I snooped and discovered much more than I bargained for …



My 16-year-old is basically writing porn. For context, they’re a relatively smart, compassionate teenager and they love to write—and OK, I was snooping and I shouldn’t have been, but they’ve also been diagnosed with depression, and throughout quarantine it’s felt like they’ve been hiding something from me and, fearing the worst, I looked at their iPad while they were taking a shower and found it open to a page of drafts to some site. I haven’t realized until now that they’ve gotten into writing fan fiction, specifically on one particular, popular website, for multiple fandoms, and some of what they write is … fine. Has some swearing I don’t like them using, but I get that it’s a creative outlet for them—some of them might actually be good if I understood the fandoms and such.

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But then I found some other fan fiction they’ve also written, and it’s very … mature. And adult. I don’t know where they learned half of this stuff—it feels like a year ago they didn’t even know what a condom was, and now they’re writing explicit and age-inappropriate fan fiction.

Do I give them “the talk”? Ground them? Take away their iPad so they can’t write? Tell them that I’m OK with their creativity, but this is inappropriate and it needs to stop? I’m reluctant to do anything because I know I was in the wrong for snooping, but now I feel like I have to do something.

—They Didn’t Learn This in ELA

Dear ELA,

No. You do not have to do anything. I promise you that nothing has ever needed to be done less. On your list of Things Not to Do, add “confronting my 16-year-old about their fan fiction,” and look at it often should you need a reminder.


[moves aside so as not to be crushed by stampeding hordes of teens now rushing to change their AO3 usernames just in case you are their parent]

Please don’t ground your kid over this, and don’t try to forbid them from writing, either. There’s a pandemic and they’re depressed, but even if these things weren’t true, writing fan fic is obviously an important and needed outlet for them, and is likely providing some form of community as well. They aren’t doing anything wrong. We are all of us, at any/every age, entitled to hobbies and fandom and fantasies and a rich and private inner life. I read so much fan fiction and so many of my grandmother’s romance novels when I was younger than your kid (which everyone in my family graciously pretended not to notice). They are 16—they could be having sex by now, never mind reading and writing about it.

You can certainly talk with them about sex and intimacy, bodily autonomy, internet safety and the importance of maintaining their privacy online, etc. But I just don’t see any good reason to subject them to a conversation about the fact that you read their rated-E fan fic. And I can only imagine the mortification and anger they’d feel if they knew that you’d snooped on their device and found their stories. Your 16-year-old still thinks their fan fiction writing hobby is a secret (which they must want it to be, for now—at least secret from you, or they’d have told you!), and maybe they also still think they can trust you. If I were you, I would not want to disabuse them of either belief. Stop creeping on their iPad. Don’t read any more of their stories. Let your teen live—and have their erotic fan fiction too.