I have 4 from 33 to 18 yrs of age! Ones a successful musician, my daughter works for homeland security & supports her own kids, my 22 yr old is in college & my 18 yr old is & has always been a honor student! I've never ever snooped on one of them!

So... I'm either guessing that you don't have kids either and just plan to snoop, or you DO have kids and snoop personally into their diaries. Tell me how not invading the privacy of your children automatically make those kids audition to become the next teen mom. Seriously, tell me how that prevents it. I guess you can say that if they're sleeping with someone, you can catch them admitting it into their diary, but seriously, shouldn't you already be on top of that? If they sneak behind your back and do something, the solution is NOT to sneak behind THEIRS. You should be upfront with them at the beginning, make them know that they can talk to you and trust your children. However, since I see that you already have no trust with the next generation - even going to far as calling it "retarded" - then I can doubt any chance that you trust your child in the first place. Maybe the reason why they keep trying to hide everything from you more and more is because you snoop around and desperately try to uncover every little thing and drag their personal stuff into the light, forcing them to grow distant and actually HIDE things from you to create any form of "privacy," even if it's a forged one based on lies because that's the only way. Ironically, you're teaching them to become even MORE deceitful if you keep trying to pry into their privacy like reading their diary. Now they'll learn that writing their feelings down can't be safe and they're equally vulnerable because their own freakin' parent can read it so they probably give up writing and hold their emotions inside. ANYTHING to keep their feelings and emotions private, because, apparently, they can't have it out in the open in the outside world.