Teenagers Today's Health Advisory Panel Answers: I snooped and read my 16-year-old daughter's journal. Is it normal for me to feel so guilty? Now she can't trust me. Will I ever get that back?

By Chris Crutcher Author Licensed Child and Family Therapist

Question:

I snooped and read my 16-year-old daughter's journal. Is it normal for me to feel so guilty? I found out that she and her boyfriend are more intimate than I thought, and that some of her friends are doing drugs and alcohol.

She swears that she is not having sex, nor drinking or smoking. I admitted to her that I read the journal, but now I can't trust her with her boyfriend or her friends, and she can't trust me. Will I ever get that back? She acts mad at me and stays in her room all of the time. I just want her to be safe, and whenever I try to talk to her about safe sex, she says she is not that dumb and that her goal is to stay a virgin at least until after she graduates. I tell her not to get into tempting situations that may keep her from reaching her goal.

Answer:

I'll start from the top. Yes, it is normal for you to feel guilty, and you have a problem now because you have to reassess the value of privacy in your home. Kids use journals like therapists, and barring those few cases where they WANT the parents to find them, need the safety of anonymity.

You said some interesting things. You said she was more intimate with her boyfriend than you thought. Welcome to planet earth. I would say that's probably true of at least 80 percent of teenagers with their parents.

You did not say she said she was having sex in the journal, and you did not say she said she was using drugs. Your job right now is to believe her until there is reason not to. You can't stop it. She knows about safe sex, judging from what she's said to you already, and the truth is, there is nothing you can do to stop sex if it's going to happen – and it is not the worst thing in the world if it does happen. It's bad if it results in pregnancy, and that's the place to put your concern. This is one of those places where you can't afford to be judgmental. What you are succeeding in doing more than anything else is letting her know how afraid you are. That makes kids insecure, and it makes them not come to you in a crisis if that crisis concerns one of your fears.

If I'm in your shoes, I tell her I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life snooping in her journal, and that I'm going to do my best to behave as if I hadn't done that. When I can, I'm going to laugh about it and whap myself on the forehead. I'm not going to throw a bunch of obstacles in her and her boyfriend's way just so they can't have sex, because I'm likely to create the opposite effect. If she says she wants to remain a virgin at least until after graduation, believe her. There is a lot better chance of her trusting you if you let her know you think you made an error and are going to rectify it by being sure you respect her privacy from now on.

This is a tough situation. All of us would stop our kids from having sex until they are more mature, but none of us has found a way to do that, and a lot of us had sex when we were too young and survived just fine. That doesn't stop us from fearing the worst, which is teenage pregnancy and the loss of a childhood. But we do what we do to make sure kids can come to us in a pinch, and we make our decisions based on what happens.

Under any circumstances, what you want is the connection between the two of you. That connection gets stretched in the best of circumstances during adolescence, so take a breath and release a little.