A Nosy Mother Who Thinks Her Daughter Is A Racist Asked Slate For Advice. The Advice Slate Gave Was Terrible.
This is long.
In today’s edition of I Can Do Advice Columns Better Than The Famous Advice Columnists, I have some bones to pick with not only a letter that was sent to Slate, but with the answer Slate gave them in response.
You can read them in full here. I’m not republishing them in full first because I go through them line by line. But if you think it’s easier to read in full first, have at it.
A few days ago, I was looking through my 14-year-old daughter’s phone. I do this once a week, just to check she’s not being rude or anything.
I recognize that this is legally permissible behavior but your child is going to be screwed up in the head because of you never letting her have any privacy.
14 year olds are—what?—freshman in high school? They are becoming the people they will be. They need space to do that without their parents eavesdropping on every conversation.
When I grew up, texts were barely a thing, but we did have phone calls and we did have emails and if I caught my parents listening in on my phone calls or snooping through my emails I would have a freak out. If then I was told to just get over it, tough tits, I would hate my parents and find every way to rebel and become deeply untrusting. This lack of trust would very likely stay with me down the road after I went off to college and became an adult, and it would imperil my ability to have healthy relationships with people.
Everything seemed okay, but then I suddenly decided I should probably look through her messages, too.
What were you looking at initially if not her messages? I thought the whole point was to see if she was rude? Sounds like maybe you’re just clicking around and aimlessly spying.
I found a WhatsApp chat called ‘Wonderful People Only.’ In the group there were about 60-70 children, all of them about her age.
Snooping through your kid’s messages is screwed up, but going into a private group your child is part of is also an invasion of the other children’s privacy.
Those children have expectations of privacy as well, and again, I understand it might not be legally enforceable because of the size of the group or any number of other reasons, but it is still morally bad behavior.
If my child were one of those kids in that group and you called me to tell me that my child had done x y z, I might think it important to talk to my kid about it, but I definitely would think it important to tell you to fuck off and keep my child’s name out of your mouth.
I’d never seen this WhatsApp on her phone before, so I scrolled to the top. The chat was created in December, and she was one of the original 20 people to be added.
You’re also now going through the archives of when the group was smaller, which is not helping your case! The one factor that semi-favored your behavior was the vast size of the group. But now you’re reading things that were sent when it was much smaller and the participants had a much greater expectation of privacy.
Also, this is now old stuff! Digging into the old records of a private chat misses a bunch of things that happened between the participants outside of the chat, between the messages. You have no possible way of getting that context.
To start with, the group seemed to revolve around those 20 people (including my daughter) saying extremely rude things about another girl, “Millie.”
People like to talk shit about people behind their backs. It’s a right handed down from God.
I wasn’t happy about this.
Take it up with God!
But then, in January, Millie was added to the chat so she could see what horrible things were being said.
So, first off, adding the Millie person is weird and I’m curious who did that and why, but, no, she could not see all the mean things that were said before she entered the group. That’s not how WhatsApp groups work. The only reason you were able to see those messages is because your daughter was a founding member of the group. People can’t see messages in groups from before they joined.
They called her a spoiled brat, a b***h, a freak, and more. And my daughter was the ringleader. After reading this I immediately sat my daughter down and asked her what the heck was she doing.
Did she say those things before or after Millie joined the group? You make it sound like it was after, but I’m not confident that’s what happened.
If Millie was in the group when mean things were said, then that is potentially bullying. But still only potentially.
If you came home and overheard your daughter in the backyard saying very mean things to one of her friends, who was crying, you’d probably say something.
But what if you came home and overheard your daughter teasing one of her friends, but the friend wasn’t crying? What if teasing was their love language and just how they bonded? Doesn’t sound like that is what is going on with your daughter and Millie, but it is why you generally want the full context of things before deciding how to react.
It begs the question…how did Millie react in the group? Were they fighting? Did she even see them?
And of course you didn’t come home and innocently overhear your daughter. You broke into her phone and went scouring for misdeeds like a sniffer dog in a cell block.
My daughter replied that Millie had been being “extremely rude” to her and the other people in the group since Millie joined the school in November. So these people got together and made a WhatsApp group so they could rant about their frustrations. Apparently it was never intended for Millie to be added.
I’m sorry to get hung up on this but someone added her. Adding her is an important element of this because it is what theoretically elevates “people talking shit behind someone’s back” to “bullying.”
Who added her, why, and what happened after she was present are the key things you can’t skip over.
It’s possible that someone was in the chat and didn’t like the way Millie was being treated and invited her so she could see what was going on (unaware, like you, that people can’t see old group messages), or perhaps hoped that no one would notice Millie had joined the chat so that the next time someone said something bad about her Millie would be able to pop out of the shadows and go “say it to my face!”
Who knows! But it’s important in deciding the nature of your daughter’s act.
Art isn’t art unless you allow an audience to see it, and talking shit isn’t bullying unless the subject is subjected to it.
I asked my daughter to give examples, and my daughter replied that Millie had refused to download social media, didn’t wear trendy clothes and barely used her mobile phone. I explained to my daughter that doing these things was not being “extremely rude” and Millie simply had different interests than her peers. My daughter said that it was wrong for Millie to not be like anyone else. I tried to talk to her, showing her videos about diversity, etc., but they didn’t work.
I’m not buying this version of this conversation. Obviously those examples are not someone being “extremely rude.” Your daughter is 14. She’s been through middle school. She probably knows the difference between an act and a trait. She’s spent 9 years in school and she’s probably met lots of students she doesn’t like for whatever reason. She probably wouldn’t describe those students as rude just because they didn’t hit it off.
My daughter said that it was wrong for Millie to not be like anyone else.
This line just doesn’t sound real in this part of the conversation. “Anyone” else? Not “everyone” else?
It sounds like your daughter is in a popular clique, but the whole thing about cliques is that necessarily there are people who aren’t in them. That’s what gives them structure. The people who are not in your daughter’s clique are not like what she might consider “everyone” else but she isn’t being literal. There are other cliques. This is a fact she is well aware of.
But the first red flag for why I think you’ve become an unreliable narrator is that you say she said “she’s not like anyone else.”
This is not a thing people usually say in an insulting way. If you are unique, you are a rare bird, is how that sort of thing is normally said. (Whereas “not like everyone else” is a pejorative euphemism for some loser who isn’t popular.)
The exception to this would be if they had no arms or something. And if Millie had no arms, this would have come up in the conversation you had with your daughter. Or you’d have read jokes about her armlessness in the WhatsApp group you read.
I went to a school where everyone was very athletic and able-bodied except for two disabled kids in the whole high school. I was one of them. Believe me, when kids want to tease you for being different because of something that actually does make you different, they do it! They call you “one eye.” They don’t dance around it.
Reason 2 I have come to doubt the reliability of your version of events is this:
“I tried to talk to her, showing her videos about diversity, etc.”
Why would you show her videos about diversity? What makes you think any of this is about diversity? You’ve read the WhatsApp chats and you’ve grilled your daughter and this is the first time diversity has come up. How could you possibly know at this point in the story if that has anything to do with it?
“And then I found out that Millie had been invited to our house the following Saturday. I told my daughter that Millie could still come round but if I heard any rude comments she would be leaving.”
Why wouldn’t you have let Millie come around? She’s a bully victim in your mind. Wouldn’t you want the unpopular girl to be invited to the party? And if then people weren’t nice to her, your remedy would be to…make her leave? Hahaha.
Look, kid, I know my kid bullies you but nevertheless I have graciously decided to let her invite you to her party, however, if my daughter decides to be mean to you—even a little—you’re going to have to walk home in the rain.
When Millie came round, I found out that she is Black, bisexual, and transgender.
In life, one thing leads to another. There’s a cause and effect. In your retelling of this story, another led to one thing. You divined out of thin air that diversity was going to be the root cause here.
Conveniently, this ties all of your daughter’s questionable behavior up nicely. Your daughter indeed is allegedly mad at Millie for a trait and not an act. And not just any trait! She’s picking on this girl for three traits which Gen Z has been rightly celebrated for embracing.
I don’t have a problem with any of those things but apparently my daughter does.
So 70 kids in your daughter’s school in 2022 all got together to talk shit about a bi trans woman of color in a private WhatsApp group and no one in that group even once mentioned that she was bi, trans, or a woman of color? If they had, you would have learned that when you went through the chats and not been surprised when she walked in your house! And if that is true, then it seems to me the only person thinking quite a lot about her sex, gender, or race is you, someone who comes from a generation obsessed with those traits.
I immediately took Millie home.
HAHA WHAT???
You THREW the girl out because of her sexuality, gender, and race?
And you think that you’re the woke and evolved one?
I’ve confiscated my daughter’s phone but she still makes random comments to me about how “stupid” Millie is. How can I explain to my daughter that this isn’t okay?
She’s probably just doing that because you made a huge deal out of this and now she’s bringing it up a bunch because she’s invested in making you feel remorse for every single thing you’ve done up to now and every single conclusion you’ve jumped to.
If I were your daughter, I would be much more concerned about how stupid my mother was than how stupid this girl in the class is!
I don’t think this whole story is made up. I think the broad strokes probably happened like you say. I think you didn’t know why your daughter didn’t like this random kid you’d never heard of and then you became convinced your daughter was a monster. I think the part where you say you showed your daughter videos about how diversity is good is a false memory, or it happened later on after the party.
I think you refused to take the act of your daughter inviting this girl over to your house as a sign that social dynamics in school are hard and you probably don’t grasp them fully because if she really hated her why extend her an invitation at all? I think you didn’t consider the fact that Millie had been unable to see the old WhatsApp messages and didn’t even know your daughter hated her because if she had known, why would she accept the invitation?
I think that when she showed up you, an old person, saw a young black trans teen and were like “WOAH” and then, what? You inquired about her sexuality? How did you know she was bi? And then because you’re obsessed with all those things, even if you’re a nice liberal who is obsessed with them in an accepting way because it makes you feel evolved and valiant, you projected that obsession onto your daughter in the negative and decided she was a racist bigot. Then, properly gassed, you whipped yourself into a deeply misguided lather that somehow justified you THROWING OUT THE BULLIED BLACK BISEXUAL TRANS GIRL.
Take a breath, hon.
You have some problems with your daughter that I think you need to get serious about. Your child is 14. She is an idiot. She will make lots of mistakes. But you are an adult and you need to get a grip. Why do you think your daughter is some sort of malevolent force? Did she do something to you? What are you blaming her for?
Is her father still at home? Are you still married? What does he think about this? If not, did she side with him in the divorce and you’ve never forgiven her?
This just has nothing to do with Millie. It has to do with a mother, who I'm going to venture to guess, had a very complicated relationship with her own mom, and a daughter who is right at the precipice of becoming a full on person with their own volition.
This is an advice column. So here is my advice. The first thing you need to do is take a good long look in the mirror.
You shouldn’t have snooped on her phone. You shouldn’t have snooped in the WhatsApp group. You shouldn’t have scrolled all the way back and read the entire WhatsApp. Before concluding that Millie was shown the mean messages, you should have googled how WhatsApp groups work. You shouldn’t have jumped to the conclusion that your daughter was in the Ku Klux Klan. You shouldn’t have asked that poor girl about her sexuality. You shouldn’t have thrown her out of your daughter’s party.
You should have spent the last week focusing on almost anything else.
The second thing you need to do is this: spend some actual quality time with your daughter. Go on a vacation just the two of you. Give yourself enough time so that you can remember what you love about her. Because there are lots of things, I’m sure! She’s yours after-all!
And then when you come back home, try to accept that teenagers need to learn how to navigate complicated social dynamics themselves. Ease up.
So this is already really long but I would like to now respond to the response Slate gave.
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