Reply #26: OK, first thing you'll need to learn:

[Call Me Wesley]

You're *not* a crappy mom.

Checking his texts is fine, but make sure you forget about them if there's nothing to be alarmed of. Tell him in a few years, but sure, don't tell him now - he'll encrypt his texts or does something else computer-savvy you won't be able to follow. ;)

Last year, my sister got a laptop. She still doesn't really know2 how to check email or reply to it or how to fill out a form on ze internets. She was able to, though, once giving her address to a pop-up that said 'You've just won 13 billion in our lottery.' Took me some time to erase the spam emails she got after this.

She has two teenage daughters who play on the computer like it's the most natural thing to do. She has no clue about their use of it. As far as I know, they just use some IM program and don't have any myspace/facebook or something equal accounts. I had their passwords (never used them,) just to make sure if something went wrong. Since their both now young women, I erased these from my knowledge.

No, it's not easy to have teenage kids in these times. My mom could tell you some stories about my and my sister which will leave you with nights and nights of sheer nightmares (and my sister was way worse - I was a loner.) Agreed, we didn't have computers then, no text messaging, nothing like this. I left my parents once a phone bill around $ 3'000 for chatting over the phone line with a foreign country. ;)
In the end, we both turned out to be very OK.

My sister might see a few things in her kids that seem really familiar to her when she was this age and acknowledges it. Sure not an easy journey, but nothing really new (except for the medias.)

There's a wonderful book out right now (unfortunately in German, but might be translated) a mom wrote together with her son about exactly these issues.

So, you're fine, Shine.