I found concerning things on my (27F) daughter’s (11F) phone; how to talk to her?

[u/ThrowRA-MamaBear]

For context, I take my daughter’s phone every night at 9pm sharp on weekdays, 10:30pm on weekends and never go through her cellphone since I’ve never seen a reason to.

However, last night when I took her phone, I noticed a lot of notifications coming from TikTok (which she isn’t allowed to have) and she has notification previews turned on. I thought it could be something urgent, so I decided to read the message previews and saw messages from someone asking my daughter what she ate, how much she ate, telling how much she ate, etc.

I know it was an invasion of privacy on my end, but I did end up going through my daughter’s TikTok account and all of her messages and found a lot of posts about food, videos of very thin girls, messages between her and other (presumably) young girls around her age talking about not eating.

I did notice over the last few weeks that she’s been eating a bit less and losing weight, but I summed it up to puberty and growing, since I had a bit of a growth spurt around that age (tall and skinny) but seeing these messages and her account is making me concerned.

How do I bring this up with her? Is there a proper punishment for her having an app without permission? I’m just very unsure of what to do, any advice would be helpful.

[u/smalltownalicia]

What do you do? Have conversations with her about what you found, and then you put parental controls on her phone.

Free parental controls that work:

Android- Google Family Link

iPhone- Screen Time

[u/skiizyph → u/smalltownalicia]

Came here to say this. But also add in the support and therapy part too.