You’ve made a scapegoat out of privacy, when it’s really a red herring.

The issue of sexually irresponsible, or psychologically unhealthy behavior in young adults is not an issue of privacy. That’s much too late in the game.

A parent’s job is to create independent, healthy adults. To raise unhealthy children, and then deprive them of privacy as teenagers, in order to catch them being unhealthy, is a wrongheaded approach.

Instead, a parent should be prepping to make the teen years a period of transition to adulthood. The time prior to this should be spent on helping children develop judgment and learning the sources of good information. Then the teenage years should be spent in slowly trying to give the teenager progressively more control over their own lives.

Obviously some degree of privacy is essential or children will never have the opportunity to evolve personalities distinct from their parents. That being said, I think a strong case can be made for severe limitations on this privacy. Eric Harris and Dylan Kleibold became stone psycho killers while living under their parents’ roofs and those parents never had a clue. That’s too much privacy. Young kids go out and become sexually active without a clue of the profounder implications of such activity – and all too often with no input from those who have been there before them and lived long enough subsequently to have a broader perspective on the issue. That’s too much privacy. Kids go out and do a huge variety of drugs – with little knowledge as to what those drugs will do to them in the longer term – or even the history of such once well known drugs as PCP (which made a comeback a few years ago as an additive to marijuana under names such as “sherm” or “embalming fluid”. Or people who will do “Special K” as a club drug but have no knowledge of such an historical figure in the story of ketamine as John Lilly. Or just straight up old school heroin. Since the US took over Afganistan in the wake of 9-11 opium poppy production increased 10-fold. The implications of this are not rocket science. There’s a lot more “dog food” on the streets today then has been seen for years. Are we really so naive to think this will not find it’s way into at least fringe elements of youth culture? Not knowing whether such choices are part of your child’s life is WAY too much privacy.

My point is that it’s very dangerous today to be a child – and, admittedly, all too often the very people that are supposed to have your back – i.e. parents and other adult authorities – are the ones you have to watch your back against! But, that being said, there are millions of parents out there who actually love their kids and are trying to be responsible and do the right thing. And the notion that children should have an arena in which they can court danger without adult oversight is an open invitation to the destruction of the next generation. And no, I don’t attribute such a radical advocacy of child privacy to anyone here – but I’m certain that many kids will take it exactly that far if they are given available means to do so.

Research widely popularized in the last few years suggests that the portions of the brain responsible for strong emotional impulses become active during the teenage years, while the brain functions responsible for making judgments and “looking before you leap” (aka the cortico-thalamic pause) does not mature until sometime in the early twenties (although my personal view is that the rate of maturation of this function can almost certainly be assisted by exercise – just like developing a muscle).

And I loaned an article on this to one of my young friends – and when I explained what the research supposedly showed she got this really thoughtful look and said “that explains a lot”. Wise beyond her years, that one.

But the bottom line is that children need adult supervision. That’s why there are traditional and long-standing social cultural and legal distinctions between children and adults.

I’ll close with a piece of poetry/lyrics inspired by Columbine that approaches the question from the other direction – that of parental irresponsibility – but that’s really just the other side of the same coin.

RED ALERT (MEDICAL EMERGENCY)

(Chorus)
Red Alert! 9-1-1!
Better get there on the run!
Life is dying while you wait!
Might already be too late!

Shots are fired in the school
Bodies on the floor
Better call emergency
Don’t delay no more

(chorus)

See the children lying dead
Heaped in disarray
Who’s a victim, who’s a killer
Really hard to say

(chorus)

Why’d it happen – Now they ask
They all want to hear
Fingers pointing every way
Except into the mirror

(chorus)

Those who knew the young men best
Say parents weren’t to blame
The kids themselves said no one could
Have guessed their deadly game

And no one thinks it’s strange at all
That from the very start
Nobody noticed the child’s soul
Hid a killer’s heart

(bridge)
If I would tell a story of a time so long ago
When parents used to know their children’s heart
Would anyone believe I ever lived in such a world?
Before the ties of love were torn apart

Eighteen years a stranger, living in a stranger’s house
Is this the life that we call normal now?
If you can still remember how to show a child your love
You’d best begin to show the world how

Children’s blood’s a mighty river
Flowing through this land
Why won’t anybody notice
Try to understand

(chorus)

My Profile

(My Commentary on the poem)

Like most of my poems, there’s a story about how this one came to be. The one thing I always wondered about was how Eric and Dylan could have been going in that direction mentally and their parents never noticed.

In my world, your parents are supposed to be the closest people in your life – they should know you inside and out – if anything strange is happening to you mentally – they should notice right away.

But some people would say I’m trying to live in a world that’s not there any more. First, I got in a conversation online with somebody who said she had known Eric & Dylan – she didn’t say if she meant online or in real life. She thought I was wrong to hold the parents responsible. She said one of the boys had even said that his dad was a good dad to him, and that there was no way he could have known about it or stopped it.

Then, a few years later, I was taking a young friend and some of her other friends out for ice cream. One of them I didn’t know before and we got talking, and I found out she was a huge fan of Eric and Dylan. She thought they were very misunderstood and lied about. And she also thought that the parents weren’t responsible. She seemed to think that it was just normal for parents not to be close to their kids.

Well, I know a lot of things have changed since I was a young kid. Today, if there are two parents, they usually both work. Less time for the kid. When I was growing up, almost everybody had two parents in the home, and usually one worked (and could make enough to support the family) while the other – usually the mom – stayed home and looked after the kids. But even in today’s hard times there are still parents who are close to their kids – often in poorer families. Maybe it’s about where priorities are. I’ve seen the pics of Dylan’s and Eric’s homes. Rich and beautiful. And some of my friends who were close to their parents grew up with single moms in a situation where they were struggling financially. But those moms put their kids first. Maybe other parents put money and success first.

Anyway, I guess this poem should be dedicated to Chelsea – because she was the one that bothered me so much by what she said that a week or two later this popped out as the answer.

Just a thought,
-Steve

So, to Danah’s point, while privacy appears to be shifting, it’s simply the landscape and toolsets that shift. The desire to to control what we say–and when, why, how, and to whom–is timeless and immutable.

Acknowledging that is easy. The hard part for parents is recognizing the new patterns that distinguish what SHOULD or CAN stay hidden vs interactions that are damaging, dangerous, or illegal.

Texting works as way of back channeling communication all the time, to hide it from anyone, no matter the age group.

People sitting next to each other IM and text each other quite commonly. And then everyone else laughs at them. The laughing will probably go away eventually though.

Robert Scoble of FastCompany.com put it bluntly, “Privacy is dead,” he said. “My 14-year-old kid just doesn’t care about privacy.” Kimbal claimed he hasn’t had a single negative comment on privacy, while Rose said Digg is open about what it does with information. “If we share information with advertisers,” he said. “We’ll be up front about it… we’ll tell people and give them the means to opt out.” (Web 2.0)

The reason that I point out what definition of privacy I’m working with is to make it clear where I stand. I’m pointing to two things here. First, I’m leveraging the structure that Beate Rossler puts forward in an attempt to resolve different strains of thought around privacy. It’s not clean, but it’s workable, especially when you’re focusing on local constructions of privacy and not structural conditions of privacy. Second, from a teen POV, privacy is ALL about control. Regardless of how we want to theorize it, what matters to me is that very local perspective.

I’m an ethnographer, not a philosopher. I believe in making sense of culture from the culture itself. And I believe in conveying that broadly through impression management, even if that requires being theoretically sloppy at times. I’m glad that you’re working to problematize these terms; it’s important. But please understand that there are also reasons to make such assertions in such public (non-academic) contexts without it being academically dishonest.