# Dealing with the worries about my kid



## mriaaalis (Jul 2, 2020)

So, dear parent. Hope to have some advice from those, who have experienced the same things.

My daughter is 14, and, obviously, she spends a lot of time being online or outside the house. I've been a teenager too and I know what problems she may face, especially on the internet. But, you know, I don't want to be a burden and give her that trivial "parenting talk" about not talking to strangers and anything like that. Because "I'm not a kid!" is an answer that I will probably hear. 😥
I just wanted to know - how do you deal with the problems like that? How to be confident that she's alright without stalking on her and with saving trust between us?


----------



## EleGirl (Dec 3, 2011)

You need to have that talk with her. She most likely has no clue about the bad that is out there.

When my children were your daughter's age we talked. They did not want me to use parental control software because they used their computers for school projects. One of my sons went to a lot of sites for music as he plays several instruments. He also was teaching himself computer programming using online sources. So we all agreed that I would put keystroke monitoring software on their computers. 

I checked the log files every few days. The two boys caused no problems. But my daughter and her friends were lucky that an adult was monitoring her computer. One thing that happened was that my daughter had a friend over. The friend was using my daughter's computer to communicate with a man who claimed he was in the UK, a college student. Apparently this had been going on for months. When I checked the computer logs there were emails from him. He was sending her an airline ticket to London... from New Mexico, USA to London. She was 14/15 and she was going to just leave without telling her parents and fly to London because she thought she loved him. She snuck her passport from where your father kept it and she was going.

I printed out all the logs, called her father, the police and the FBI. They took all the evidence I gave them and a computer from her home. She never heard from this guy again. Long story short, he was a sex trafficker. 

Oh, and my daughter lost the use of the internet for 6 months. If she had to use it for school her father or I had to be sitting with her the entire time she was online.

That was only one of a few things that my daughter and her friends got into. 

And yea, my daughter told me that she was not a child any more. My answer is that it was my job to keep her safe so sorry, I was going to do my job. Thank goodness I did.

The internet is a much more dangerous place today than it was back then.


----------



## Violet28 (Oct 4, 2018)

But she is a kid and you are the parent.


----------



## turnera (Jan 22, 2010)

I agree 100% with Elegirl. She needs you to be the parent, not her friend. My daughter was super organized and wary of online stuff, but even she messed up with a guy at that age. I had to make it clear that until she was 18, it was my job to watch out for her while she figured stuff out.


----------

