Parents' and Children's Privacy Management about Sensitive Topics: A Dyadic Study

Parents and children in families must manage private information about sensitive topics. This privacy management can necessitate both individual and collective privacy rules. However, parents and children may have significantly different views of individual and collective privacy boundaries and rules for managing them. Particularly for adolescents, changing expectations and privacy needs may lead to different perceptions of privacy rules, with various relational consequences. To better understand parents' and children's perceptions of privacy rules in the family, this study analyzed individual interviews with 41 parent-adolescent dyads to provide a crystallized view of privacy rules in families. Parents' and adolescents' perceptions of privacy management both converged and diverged in this study, and reflected the nature of the parent-child relationships. When privacy rules could not be reconciled, there were both relational and privacy management implications.