Parents and kids can agree on one thing: they never want the other to know every bad thing they’ve said about them when they’re not around. There are things I wrote about my mom in my diary as a kid that I pray to God nobody ever reads, her especially. I’m sure she’s said things about me that would’ve broken my heart when I was a kid. The key to maintaining this balance is never to read your parents or your kid’s diary or text messages that they did not intend for you to see. That might be a radical concept, especially for parents of minors, but staying civil with your family requires maintaining boundaries and privacy, and if you can’t respect that, things might crumble fast. These parenting texts include posthumous texts from a parent that were never intended to be seen by his daughters, and my heart breaks for her.