The texts part depends on your perspective. We share most accounts with my wife because we literally have no secrets and it makes life so much easier. We don't really text, but we also grab each other's phone quite often when it's closer than our own. Then again, we don't really use our phones a whole lot either, a battery charge lasts 4-5 days.

'We?'

That all sounds very odd.

> share most accounts with my wife because we literally have no secrets

I mean, I don't have secrets either, but if one of my friends from work wants to invite me bowling any scenario that doesn't involve us directly messaging each other seems just convoluted and weird.

Maybe as added context, we have been working together in the same company and team remotely since 2020. We also spend 90+% of the time together, so a scenario you are describing wouldn't happen. We did make separate email aliases as to not confuse other people though :)

I guess it all depends on how life is structured.

I mean, the article specifically talks about parent/child interactions, so I'm sure you appreciate my confusion.

Right. I was referring to the "family" aspect, trying to point out that having full transparency can be both good and bad, depending where you are coming from.

> Reading texts? That's borderline abusive.

Would you mind explaining why you think so? To me, reading someone's texts is impolite, but I cannot comprehend why it would be in the same category of misdeeds as physical beatings or sexual abuse.

Abuse is a very broad category, for example neglect and emotional abuse are still abuse.

> Reading texts? That's borderline abusive.

I’ve noticed a trend of people using increasingly dramatic language. Words like “abuse” and “harm” are being tossed around to describe conduct that really deserves blander words.

I’ve also noticed a kind of social feedback loop happening, where people hear these exaggerations and then come to believe they are victims of “abuse” when, really, someone was just rude.

Anyway, I don’t think reading your kid’s texts qualifies as borderline abuse. I’d reach for a word like “strict” or perhaps “overbearing”.

This is kind of meta, but you're taking issue with the descriptive term I've used and implicitly dismissing the possibility that we simply disagree on the severity of the transgression.

If I said a 63 degree room was freezing. That would be an exaggeration and misuse of the term and you'd be objectively correct in pointing that out. But in the case of how severe the transgression is - we can only use descriptive terms as it's not quantifiable.

I think it's far worse than rude and is controlling in an abusive manner. Reasonable people can disagree on that and we likely do. But, declaring that on I must be misusing the word seems like a distraction from that.

> implicitly dismissing the possibility that we simply disagree on the severity of the transgression

I do think we disagree, and very fundamentally. I wouldn’t personally characterize this even as a “transgression”, much less abuse. Depending on the kid’s age, I’d even call it responsible parenting!

Nevertheless, I doubt you believe monitoring your children’s texts is truly adjacent to burning them with cigarettes, molesting them, humiliating and calling them names, and so on. This is what “abuse” used to mean.

My pet theory is that this escalation in language has been part of a social feedback loop, where people have become more sensitized and less able to cope with relatively minor nuisances.