Faced with hyper-connected offspring, many parents feel helpless. Should we search our children's phones or not, as Secretary of State Sabrina Agresti-Rubache suggested? If some “monitor” as a precaution, others formally forbid it “out of respect”. Parents tell BFMTV.com about this dilemma.
Angélique doesn't hide it: she constantly monitors the cell phone and social networks of her daughter Ambre, aged 16. Yet two years ago when the schoolgirl got her first phone, mother and daughter agreed to establish a relationship based on mutual trust. But the day the forty-year-old inadvertently put her nose in her daughter's messages, she fell from a height.
“At first I wasn’t particularly checking, until the day I came across inappropriate conversations and photos that she had on Snapchat with strangers” who turned out to be adult men, says this mother of five. children, who lives in Saint-Gobain (Aisne).
“My duty to watch over him”
Since then, this 40-year-old mother no longer really knows what to do. She, who did not like violating her daughter's privacy, still has the impression of having somewhat “lost control” over the online activities of her teenage daughter, who has managed to evade parental controls. Snapchat, Whatsapp or even Instagram… Angélique has now gotten into the habit of searching her daughter's conversations, knowing that she is capable of putting herself in danger, despite her parents' numerous attempts to warn her.
But does a parent have the legitimate right to search their minor child's smartphone? The Secretary of State Sabrina Agresti-Roubache affirmed this Wednesday, April 24 that parents were within their strictest rights. “Parents, the authority is you! Something that has struck me in recent years is to think that a teenager has a private life. A teenager is a minor,” she declared on France 2 .
An opinion shared by many parents of children and adolescents. For Anne-Sophie, this condition was non-negotiable for her almost 12-year-old son to have his own smartphone. “It was that or nothing,” explains the thirty-year-old. If she refuses to cop young Noah, she glances from time to time, “randomly” at her son's phone.
“I purposely ask him for his phone when he doesn’t expect it, to remind him that I have my eye on him,” says this childminder from Pérone (Somme). “No matter how much we trust, he’s still a kid, it’s my duty to watch over him.”
“It’s my privacy!”
Several times a week, Anne-Sophie sifts through his photos, the text messages he exchanges and even the history of his search engine. She also scrolls through her Tiktok feed – “for you” – to see what content is offered to her by the platform, the algorithm being based on our preferences.
Like her, Florence feels “somehow obliged” to monitor what her almost 13-year-old daughter does online. Last year, she and her ex-partner were also surprised to come across conversations and screenshots discussing her daughter Nessa's sexuality.
When she learned that her parents – particularly her father – had taken a look at her cell phone one day when it was hanging out in her room, Florence says that the young girl became angry. “You have no right to search my cell phone!”, “It’s my privacy!”, she defended.
However, what interests Anne-Sophie or Florence is not to “police” their teenagers but rather to protect them from external threats: cyberharassment, violent content, risk of recruitment, bad encounters, pornographic sites. So in addition, the two mothers strive to prevent the dangers of the Internet: “At home we try to make him understand that we never really know who we are talking to on the Internet,” explains Anne- Sophie.
“It's worry, that's all. With everything we see today… I don't want to cut her off from the world but I know she's not wary enough. At this age -I find that they trust much too easily.”
“A bad signal for confidence”
French law does not definitively resolve the question of parents' access to their child's phone. If article 9 of the Civil Code calls for “respect for the private life” of the child, article 371-1 of the Civil Code reminds us that parental authority “is a set of rights and duties whose purpose is the interests of the child.” The same article nevertheless emphasizes that “parents involve the child in decisions that concern them, according to their age and degree of maturity.”
For their part, psychologists and pediatricians also advocate dialogue and support. Marie Danet, psychologist and lecturer in developmental psychology at the University of Lille, explains to BFMTV.com that searching in secret represents “a bad signal for trust and the parent-child relationship”, “of the same order as searching in your child's room or read your child's diary.
“If we don’t respect our child’s limits, how can we expect him to trust us?” asks Mélanie, the mother of Nathan, 15, who has never looked into his son’s smartphone. son and hope he never has to.
“It’s his privacy, his secret garden and I respect it,” says Mélanie. “Children and adolescents are people in their own right,” she defends. “It blows my mind that some parents don’t see a problem with overriding their consent.”
“No risk does not exist”
Eden, 12, says he is grateful to his parents, because he knows full well that they too would not infringe on his digital space without asking his permission. “It’s the basis, in fact. I have nothing to hide but in reality it’s important that they respect that,” explains the teenager, who assures that he has no problem providing the code for his smartphone to his mother.
This does not mean, however, that Mélanie and her husband never have fears regarding their son at school. “Of course we don't control everything, that zero risk doesn't exist… but neither does it in 'real life',” continues this mother, a teacher by profession. However, she prefers to favor dialogue and pedagogy on these subjects, so that adolescents learn to “step back from situations” and “judge for themselves”.
“If we think that they are not capable of managing themselves on the internet, then it is better not to give them a cell phone,” decrees the forty-year-old.
