Mother and 22-year-old daughter argue at a family wedding because of how the mom used to sneak to look through her things just to find things to prove she was a bad teenager: ‘I was hiding stuff from her and wanted to find the evidence.’ – FAIL Blog

Strict parents raise rebellious children.

Do you remember the girl in your class who was overcontrolled by her parents and couldn’t attend sleepovers or birthday parties, so she started to feel left out because they stopped inviting her. In her teens, she started sneaking out and doing things that were almost too much, but her parents still saw her as the controlled kid she used to be. Till someday you realize that what she’s doing and the activities she engages with are far more than what normal teens who didn’t have controlling parents in the first place are doing. So you start to think that being controlled was actually useful, as she is far worse than you because she learned how to sneak around. You were just going to parties while she was leaving the state. Was it worth it? And you meet back as adults, and you hear that she doesn’t talk to her parents at all anymore. Was it worth it? Well, I don’t think so.

In this Reddit story, the user pretended to be a rebel teenager who entered some heavy business while actually being a normal teenager. She pretended just to show how her mother was searching her stuff without permission and getting involved in her business to show how awful and problematic a teenager she was being. The thing is, she wasn’t. It was an act she created to prove the lack of privacy that there was in her house. Even if it wasn’t her intention, she really proved the phrase “strict parents raise sneaky children“. She started being sneaky because she wasn’t allowed to do anything, even though she wasn’t actually sneaking anything. But all that pretending made her able to hide her real life from her conservative mother.

As we predicted in the first paragraph, she ended up separating herself from her mother. She did not talk much to her in her adult life, especially after the wedding and the falling apart. But she felt so overcontrolled, having even a therapist who talked to her mother about what they talked about, that when she had the age to stop contact, she did. Her conversation became superficial to avoid the judgment of her mother.

Maybe if the mother had been more comprehensive and trustworthy, the daughter wouldn’t have had to lie to her at all. She could have told her everything and been a normal teen who does some bad things, but still nothing dangerous, because they respect their parents and themselves. Better than being an overprotective parent is to be an understanding one.