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Dear care and food,
I have a 14 year old boy named “Tom”. Last year, Tom was involved in a fairly serious bullying incident that resulted in one of the student victims attempting suicide. Since then, we have been watching him closely and making sure to keep his nose clean. His phone and internet are both monitored and his curfew is 9 p.m.
He also keeps a diary, which I look through about once a week to make sure he’s not hanging out with the same gang or getting into any more trouble.
The last few entries have not been written in English, or at least not in recognizable English. They are in this strange letter or cipher that looks like a bunch of spiders with different shapes of legs. I can’t read a word. At dinner that night, I asked him what he was doing encoding a diary like that, and he flipped the lid.
He calls me all kinds of misogynistic names that I don’t think I could even print here and his life is hell and I hate him and every time I see him You said you could see the look in my eyes, and why? Can’t he be killed to end the torture? He charged and tried to leave, but my husband and I took his bike and wouldn’t let him leave. Now he’s always sulking in his room and whenever I try to say something to engage him I get a hostile silence and a raised middle finger. I don’t know how to get him to come back or admit why we’re doing this.
-Struggling
Dear struggling people
My child’s teacher assigned my son a project that would definitely turn him into an incel helper! Every year I make plans to escape my in-laws’ multi-day Christmas festivities. They are catching up. My father-in-law won’t pay for my destination wedding, so I’m boycotting vacations. I have a delusional obsession with an ex-lover. It’s making me do something very strange.
Take your son to therapy. According to the American Psychological Association, real-world and online bullying carries a high risk of mental health problems for both the victim and the perpetrator. Your monitoring doesn’t seem excessive. In fact, reading his diary (more on that later), it seems like a pretty normal guardrail for a teenager, regardless of what he’s been up to in the past. So the fact that he reacted so strongly suggests some deep discomfort that needs to be addressed. I usually refer letter writers to the book “14 Stories for 14 Years” as a good guide for communicating with children Tom’s age. Your situation seems a little more difficult than most covered in this book, but you may still find this framework useful.
When it comes to monitoring diaries and related devices, did your son have any assumption that any of those areas would be private, or did he have any expectations that you would be reading his articles? Did you know? Although well-intentioned, I can understand why Tom would react strongly if you were reading Tom’s material without his knowledge. Invading a teen’s space that they thought was private is a surefire way to undermine trust in your child. For example, you may need to do some remedial work and review with your teen what is private and private, and under what circumstances they should read the diary.
Finally, if you haven’t already done so, try contacting your school counselor or social worker. If something deeper is going on, or if Tom is behaving in a way that reinforces or alleviates your concerns at school, you and the school need to be on the same page.
—Alison
More advice from Slate
I can’t stand my in-laws. When we first got married, we probably saw each other once every other month, but since we didn’t live close together, we would sometimes go months without them. Now we have a baby and they keep trying to come every week but I have had to stop because it’s disgusting. We hadn’t seen them since Christmas so we were very happy, but they plan on coming back soon and we expect to make time for them every time we come here.
