Oh. Huh. Weird. What's sort of terrible is my dad is actually fine when my mom's not there. Well not perfect but better.
i'm late to this discussion, but for the record, yeah--snooping around and not allowing kids any semblance of privacy online is a shitty thing to do. it breaks down trust on both sides, it stifles communication (who wants to talk honestly with someone if there's a problem when that person doesn't give them the option to NOT talk to them?), and reading emails/etc. is not just invasive of your privacy, it's an invasion of privacy to the person you're communicating with who believes they're sending something in confidence. i might have really strong feelings on this issue because my mom really heavily filtered and observed my internet usage until i was 18, but. it really isn't a good way to parent. like a few other people in this thread have said, there might be occasions where watching internet usage is necessary, but those should be pretty extreme and rare cases where there's already solid reason to believe there's a serious problem going on. 'we have to watch everything you do but it's to ~protect~ you' isn't one of those cases.
