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Letter to the editor

Let parents do their job - and even snoop

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER
Published December 19, 2004

It seems the Supreme Court of the state of Washington needs a session with Dr. Phil.

In what had to be an eye-rolling moment for most parents, the state's high court ruled earlier this month that a mom violated state law by listening in on her teenage daughter's telephone conversation.

The court strictly applied a state law protecting the privacy of telephone communications, requiring the consent of all parties to a call before a conversation can be intercepted or recorded.

The justices unanimously ruled that the law provides no explicit exception for parents eavesdropping on their children, and they were not about to read one in. But the court failed to appreciate the overarching constitutional principles at stake, which protect parental authority within households. Simply put, moms have the right - and maybe to some extent a duty - to snoop into the lives of their minor children, including, if necessary, to read their e-mail, track their movements on the Internet and eavesdrop on their phone calls.

Dr. Phil McGraw, television's family relationship guru, would no doubt approve of this hierarchical organizing model. "This is a parent/child relationship, not a democracy," says Dr. Phil on his Web site about disciplining children. "You shouldn't make the mistake of letting (your children) have an equal say in the rules of the household."

This seems to be a basic prescription for sensible child-rearing. Parents set the rules and are the ultimate arbiters of how the family functions. Of course, good parenting includes giving children a say in their own lives as they mature and demonstrate trustworthiness and good judgment, which may include granting them an orbit of privacy. But generally, household authority rests with the parents. The government should be watching parents' backs on this, not sabotaging the effort.

The case in Washington stemmed from a purse-snatching in October 2000 in which two young men reportedly knocked over a senior citizen and stole her purse. The local sheriff contacted Carmen Dixon to be on the lookout for any evidence in the crime since her then-14-year-old daughter, Lacey Dixon, was the girlfriend of one of the suspects.

Sure enough, boyfriend Oliver Christensen, who was 17 at the time, contacted Lacey later by phone and admitted that he knew where the purse was. But unbeknown to Lacey or Christensen, Carmen Dixon had activated the speaker function on the cordless phone base and was secretly listening in and taking notes. Her testimony about what she overheard helped convict Christensen of second-degree robbery.

The high court set aside the conviction, saying that Lacey and her boyfriend had a reasonable expectation that their call would be private, and any evidence gathered from Carmen Dixon's illegal act of snooping could not be used at trial.

Where the justices missed the boat was in not recognizing the unique legal relationship between parents and their children. Parents have a fundamental liberty interest in raising their offspring. This right has been repeatedly recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court, from 1923, when the Supreme Court ruled that the due process clause protects the right of parents to "establish a home and bring up children," to as recently as 2000, when the court said "so long as a parent adequately cares for his or her children (i.e., is fit), there will normally be no reason for the state to inject itself into the private realm of the family. . . ."

These holdings suggest that it is unconstitutional for state law to insulate minors from their parents' watchful eyes. Minors should have no legally recognized expectation of privacy when talking on the phone in their parents' house, and anyone talking to the minor should understand that parents may be monitoring.

The Bill of Rights applies to minors as well as adults, meaning that the government can't snoop on young people without evidence of criminal conduct (although, sadly, that civil liberties doctrine has eroded in recent years). But parents are given leave to do what the state may not. "Privacy" in the context of the family means one thing: The state will butt out and let parents do their job.

[Last modified December 17, 2004, 23:22:03]