keep talking about these issues and being open and honest rather than being too draconian in response. Teens are learning how to navigate and will need to make a few mistakes in life to grow up rounded and able to handle the pitfalls of adult life. Learning from mistakes rather than fearing punishment seems most effective - otherwise blame is transferred to the parent for their response rather than reflecting on where they went wrong. And I have a younger DS too so I want the same lessons to apply to him - he seems to be following her lead in terms of being open too. Good luck.