Knocking and entering rooms. Moral high-ground.

[edaw1982]

(Firstly: This seems to be something of a moral question, so 'Science, Logic And Morality' seems to be the place to put it; apologies if if isn't the right thread in advance).

Irregardless of how old the child should be before they're permitted privacy and such; which varies from parent-to-parent-child-to-child and yes I realise that a parent owns that house (or if they're renting, they at least pay the money) then they have certain rights.

But does entering a child's (or teenagers) room without knocking and waiting an appreciable time for a reply, negate any moral high ground a parent has to be extended the same courtesy by their child?

If Mommy and Daddy (or Daddy and Daddy or Mommy and Mommy or Daddy and that hot girl he picked up at the bar, or Mommy and that hot waiter...or....well..you get the point) are having sex and your child bursts in without knocking, when they in the past have burst in without knocking whilst Little Mary Sue or Little Timmy have been say, masturbating; to use a similarly appreciable example of equal embarrassment; therefore mean that the parent(s) are not justified from a moral standpoint of berating the child for interrupting and otherwise embarrassing them for not in the past extending a similar courtesy?

To whit; is "Do as I say, not as I do" an acceptable recourse?

No I'm not a parent, and I've had close calls but never had the delight of being properly embarrassed; so this isn't me trying to look up some sort of self-justification of self-entilted rage (and even so I knock before entering someone's room that's just good manners).
I was simply surfing the question out of as sense of boredom and wondering what your thoughts on the matter are.

Also I'm not going to account for variables like 'Well what if the kid did X-Y-Z (smoking/doing drugs/raping the family pet; etcetera)' because those are myriad and varied. I'm talking about on the assumption the kid(s) haven't done anything to warrant a loss of privacy.

[biostem]

I would argue that there should be an understanding between the parent(s) and child(ren); Simply put, if the rules that have been laid down are that the parents can access any and all parts of the house with impunity, while the children must ask permission before entering, then that is how things should proceed.

That being said, the above is probably not the way to run a "functional home", (as opposed to a dysfunctional one); By giving your children some space - as a right they earn through good behavior, then there is no harm in the parent knocking before entering, (but perhaps still entering if they feel it is warranted - like if drugs were being used or the child was hurt/sick).

IMO, children develop at different paces, and some can be treated like adults early on, (and in turn, can be expected to act like adults), while others may need the "door taken off the hinges" if they are consistently disrespectful or so on.

In my experience, when growing up, my parents expected an answer if they knocked, and if none was given, then they'd enter to check on me - if I had a girl in my room, and the door was locked, throwing a fit was never a good solution - a simple reply, more often than not, produced a better outcome.

Still in all, it's something that has to be judged on a case-by-case basis, thus no "blanket rule" really applies...

[Borgholio]

My personal opinion is that parents should be able to over-ride a child's right to privacy IF NECESSARY. That's the job of the parent, to look out for their child's well-being but not to be a helocopter parent. If the son brings home a cute girl and he goes to his room with her...unless there are ground rules against having any nookie, the parent should grant them the privacy that they expect. Barging in should only be needed if the parent honestly believes something is wrong in there and there is no time to be wasted (or no time to let the kid hid his stash of drugs, as the case may be).

If the parents trust the children to obey the rules, and the children trust the parents will give them the space they need so long as they obey the rules, you have a mutual respect that will keep things running smoothly.

[Elheru Aran]

In practical terms, children are not the equal of the parent. They do not have the same right to enter the parent's private quarters without permission as the parent has to theirs. Is it fair and equal? No, not really, but that's life. Parents cannot, well, parent without having the upper hand in some fashion.

Is there an element of "do as I say not as I do" to that? Yes. It will happen sometimes. You should justify it to the kid at some point, though, rather than just telling them to do it. They may not understand, but you're attempting to communicate at least, and they'll understand eventually.

[Korto]

I feel children are entitled to courtesy and respect, same as anyone else. They're entitled to a polite knock and pause, before their room is entered, unless probable cause exists otherwise.
A child too young to be deemed responsible for themselves is NOT entitled to being able to refuse their parent permission to enter, just as they're not entitled to be able to refuse to eat their vegetables.
I feel that once a kid is old enough to be deemed responsible for their actions (possibly 16, maybe 18 yo), then the parent's powers should be considered more like a cop's. The child CAN refuse permission to enter, and the parent CAN'T conduct searches, without some kind of probable cause. If you do have probable cause, though, we're talking no-knock warrant.

Really, if you don't extend courtesy and fair dealings to them, how can you expect if from them? Who will they learn it off?

[Simon_Jester]

In practical terms, children are not the equal of the parent. They do not have the same right to enter the parent's private quarters without permission as the parent has to theirs. Is it fair and equal? No, not really, but that's life. Parents cannot, well, parent without having the upper hand in some fashion.

This. I experience the same issue as a teacher from a different angle.

If I am to actually teach anything, I have to have the right to interrupt the students, while they do not have the right to interrupt me. Is it fair? Arguably not. But realistically I'm dealing with 25-30 people, many of whom have poor impulse control. If I wait for them all to finish talking before I say anything, I'll never open my mouth. Conversely, if any one of them has the right to interrupt me, then they all do, in which case they will literally never do anything else.

Parents have a different but analogous situation. They may not be (so badly) outnumbered, but on the other hand they're responsible for a much wider range of their child's behaviors and actions. If they don't have some right to control their child's actions, that responsibility becomes a farce.

Really, if you don't extend courtesy and fair dealings to them, how can you expect if from them? Who will they learn it off?

I agree, I SO agree having seen many children who obviously never learned courtesy from anywhere and have virtually no concept of "fair" aside from "I get whatever the hell I want, when I want it."

Although I agree with a catch: there's a difference between courtesy and equality.

Courtesy is part of decorum. And here I'm trying to invoke the classical roots of the concept: the idea that 'decorum' consists of ensuring that actions are appropriate to a situation.

Courtesy is certainly a part of what's appropriate to domestic life and parent-child relationships. As they grow up, children have to learn to develop boundaries, and to understand the limits of what they are and are not allowed to say and do to different kinds of people. They do tend to learn this by example.

But perhaps the trickiest part of decorum in childrearing is that children need to get the hang of the difficult balance between being a free, independent person, and being a person who can submit to authority under the right circumstances. If they don't learn to be free, they'll either live a cramped life or start screwing up as soon as nobody's watching. If they don't learn to submit to authority, they have basically no chance of succeeding in life, because they won't know how to function in a situation involving a hierarchy.

So on the one hand, all interactions should have courtesy involved. On the other, the relationship of authority has to be very clear: "My roof, my rules."

[Channel72]

^ Out of curiosity, what do you teach, if you don't mind me asking?

[slebetman]

Wait, how can such a scenario arise in the first place? You guys don't have locks on your doors? Or do all family members always carry keys for every door in the house around?

[Korto]

You have locks on your interior doors?

[AniThyng]

You have locks on your interior doors?

Every malaysian house I have ever seen does, yes...

[Borgholio]

Only interior door I've ever seen in my life with a lock is the bathroom door...and *SOMETIMES* the master bedroom. Secondary bedrooms never had locks for me.

[Korto]

I laid it on a bit thick, because of slebetman's apparent astonishment at no locks.
With one extraordinary exception, I have maybe seen one or two houses, in my life, with a lock on the master bedroom. And they were old houses. Locks inside the house are something quite peculiar here. You see it occasionally on some foreign TV, someone's been locked in their bedroom as punishment, or they've locked the bathroom and wont come out, but you'll be hard-pressed to do that in an Australian house.

The one extraordinary exception is my own house! I actually have a lock on every door in the place. It's an ancient place, and they're all those ancient rim-locks with the big keys. The keys were probably all lost more than 50 years ago, and I'd be surprised if the locks still work. I don't think of them as locks, just decoration.
But no other house have I lived in that's ever had any lockable interior doors.

[Elheru Aran]

Mind you, we're not talking big old padlocks or anything. Just the little push- or turn-button in the doorknob kind of deals. They're typically a privacy consideration and generally just go on bedroom and bathroom doors. Often it's just the master bedroom and the bathrooms, on all the bedrooms it can happen but it's not as common. It's really just a matter of what the home-owner wants.

I may have come off a little harsh in my original post. Certainly courtesy is a part of the whole thing. If your children are in general well behaved, and sometimes even when they're not, of course you knock before entering. You don't necessarily have to knock and *wait*, but you do give them the heads-up that you're coming in.

Children do have a reasonable expectation of privacy, to some degree, especially as teenagers. It's part of their maturation process, and there is an age- or maturity-based line between zero privacy and no intrusion whatsoever that should be granted by the parent as appropriate. Really it comes down to one's parenting style though... some people are just scary, other people aren't involved with their kids whatsoever. You just try to hit somewhere in between that you think is right.

[RogueIce]

Wait, how can such a scenario arise in the first place? You guys don't have locks on your doors? Or do all family members always carry keys for every door in the house around?

It varies. In my old house, we had locks, but as mentioned above they were the push-button type. You could unlock them from the outside from these little hole things that you would put these into:



If you lost them, you could easily replicate it with a small flathead screwdriver, or just buy replacements (this picture is from Amazon where you can get a set of five for about three bucks). Another design I saw is basically a big flathead screw top that, again, a screwdriver or even your fingernails can turn.

As Elheru Aran said, they're really just there as a bit of privacy for bathrooms (obviously) and bedrooms (when so equipped, depending on the age of the house and/or whether or not somebody bothered to change the door knobs) so nobody walks in on you changing - or doing whatever else you're doing in your bedroom - inadvertently, but they're hardly a serious barrier to entry should the need arise.

[biostem]

You have locks on your interior doors?

Almost every bathroom I've seen has had a lock on the door. Most master bedrooms also have locks, here in the US. Growing up, my bedroom did not have a lock, but I added one myself, (kinda without my parents knowing), when I got into my teens - I only ever kept it lock if I had a girl over or wanted privacy.

[Ziggy Stardust]

In general it's pretty rare in the States for interior rooms (bathrooms aside) to have locks, even the push-button kind. My house was old and had lock fixtures for all the doors, but the actual mechanisms had long since been removed. Even the bathrooms.

With regards to the OP, doesn't this scenario presume the adult repeatedly and intentionally violating the child's policy by bursting into their room? Maybe some parents are like that, but I think the norm for this type of embarrassing incident is usually just a one-off accident. I've accidentally opened doors onto family members because, for example, I thought they were out of the house and there was no reason to knock, etc. It just happens sometimes. I'm not really sure elaborate moral conundrums are necessary, unless we are talking about the kind of domineering parent that intentionally kicks doors in.

[Dragon Angel]

My mother was like that. She would go nuts if I even closed my bedroom door, much less locked it. (my bedroom was a room of a former family roommate) I guess I never really bothered to close it for the majority of my childhood. My grandmother didn't have a problem with it when she was taking care of me.

I have to say it really does affect a child's understanding when there are no consistent rules of privacy between them and their parents. Eventually, this stopped, but not until well after I entered university. I agree that parents should have the upper hand in this respect, but the authority shouldn't be abused.

[Eternal_Freedom]

In my family it was a general rule that once you were 10 or so you were allowed to have your bedroom door closed and everyone else would politely knock, unless we put a sign up saying "do not disturb." It worked out well enough I think, although that was also because we were taught from a very young age that we should be polite to each other and that good manners cost nothing.

Of course, that didn't stop my brothers knocking and complaining that my choice in music was terrible.

[edaw1982]

Wait, how can such a scenario arise in the first place? You guys don't have locks on your doors? Or do all family members always carry keys for every door in the house around?

Got locks on the bathroom door. Who wants to be sitting on the toilet and someone barges on in because GODDAMMITNEEDTOUSETOILETCANT'WAITTOKNOCK.
At least we've got another lesser used, less secured en-suite.

But as a rule of thumb, it's not common (at least in New Zealand) to have locked internal doors unless there's a reason for them to be locked.
Bedrooms generally don't fall under this criteria.

[Simon_Jester]

^ Out of curiosity, what do you teach, if you don't mind me asking?

Math.

[Mr Bean]

I locked my door all the time as a kid and having a lock was standard even if like they said it was the push button type. My mother came into my room like a breach and clear exercise in SWAT. Knock twice then throw the door open and move into the room in the same motion. I got in the habit of locking my door when she slammed me in the face twice with the door because I had a center door and if I was at the book case to the right of the door the door knob went into my ribs/face if I was ducking down. She fell out of that habit once I hit high school.

[slebetman]

OK. That's really surprising for me because as mentioned by AniThing every house here have locks on every door (sometimes even the cupboard and drawers in the cupboards if you look at antique furniture).

And the push button door knob locks use actual individual keys on them which are fairly difficult to pick. My trick of opening an accidentally locked door is to slide a soft plastic card to force the spring loaded bolt to slide back. It's like what you see people do in movies and on TV in the 80s with credit cards but trust me, credit cards are much too stiff to do it properly. If/When that fails my second trick is to slide a thread or string on a long piece of wire or scrap plastic or cardboard up the door through the gap and try to loop it around the knob on the other side then with a long piece of cloth tied to the end of the string (I usually use a sarong for this) pull the string to drape the cloth around the knob then keeping tension on the cloth twist the knob on the other side. Failing that I'd have to call a locksmith. But I've never called a locksmith.

Every house I've ever rented when I was studying in the UK also had locks on every door. But that's sort of understandable I guess when you have housemates and you really want privacy. In other countries I've only been hotels and B&Bs so they also obviously have locks on the room doors. I've never considered that people would install ANY door without locks. I didn't even know you can buy doorknobs or door handles without locks.

Even traditional wooden houses effectively have locks on every door. My granddad's house didn't have door handles or doorknobs. You'd simply pull on the doorframe to open the door and you can only properly close a door from the inside using a sliding bolt. So once closed a door can't be opened from the outside so you'd have to knock to get someone in the room to open the door.

[slebetman]

OK. I feel like I need to clarify something. Most of the time nobody locks the room doors (except my mom at night because she considers it a last line of defense in case anybody breaks in). But the locks are there as an option to use in case you need some privacy. But because nobody normally lock their doors your parents do get suspicious if they find it locked. So far my kids are too young to get suspicious and they simply buy my "daddy accidentally locked it and daddy and mommy was asleep and didn't notice the knock" explanation (I think).