Chapter 9

Their Eyes Only

Unfortunately, you aren’t the only one in your house who doesn’t tell the whole truth. Your kid has secrets. They won’t tell you who they have a crush on, where they keep their special rock, or who used your white kitchen towel to wipe mud off their dirt bike. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t the dog.

A secret is the first sign your child is their own person with an agenda different from your own. That’s a problem for over-achieving parents. One of the main reasons they’re obsessed with their kid’s “success” is they don’t view their child as separate from themselves. Their offspring’s triumphs belong to mum and dad, and their failures do, too. Such a kid is more an accessory than an individual, an accent piece intended to make their parents look good. There are cheaper ways to pull that off. Maybe next time just buy a nice handbag.

As a bare minimum parent, you shouldn’t run into that problem. In fact, you shouldn’t run into anything. It’s better to walk. If you take credit for everything your kid does, you won’t be able to dodge the blame when things go wrong. That’s obviously a nonstarter. Instead, keep some distance between yourself and your kid’s daily affairs. The more space, the better—probably for them, but definitely for you. And that’s what really matters.

With secrets, a child is asserting their right to privacy as an individual. Admittedly, that can be dangerous. Kids are enough of a mystery without deliberate concealment thrown in. When your child is older, they might even engage in disinformation campaigns to throw you off their trail. So much for loyalty. If you wanted a sidekick for life, you should have gotten a dog.

Overachieving parents react to this lack of real information by working harder to find the truth. As always, that’s the wrong move. As a bare minimum parent, you should leave your child’s secrets alone as long as your kid is still on track to be a functional human being. Don’t breach their privacy unless they’re doing something dangerous or illegal, like cockfighting or tax fraud. If your basement is covered in rooster blood or fraudulent checks, it’s time to ask some tough questions.

Dependently Independent

It’s easy to see why overachieving parents have a hard time dealing with their child’s privacy. Your kid might be a separate person, but it’s tough to see them that way when they would literally die without you. You provide them with food, shelter, and clothing, without which they would be in a three-way race to starve, freeze, or get taken down by the police. Law enforcement doesn’t like touching streakers, but that’s why God made stun guns.

Likelihood Your Kid Will Lie to You on a Given Topic

This helpless stage lasts longer than it should. Your kid will be incapable of using the microwave well into their teenage years. Instead of providing for themselves, they’ll sit in a kitchen full of food and complain there’s nothing to eat. Nothing good, at least. Forget hunting and killing their own meal. They’re not even capable of boiling ramen.

Despite this dependency, a child is a person with rights, including privacy. It’s easier for you in the long run if you respect that and keep yourself selectively ignorant on certain parts of their life. You can’t feel guilty about not solving problems you didn’t even know were there.

That includes dating. Wading into your kid’s romantic entanglements will create years of extra work for you and make your kid resent you for life. Leave them alone as long as you’re sure they know the possible consequences. Teenagers could get pregnant, pre-teens could have drama, and toddlers could be asked to share their cookies. Puppy love is no match for Oreos.

Your kid needs to fumble their way through relationships on their own without your intervention. If you give them space, they’ll either figure out what they want or give up on human companionship altogether. They can’t buy love, but they can adopt it for a modest rehoming fee. Just remember the humane society will cut your kid off after the first dozen cats.

Pros and Cons of Companionship Animals

Animal	Pro	Con
Goose	Mean enough to scare away enemies.	Mean enough to scare away you.
Dog	Would die for you.	Will die before you.
Cat	Has nine lives.	Would watch you die.
Turtle	Can’t run away.	Can walk away briskly.
Pig	Super-intelligent animal capable of anything.	Can’t trust them after reading Animal Farm.
Horse	Can give you a ride.	Hard to take on a plane.
Parrot	Can repeat words and phrases.	Can testify against you in court.
Possum	Has a hidden pocket for extra storage.	You can’t tell if it’s playing dead or you’re a bad pet owner.

Secrets upon Secrets

Most of the information your kid withholds from you will be mundane. They’re not afraid to throw up walls of secrecy around unimportant parts of their life. The more trivial, the better. They don’t need a reason. Being difficult is its own reward.

Just try asking your kid what they did at school. If you get an answer other than “Nothing,” your home must have an interrogation center. That’s much more practical than a sunroom. Of course, if someone asks you what you did at work, you might also say “Nothing.” Some days are best forgotten.

If you press your child, even a simple story about swapping desserts with another kid will escalate from uninteresting factoid to state secret. That’s where overachieving parents fall into a trap. They take this reluctance to divulge information as a clue their child has something worth hiding. They don’t, but they’ll take any interest from a parent as a cue to hide their pointless secret even harder. They’ll die before they tell you the pudding exchange rate. Your kid isn’t playing hard-to-get. They’re playing impossible-to-live-with.

For a bare minimum parent, this is a welcome shift from your child’s early days with language. Every parent spends the first twelve months of their child’s life eagerly waiting for their kid to talk and the next three years wishing they’d stop. The question stage is especially rough. For a time, their life is nothing but a series of rapid-fire queries, the answers to which lead to an unending chain of follow-up questions. Why is the sky blue? Why is the dog soft? Why do the faceless children visit me at night? It’s best not to answer that last one.

The switch from asking too many questions to avoiding questions completely is sudden. It usually happens when your kid finally does something worth asking about. When they’re with you most of the day, you know far too much about their lives. You’ll forever remember how they like their sandwiches cut up or what they look like when they’re about to poo. It’s hard to miss that evil grin.

But as soon as your kid goes to nursery, they lose the desire to share information. This is partly because they sense your eagerness. Childhood is one long power trip. But it’s also because their feelings about questions change once they’re in school. Nothing kills a child’s curiosity like learning.

Even if your kid were willing to tell you everything about their life, you wouldn’t want to hear it. Their petty dealings aren’t much different than your own. Theirs are just with actual children rather than adults who act like them. Your curiosity is only piqued because of the mystery, but just like every book or movie in that genre, the answer is always less interesting than the question. To preserve calm in your life and your child’s, agree to a truce where you both acknowledge neither of your lives are worth asking about. Embrace the boring. This is you.

The Book of Non-Secrets

Overachieving parents try to find ways over their child’s moat of silence. If your kid doesn’t talk, maybe they write. No matter how bland your child’s life is, they might still keep a journal. Dry, tedious works land the biggest publishing deals. Just ask the guy who wrote the Bible.

To an overachieving parent, there’s no greater temptation than reading their kid’s diary. They think a journal is a window into their child’s soul rather than a list of toys their kid wants to buy. Yes, there might also be information in there about sleepovers and crushes, but those things don’t matter. The likelihood of a relationship lasting from primary school to adulthood is slim to none. Not many wedding vows start with, “I loved you from the moment I saw you eating glue.”

Bare minimum parents know diaries aren’t worth reading, but that doesn’t mean diaries are harmless. There’s always danger with a paper trail. Tell your child not to write anything down if they kill someone. They need to confide in a lawyer, not a book that will be entered into evidence. Also, tell your kid not to record anything they don’t want to see in print if they become famous. You don’t want your child’s unauthorized biography to be titled Chief Justice: The Bed-Wetting Years.

The Seal Is Broken

While it’s usually best to show as little interest in your child’s personal life as possible, there are times when you’ll need to violate your kid’s privacy. If there’s smoke coming out from under their bedroom door, kick it in. Your child is inhaling something illegal or burning down the house. Either way, you have a vested interest in the consequences.

You should also get nosy if you suspect your child is in danger. Overachieving parents abuse this excuse. A sudden change in behavior indicates adolescence, not a life-threatening situation. If every time a teenager acted moody it was because they were in mortal peril, none of them would survive.

Instead, look for concrete signs of a threat before you barge into your kid’s personal space. Mysterious pentagrams on the walls, glowing red eyes, or stigmata are all clues it’s time to start monitoring their text messages. And, yes, most threats to teenagers are supernatural. Regular mortals are afraid of them.

Not Sharing Is Caring

As a bare minimum parent, you’ll have an easier time than most respecting your child’s privacy, but your kid might have trouble respecting their own. Rather than withholding their secrets, they might hide the truth by using pictures to lie on the internet. It’s the worst-case scenario. They turned out just like you.

In keeping with family tradition, your kid may want to portray their life as being better than it really is. The problem is they have a different definition of “better” than any rational human being. While you use pictures of your kid to portray a lie more wholesome than reality, your kid will create a fake life that’s more extreme. That always involves less clothing and more danger than you’d like. On the internet, every teenager is a seminude party animal. No wonder parents go gray.

This is especially true on the parts of the internet your kid thinks you’ll never see. Your child assumes you’ll be baffled by anything new enough to be cool. They’re not wrong. My grandma still tries to use her cordless phone to turn on the TV. But today’s secret apps aren’t as hidden as kids think, and the disappearing pictures they send to just one friend have a way of spreading around the world. The second rule of the internet is anything you try to hide will be seen by everyone. The first rule is if you don’t have anything nice to say, you’ll fit right in.

Just like it’s no longer possible to avoid taking pictures of your kid, it’s also too late to keep your kid off the internet. At this point, even toasters post status updates. “Burned” is always good for a few likes. You’re better off teaching your kid to use the internet responsibly than banning them from it altogether. The harder you try to keep them off of it, the more likely they are to burn toast.

Your duty as a bare minimum parent is just to passively monitor your kid’s online activity. Ask yourself two questions about anything they post: (1) Does it show something illegal? (2) Will it create more work for you? The last thing you want is a call from some other kid’s angry parent, much less the police. In a few years, there won’t even be detectives. A trial will just be a judge slowly scrolling through your kid’s Facebook page. Drama, legal or otherwise, could ruin your child’s life—or worse, require you to do stuff. Don’t let that happen to you.

Sharing for Life

By respecting your child’s privacy except in cases of imminent danger or legal consequences, you’ll have an easier relationship with them when they’re an adult. If you keep your distance, your child will think you’re setting healthy boundaries rather than displaying a general lack of interest in their life. In reality, you’re doing both.

This lack of knowledge will also ease your mind. You can’t worry about what you don’t know. That’s a lie. Parents worry about the unknown all the time. But it’s different when your kid grows up. At some point, you’ll decide you’ve done a good enough job and your kid can handle life on their own. If your adult child doesn’t call for a while, they might just be taking a night class or doing volunteer work. Thinking that is more comforting than knowing they got their hand stuck in a vending machine. Damn those pretzels.

Loose Lips

The world needs more secrets, not fewer. Leave your child’s diary alone and don’t ask more questions than you have to. The less you know, the less you’ll have to do. As for oversharing on the internet, warn your kid about the scary things that could happen. If they post too much, they might get murdered or—worse—turn into a social media star. It’s every parent’s darkest nightmare.

If you stick to those parameters, you’ll hit all three benchmarks of successful parenting without really trying at all. If your kid is used to dealing with their own problems without you butting into their personal life, they’ll learn how to take care of themselves. If your kid is used to protecting their secrets, they’re less likely to be arrested for being a social deviant. They might still be one, but at least they won’t get caught. And if you have no idea what your kid is up to, they can’t blame you for their problems. That’s a life well lived. Or wishful thinking.