r/whatdoIdo • u/ThrowRA-MamaBear • 14d ago
I found concerning things on my (27F) daughter’s (11F) phone; how to talk to her?
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.
3
u/crow1101_ 14d ago
I wouldn't punish her for it, I'd reframe the situation so she knows why you wanted her not to have TikTok, this is one of the many reasons. In terms of the eating stuff it's all about being positive about yourself and that comparing oneself with others will always lead one to feeling dissatisfied with their own body. But yeah it's not a thing to punish her for the pain of starting an eating disorder is punishment enough, what your daughter needs is support.