Why would it ever be remotely acceptable to look through your kid’s phone? One can hardly think of a more serious violation of privacy. Not just for the kid but for all the people the kid communicates with. It should not be socially acceptable to admit that you’ve done this.
If they’re causing problems, address them another way. Take the phone away if you need to, but do not turn your house into North Korea.
Because a parent should have the right to monitor their child’s internet exposure just as our parents told us we couldn’t watch R movies or play violent video games…imagine for two seconds she didn’t have innocent pictures of a video game character, but the parent found she was in contact with a groomer and sending pics. Maybe she’s the bad one getting into drugs, or bullying other kids. It’s a parents job to intervene and to help their kid - you can’t do that if you don’t know what’s going on.
How many stories have you heard about cyber-bulling, grooming, or “send me a pic” scams that led to suicide or other terrible outcomes? - way too many. In a lot of the post-interviews, the parents responses are always something like “I never knew this was happening, my 9 year old Billy was so happy the 20 minutes a day I saw him outside of his room. I never imagined that his ‘online friends’ on 4chanclone77 were telling him to send pics and that he should die everyday.”
For a kid its protection over privacy everyday - same reason that you might want to know if your kid is spending a lot of “extracurricular time” at the teacher’s house.
Once they’re a teen the training wheels slowly come off until they’re not needed, hopefully by 14, after they’ve been taught about the dark side of the world and how to protect themselves from that crap, and know that they can come to me with any problem no matter what, weather they caused it or not, and I’ll help them figure it out.
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