Let Your Kids Have Some Privacy
- Posted by MetropolisMom on August 19th, 2008 filed in Smart Parenting
Sometime between the ages of 5 and 6, children begin to develop a need for privacy. They shut bedroom and bathroom doors for the first time, and they want their own room if they have shared one with a sibling.
If they do have to share a room, they may even begin dressing in closets or in the bathroom. And in addition to wanting privacy in this physical sense, kindergartners and first-graders start keeping some of their thoughts and experiences private too.
Children this age are just beginning to understand privacy in terms of setting boundaries around their bodies, ideas, and possessions. This change occurs in part because as children start going to school fulltime, they become more aware of their separateness from their parents.
What happens to them at school, they realize, belongs to them. It’s their day, their grade, their play. Children now decide what information they will share, which may not be much as they try out this new concept of privacy and ownership. This is one reason that when parents ask their kids, “What did you do at school today?” the answer so often is “Nothing.”
The ability to control what parents know is a developmental milestone. Before this age, children do not realize that parents do not know what is going on in their minds. Once children have been successful with their first lie or secret, they no longer believe that parents are omniscient.
This is quite a revelation to the child who was once certain that his parents could read his thoughts. The desire for physical privacy is also due to children’s awareness that they have an identity separate from that of their parents.
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