Ask Lemmy

At least once. They found a bottle of moonshine in one of the drawers under my bed when I was 16. And it could've been found by accident, as it would've been spotted if my mom changes by bedding and lifted the mattress.

It resulted in "the talk" regarding danger of methanol poisoning when buying from unknown sources, and advice on not getting too hammered.

Never

Is this as a child, teenager or adult?

If adult, that's definitely not normal.

Child/teen I can see good reasons why they might.

For me the answer is never, but I was goody two-shoes and boring, so there was nothing of interest to find.

Currently living with my parents, they don't necessarily "search" my things. I'm pretty messy so their primary intent is just organize my stuff. They're not "going through my things"

Mate you live in another culture. Here we would say leave if you have a problem with it, stay if the money is worth it.

Yeah, they went into my room to look through stuff. My dad never let me have my own device, he had a keylogger and camera pointed at the desktop computer I was allowed to use. He had online blockers for porn and regularly looked through my phone and photos and I wasn't allowed to have my phone at night or my iPad. It's not normal and I've started working on it in therapy.

Once a week or so. Granted this was after they caught me smoking the marijuana leaf… they would mainly be looking for “drugs”. Would not dive too deep though, didn’t like open up and read stuff etc. (This was during the 90s)

Not once ever.

Sometimes my mom would do a cleanup, but then she’d find whatever and it would be gone. So it was a thorough “cleaning.” Didn’t happen much.

This is dependent on if you're giving them a reason to. If you're 15 and are acting drunk or high or suspected of doing shit online or building bombs or stealing, etc expect less privacy.

If there's no reason to think anything like that, expect more privacy. Every kid\teenager thinks they should just have complete privacy. Most parents know that can be a terrible idea. Very few things in life are simply black or white. Most things are somewhere in a shade of grey.

Never to look for anything, they might come and talk or wake me up if needed. But they knocked or called before coming in. I never locked my room, so they could have if they wanted to, they simply didn't want to. They also never checked my bags or pockets. One time my little brother snitched on me smoking, my dad made me grab the cigarettes and dispose of them. He didn't look for them himself.

Is this normal? I'm biased. To me it is. I think privacy is an important part of forming your identity. Having a space where you can be yourself and express yourself, and keep your failed attempts at self-expression to yourself. Nobody needs to see your attempts of tying a tie that you discovered was the total opposite of cool and you died of shame getting laughed at at school. Your parents don't need to know that shit. Their job is to love and support you, not get into the weeds of youth fashion.

And this is true of many things, but i can imagine that sometimes interventions are needed. When drugs or weapons are involved for example, parents should be parenting. As it's very difficult as a teenager to understand when self expression crosses into self harm. And in that case supporting your children could mean infringement on their privacy in some occasions.

I guess in a way my parents trusted me and trusted their formative parenting years enough to give me the privacy i had. And it is very difficult for a child to bot blame themselves for a loss of privacy, even when it's the parents not trusting their own parenting enough to trust their children with privacy.

No, that is pretty abnormal in the US.

I have heard coworkers talking about how they searched their kids stuff after finding a vape in their backpack inadvertently or set up ridiculous controls to spy on what websites the kid went to.