Snooping on your child’s personal website in order to keep tabs on them? That’s like painting over a blistering wall as a way of treating a damp patch: it’s addressing the symptom, having for too long ignored the actual root cause of your concern.

If the only way to find out what your child is up to is by nosily reading their website, then you’ve already lost the reins of parenthood. If that’s the case, how likely is it that your relationship with your child will now be improved by confronting your son or daughter with information that you’ve gleaned about them behind their back?

Everyone deserves privacy. Even, occasionally, Paris Hilton. A personal website is just a modern electronic version of a diary. And it has long been regarded (rightly) as shameless to peek at someone’s private scribblings. It’s not as if a 14-year-old even has any truly sensational gossip to pass on.

If your child is up to something truly outrageous/ illegal/depraved, the chances are that you’d have sniffed some worrying warning signs without the need to spy on their website – that’s assuming that the child was deranged enough to reveal his or her outrageous/ illegal/depraved activities on such a public forum.

Given that it is a public forum, the likelihood is that the postings will be anodyne: in which case, what prize do you gain in return for betraying your child’s trust?

It is part of adolescence to distance yourself from your parents and to forge a life outside the immediate family. Of course everyone wants to protect their child from danger. But parents must beware of camouflaging nosiness as concern.

Times recommends

• ITV plans unavoidable TV adverts
• BT rolls out Phorm web tracking
• Analysis: Google is playing the long game against Apple