She may not hate her for invasion of privacy (yet) but for the choices her mom made.

Yea my mother read mine too. Did not like what she read - Ripped it up and grounded me for a month. (I was 15) Yea I have trust issues with her. I will would never ever tell her anything. I am an adult and still do not trust her or tell her things.

Fair enough she violated her daughter's privacy but sometimes it is for the better. That a kid her age has so much rage and is pissed off that boys don't hit on her is not normal. Her daughter clearly needs help. If the kid had been writing about wanting to kill herself, would you still think it was a bad idea that her mother knows about it?

The possibility that she could have found out that the daughter wanted to kill herself is no justification to look at that diary. You could fall in the shower and die because no one finds you in time, does that mean everybody should be allowed to install a camera in your bathroom and watch while you have a shower? And I don´t read anything in this fml about the daughter being depressed or even the mother worrying about their relationship, I get from this that the mother just thought it would be fun to violate her daughters privacy.

Wait what? The mom shouldn't have looked but what she found out is important and the argument you are making is way off base. If you find out something which is detrimental to the person health wise it does justify it. Your camera shower argument is ridiculous.

Well, what if I call an ambulance after I saw someone fall in their shower? Should I not get punished because in the end I helped this person and the end justifies the means? The mother had no concerns whatsoever for the daughter (at least she is not sharing them with us), she just thought it would be "cute". Randomly violating trust and then trying to justify it by saying you could find something that is bad for that person doesn´t work for me.

# 163 > Your argument is just plain stupid. There is a big difference between not being able to prevent a random accident and trying to prevent someone from hurting themselves on purpose. I don't condone invading someone's privacy but in this particular case, I think it was for the better. This kid seems like she could do with some urgent psychological help.

Well in that case reading someones diary (child, roommate, friend), browsing through their internet history and reading all files on their computer is always the right thing to do because it could say somewhere in there that the person wants to hurt themself or someone else.

# 169 > You have completely missed the point. No one applauds the mother for reading her daughter’s diary. We just say that even if it was wrong, it’s lucky she did it in the end because she found out that her kid needs help. I lost my best friend to suicide. She had begged me not to tell anyone about her depression and I unwillingly gave her my word and didn’t. Turns out her partner knew she had been looking up ways of killing herself by going through the computer history. She made him swear not to mention it to her parents and swore she’d never do it, so he respected his promise and kept it for himself. She killed herself 2 months later. Her mother told me she can never forgive him for not telling them what was going on. There is not one day I don’t wonder if we could have avoided her suicide by talking about it with each other. So please stop your teenage drama. Sometimes it’s not about being righteous but about doing the right thing even if this is going to get you in trouble.

What does your friends suicide has to do with any of this? Your friend had problems which people were aware of, not because they read her diary but because she told them. I don´t see the relevance or why you would bring this up. I don´t know what was exactly written in that diary since we only have the mothers version but I wouldn´t feel comfortable to make some diagnosis over the internet if the child is some soon-to-be-serial-killer and the mother did the best for all involved. I can, however, imagine that this violation of trust will damage the relationship between the mother and the daughter deeply and might cause much worse problems in the future then the diary and its contents ever could.

# 177 > The relevance is that I chose to respect her privacy by not interfering. I will always always wonder if we could have saved her by not respecting our word to keep it private and inform her parents of what she told us in confidence. It would have been betraying her trust (same as reading someone's diary is) but perhaps it would have been for the better. I find that really strange that you are getting on your high horse like that when no one is giving the mother a high five for reading the diary. I am not saying that OP's daughter is suicidal or planning to murder someone but there is clearly something strange going on, especially if the thoughts she wrote down come as a massive shock to OP. Yes, sometimes being nosy can be the less of 2 evils. It's not all black and white.

Still a very different situation since you actually knew a problem existed. That is different from invading privacy on the off chance that you might find a problem there or just for the fun of it. Maybe something strange is going on but that could just be the mother´s problem because she thinks a child is all rainbows and unicorns. The child might need help now because of trust issues...

#201 > Still a similar situation as there was a question of breaching or not breaching trust. Anyway my point as stated before was that, although it was not right of OP to be nosy, it might be for the best after all. No one here, me included, condones privacy invasion, so relax... OP was not looking for a problem and it seems that she found one. Any good parent would want to know if their children are having issues like that even if this will have a negative impact on their relationship. You can't always be your kid's buddy.

I still understand where you see the similarities in these situations, I really don´t but whatever. Of course you shouldn´t be your kids buddy, you are a parent, you will have to set rules and say things that make a child unhappy (like: no, you can´t have a pony) but because you are trying to raise a child with its best interest at heart. I don´t think behaving like a horrible person and violating someones trust (be it a child, a friend, a sibling) falls under the category of unpopular but necessary decisions.

that's not letting her do as she pleases - that is giving her a diary and showing her the meaning of privacy. Going through it utterly disrespects those boundaries.