When it comes to giving kids privacy, one of the key factors is parents’ relationship with the kids and also the kind of home setting they live in. Taking my childhood stage as an example, we lived in a room and parlour apartment and we had no single private life as children. The only moments we enjoyed some "me time" were the days we went to school, returned, and our parents had gone to the farm. But then, the house was always filled with people, with everyone looking for what to report when mum and dad came back. And to gain that little “do-not-report,” we had to bribe whoever was going to report anything, especially when it came to gaming on our VCD or watching a movie dad had warned us not to watch.
The interesting thing is that we weren’t close to our parents in the true tone of a parent-children relationship, but we were totally watched and monitored to the core due to the living standard. To crown it all, phones were not so common then, so all we depended on were the TV (including the gaming) and playing around with friends in the area, which were the only ways we had our methods to do things we weren’t allowed to do.
When my dad found out that one of my sisters had “fun” outside, mehn, all hell broke loose that day and the monitoring on us, both male and female, increased. I still don’t know how my dad found out. Lol.
The close monitoring helped in shaping us and made us shy away from indulging in things that would have dealt with us even in adulthood.
So this answers the question of whether kids need privacy or not.
In this current era, kids are to be closely monitored; otherwise, you’ll see them getting loose at a very young age, where they will find it hard to control themselves when grown. In these days when smartphones are available in the hands of kids, they need to be closely monitored in the things they are using them to do. A child of 12 years can be craving s3x due to the information they feed their mind via the phone.
When should a child be given the open-doors freedom?
To me, irrespective of the age, a child should only be given the open-doors freedom when they leave the house for higher institution. By that time, a little bit of maturity has dawned on them, and they should be able to take responsibilities, at least to an extent, for their actions.
This may seem complicated with regards to the era we are in now, where the advocacy of children being pampered and adopting the lifestyle of the western world is on the rise. Children from my part of the world (Africa/Nigeria) need to be thoroughly monitored in their childhood stage because most times, what a child will become in the future is cultured from the early age.
Thanks for reading.
This is my entry to Week 185, Edition 02 of the Weekly Featured contest in Hive Learners Community
Image used is mine
