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By Tristan Gorrindo and Anne Fishel
Corporate secrets, love letters, political shenanigans, medical and bank information -- in the digital world, some of our most sensitive and private information comes to us through email. Bosses, parents, and TV commercials touting privacy software all warn us to keep secure passwords and protect our digital data from prying eyes. The issue of who has access to your email has long been a point of discussion. And while there has been much debate about the pros and cons of having your boss or spouse being able to read your email, no one is talking about your kids.
Is there ever a time when your child should have access to your email? Most would say it's a preposterous idea, but we know that it's happening. Children confide secrets to their therapists that they learned from reading their parent's email. One teenager followed his parents' emailing each other about the pros and cons of a possible separation. He had logged onto her father's unsecured email account after the family had gone to bed. Another child learned of her father's affair by seeing racy texts from a woman who wasn't her mother.
It's not that hard to imagine how kids might get such information. The next time you are in the boarding area at an airport, look around and notice how many parents have handed off their digital devices to their kids to keep them entertained. We see the same thing happening on the subway, in the back seats of cars, and at times, even in our own clinic waiting room. Although there are no data about how often this is happening, it probably happens more than we think.
What are the implications of having your child reading your email? It probably breaks down along a couple of different lines:
Time Capsule - Email services like Gmail -- which give us virtually unlimited capacity and which prefer to archive our emails (as opposed to delete it) -- are just as much a time-capsule of our lives as they are an email account. Do we want our kids reading mom's early emails to her girlfriends after her first date with dad about how she thought he was dorky and awkward but worth a second date? Maybe so, but it should be in the context a conversation reminiscing about a couple's early life together, not in the isolation of a child trolling through a parent's email account.
No context - Kids might stumble upon a nugget of information for which they don't have a broader context. Imagine a child stumbling upon a mother's email to her sister discussing her concern about a newly discovered lump and upcoming biopsy. Although a diagnosis of cancer has not been made and the mother has been told by her primary care physician it's likely benign, the child leaps to the conclusion that her mother has cancer.
Hungry for connection - The fact that your child is reading your email, might be a sign that your child is seeking a connection to you. One young man has headed off to college and is feeling homesick. He knows his father's email username and password, and routinely looks through the sent and received mail folders to find out what he's missing at home. Meanwhile, his father is refraining from texting and email too often, thinking he's being respectful of his child's need to separate.
Worrying alone - Anything your child finds in your email, he won't be able to speak about, at least not to you. These might include emails to a friend about the possibility of divorcing dad; flirtations with a man who isn't dad; a possible new job in a new city. Even benign topics become verboten. A child can't bring up anything learned from foraging through emails without revealing that he is a snoop.
Parents focus on keeping their kids safe while online by monitoring their Facebook pages and web traffic. But why don't parents worry about kids reading their email? Should parents be worried when their kids teach them how to mark a message as unread? Do parents assume that adolescents are self-centered and uninterested in adults?
What's a parent to do? First, parents need to appreciate that it's a tall order to ask kids to just walk by a computer (or smart phone) that is totally open. Secret and adult information is like catnip to adolescents who are seeking information to make sense of their developing identities. So, parents should be mindful that their kids may read what they write. It's like a mirror image of what parents tell kids about Facebook: If you don't want the whole world to know, don't write it.
Second, parents should model appropriate privacy. While we do feel it's important for parents to know what their children are doing online and to monitor their activity on websites like Facebook, kids of an appropriate age should have some small amount of autonomy on the web. Parents should let their child know, "I'm not going to look at your email because that's your private business unless it looks like things are headed in a direction where you might need my help."
You might else tell your kids that anything they want to know about your life you'd love to talk about face-to face.
Copyright Tristan Gorrindo and Anne Fishel, 2011
