agonyaunt | (no subject)

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A few years ago, we gave our daughter, now 18, a stuffed bear for her birthday. At the time, we had recently discovered she had a boyfriend whom she was hiding from us. It was quite a shock. We wanted to be able to keep a closer eye on what she was doing without breaking her trust, so we installed a hidden camera inside the eye of the stuffed bear. Our daughter is now in college, and we overheard her telling her roommate how grateful she was for our trust in her and our support. We have been racked with guilt ever since. How can we tell our daughter about the camera without destroying our relationship with her? Should we tell her at all?

I have no doubt that your daughter’s failure to tell you about her boyfriend, while not terribly uncommon behavior for a teenager, was worrisome to you. But the treachery and disproportion of your response — to secretly film a young woman in the privacy of her bedroom — was beyond the pale. It would constitute a crime in many jurisdictions and may explain why she kept her boyfriend a secret from you. What’s more, it is not clear from your letter that you comprehend, even still, the gravity of your error.

Sure, you say you are racked with guilt by your actions because your daughter praised you to a friend. But would you not be racked with guilt if she hadn’t praised you? You also let yourselves off the hook far too easily when you claim that installing the camera allowed you to keep closer tabs on your daughter “without breaking her trust.” That is absurd! You made a mockery of her trust.

Personally, I can’t imagine a healthy relationship with your daughter until you have confessed your behavior. At the same time, I am not sure that you are yet capable of making a true apology (or handling the likely fallout with your daughter). I suggest finding a therapist, a friend you respect or possibly a faith leader with whom to discuss this episode more fully and make a plan for talking with your daughter. And if you haven’t already, for heaven’s sake, disable the camera now!

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This should go without saying, but don't nannycam your adolescent daughter and you won't have this sort of problem.

Is it just me, or is there a psychological horror movie premise in here somewhere?

I feel like I've seen it already.

I kind of hope the daughter found the camera and staged the trust conversation with a friend.

I have no idea how these people are going to repair this relationship. This is such a betrayal of trust. (Also how secure is your teenage girl bedroom cam stream? Because I can think of a couple ways that could turn into a very bad thing.)

yeah I have to say I can't imagine having a continued relationship with someone I discovered had done this to me.

Also, the daughter is 18 and lives away from home. Leaving aside the obvious questions (is the data secure; are there third parties in the recording; exactly how are adult parents navigating getting naked pics of their adult daughter) this is almost certainly illegal pretty much everywhere.

Really REALLY hoping this is a fake letter.

Yeah, I don't know exactly how those things work, but I do know tech. Given that the bear is now at college, how did they get it to connect to her internet, and how are they keeping it charged?

Hi honey! We just stopped by to visit! Can we play with your bear?

These are excellent questions. I call bullshit. Fake letter.

ETA: I guess they don't say they are still using the bear and they could have meant they literally overheard her when they were all physically together, but the whole thing reads like someone getting off on getting a fake letter published.

Edited 2023-12-06 16:09 (UTC)

I'm not sure they are still using the bear now. They "overheard" the conversation with the roommate, which sounds more like "we were about to knock on the door" than "we were reviewing footage." Plus, they say she is "now at college," which seems to differentiate from when they gave her the bear.

I think it is fake. I normally try to give these things the benefit of the doubt, but the scenario as LW presents it isn't realistic.

They should have started feeling guilty a whole lot sooner. You could have given them a tiny bit of benefit of the doubt if the letter was 'we completely forgot that bear was SPYBEAR because we obviously haven't been reviewing the tapes/logging into the stream for years now...'. But it is very much not that.

I don't think there's much help for people who are more worried they are hypocrites than that they are spying on their college-aged daughter (and her roommate).

It's not just their daughter they need to worry about. Are they going to tell roommate (and roommates' parents?) that they have been secretly filming her in her college dorm room?

Edited 2023-12-06 10:42 (UTC)

If they end up accidentally filming their daughter's college roomate having sex as a result of the bearcam

they could be in a WORLD of legal hot water

- because daughter's college room mate/daughter's college roomates parents

are much less likely to hesitate about going to a lawyer/the police

than daughter is

Oh GOD no do not talk to a Faith LEader, at least not an American Christian one.

'We have been racked with guilt ever since.'

Why weren't you racked with guilt earlier!?

I am the nopetopus. Nope nope nope nope.

[incoherent screaming]

How does this even, technically, work?

--Does the bear have to be logged into wifi to transmit data? If so, how did they get that information and program it?

--If not, are they weirdly obsessed with her bringing the bear home every weekend? "Don't forget Toodles! We love to see him too!" And then... getting private time with the bear to dump and recharge? How??

--What is this thing running on for power? How?

--Battery technology is better, but I don't believe it's this good.

Since the alleged daughter was 18 at the time they purportedly did this, and would be over 18 now, they would be well over the line into Peeping Tom Law and any applicable recording-without-consent laws, too.

Since the alleged daughter was 18 at the time they purportedly did this, and would be over 18 now

Huh, I read it the exact opposite:

A few years ago, we gave our daughter, now 18

The way I read it, she was maybe 14/15, living at home, and had a boyfriend. That concerned her parents, so they put a teddy bear in her bedroom. Now she's 18 and at college, and I see no indication in the letter that they're still monitoring, spying on the roommate, or in fact would have any concern about an 18-yo having a boyfriend (though they might).

My parents didn't go as far as putting a camera on my sister and her boyfriends at that age, but there was definitely a lot of keeping an eye on them and making sure they had no privacy in which they could do anything inappropriate. And when she got pregnant *anyway* at 16 (via skipping school), my parents were suddenly on the hook for helping support a grandchild they hadn't chosen to have. So I can see where the logic of "make sure 14-yo doesn't get pregnant" would come from, although this was, of course, one of the worst possible ways to go about it.

Strictly speaking, nobody chooses to have a grandchild. I would be happy if I became a grandmother through one of my kids and a partner choosing to have a baby, but that would be their choice, not mine.

Well, yes, but normally one is responsible for supporting a child because one chose to have that child. When one's minor teenager has a child despite one's best efforts to prevent that outcome, one is on the hook for supporting a child one didn't choose to have. That's what I meant by "didn't choose."

I would be happy if I became a grandmother through one of my kids and a partner choosing to have a baby, but that would be their choice, not mine.

Would you be just as happy if they were 14-16 and you weren't in a financial position to want to take on another child, and your kid and their partner certainly weren't in the position to, and welfare is inadequate so *someone* has to step up, and it ends up being you? What I'm saying is parents have a certain incentive to prevent their teenagers from getting pregnant if the parents are going to get saddled with the unwanted outcome. Though I'm not endorsing spying on the teenager.

Sure, but that isn't exactly the first consideration for most parents. I didn't want my kids getting pregnant as teens for a whole lot of reasons, way before "if they continued the pregnancy I would be forced to support their kid" kicked in.

There are more reliable ways to prevent horny teenagers from getting pregnant than constant monitoring. Helping her get reliable birth control and accurate information about sex, for example.

I think perhaps both LW and your parents would have benefited from choosing that path.

Well, like I said, it obviously wasn't very effective! But see my response to

minoanmiss below. After the first pregnancy, my parents were absolutely pushing birth control at her, but you can only lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink.

I feel like the obvious way to make sure someone doesn't get pregnant is to get them access to birth control, not spy on them or keep them from having privacy.

Might birth control have succeeded there where supervision did not?

Forced birth control maybe, but she was determined to have as many kids as possible as a teenager (she finally stopped at 4 at the age of 21), and to get other people to support them. And I don't know what the law on forcing birth control on a minor might be.

I'm also not sure how I feel about it from an individual rights perspective: I'm sympathetic to parents who want to prevent their minor children from being in a situation where they could get pregnant (that's like any other form of controlling where your child goes and what they do), but when you start forcing treatment on them, you get into bodily autonomy territory that makes me twitchy.

That she would have refused what most teenagers would have been delighted to receive does masks the situation more complicated. There are the generalities of “trying to prevent teen pregnancy through monitoring and restriction of freedom” and then there are specific cases

Depending on the parents' faith, talking to a faith leader may only endorse the parents' terrible decision. This is exactly the kind of entitlement the whole fundamentalist "parental rights" movement promotes. In this movement, it's quite clear that children aren't people, they're only possessions to control.

Can the parents actually talk to a therapist or other professional who would be mandated reporters? Because imho this seriously crossed the line. Maybe LW should be talking to a lawyer at this point, to find out just how much trouble they're in. Especially if that bear is still actively recording in the daughter's dorm room. The daughter and roommate certainly should seek out legal opinions as soon as they find out.

There's a non-zero likelihood that this letter is fake, and I sincerely hope it is. Otoh surveillance tech can be sophisticated. A long-lasting battery and wi-fi connection is probably all that's needed. A lot of universities have easily accessible wi-fi.

This is the comment I wish I'd written.

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