Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
I’m a 15-year-old girl, the older of two siblings. I was using the family computer and wanted to check my Reddit, and that’s when I found out that Dad has a Reddit account too. I didn’t snoop then, but I did write down his account name and then checked it out on my phone later.
I shouldn’t have done that. I should have realized it was private because he had never mentioned it.
A lot of his posts were heavy. They consisted of complaints about his life, how he resents his family, and then feels guilty about feeling so resentful. How he can’t stand Mom anymore but thinks it’s important to put up a good front for us kids, and how he wishes just once his kids would come to him with something other than a problem we expected him to solve. He said some nasty things specifically about me, too, about some personal incidents I don’t want to share here, but that I had shrugged off as just normal interactions—I hadn’t realized how much I had hurt his feelings.
I feel like I’d know the answer to the question of what to do about this (NOTHING) if that was all there was to it. It wasn’t meant for my eyes, I know. But the thing is, there’s also this undercurrent about how terrible he feels for having these thoughts and feelings and how he needs to “stay strong” for his family. It makes me really uneasy and worried about him. I had no idea he was going through any of this. I feel like I pried open his diary! I don’t know what to do now. Should I just pretend I saw nothing? Or should I tell him?
—Really Stepped Into It
Dear Stepped,
Is there an adult you feel close to, who knows and loves your father—but who is not your mother—with whom you could talk this over? It’s really beyond the scope of what a 15-year-old should be doing for a parent for you to take responsibility for your father’s mental health—and to carry the burden of guilt you now feel for having “snooped.” Of course, if your dad put all of this on Reddit—and your whole family shares one computer—he had to know, at some level, that someone (if not everyone) in the family would read it. At the very least, he was making his confessions in a public space: Reddit is not a diary, as much as it may sometimes feel like one.
I don’t know why people reveal their most private thoughts to strangers on the internet (this may be a generational blind spot of mine; I am acquainted with a number of 40-somethings who seem to share everything, no matter how private, on Facebook), but I do know that writing about (what sounds like) one’s depression on a shared computer is a not-so-subtle cry for help from those who have access to it. You are not the right person to help him, but his best friend or a sibling of his might be. (And for all you know, he is just using Reddit to blow off steam. Some of those 40-somethings I mentioned definitely use Facebook that way. I read their posts and become alarmed—then learn that they’re just fine, really; they were just having “a dramatic moment.” Again, I’ll acknowledge that this mystifies me. But it is apparently a thing.)
In the meantime, can you make every effort to be kind to your dad? You might even approach him with something other than a problem for him to solve. It won’t fix him—as I say, it’s not for you to fix him—but it certainly couldn’t hurt.
—Michelle
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Up until two weeks ago, my husband “Jeff” (39) was a model family man and father to “Jenny” (8) and “Kyle” (6). About the only problem in our marriage was his insomnia, and while it was difficult to deal with him getting up 5-6 times a night, every night, it was hardly his fault. Still, after over a decade of trying to treat the insomnia with nothing working except for drugs that had side effects worse than the insomnia itself, we eventually decided on adding a bedroom annex to the home office, and Jeff sleeping there instead of with me. Ever since then, he’s been half-assing as a father.
