Once kids get to a certain age, they no longer need constant parental supervision. The adults might at first rejoice in their newfound freedom, but very quickly, they might get the unsettling feeling that now their offspring can do things by themselves, without a parent seeing or knowing.
Netizens wanted to hear parents' stories of the weird, unusual, and downright disturbing things they had found when being nosy in a kid's bedroom. The list runs the gamut from obvious, if unpleasant answers to twists and turns worthy of a true crime series. So get comfortable, make sure to upvote your favorites, and, perhaps, reconsider being nosy if the desire arises.
#21

I’m pretty sure my mom found my prescriptions I had from after having an abortion but she never said a word about it to me. I had hidden them in my laundry hamper for two weeks. Near the end of the pill cycle I came home and Mom said she had thrown some of my laundry into the wash. I panicked internally and ran back to my room. The pill bottles were in the hamper still under 1 layer of clothes. I’m still convinced there’s no way she missed that and I think she just chose to take it to her grave. It was 12 years ago.
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102points
#22

My parents raided my older brothers room once .... The sock, oh my god the sock....
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99points
#23

When my son was 3 I found an old banana peel in a clipboard that opened. We were battling a fruit fly infestation and couldnt figure out what they were after. It was so disgusting when I opened that thing and hundreds of fruitflies flew out
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95points
#24

My parents once found an intact slice of pizza in my little brothers drawer that had been in there for months
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95points
#25

Not quite on topic but funny all the same. I was about 18 or 19 and still living at home. One day my mom did my washing so a load of my clothes was loaded into the wash basket.
As they went in, I saw a condom wrapper fall onto the floor which my mom then trod on without knowing. It was stuck to her foot for ages before she noticed. I did everything short of pretending there was a fire in the house to distract her enough to take it off.
90points
#27

I was a bit of a hoarder, so my mum often insisted on going through my stuff with me and chucking out stuff I didn't use. She pulled this on me as a surprise, so when I was about eleven-ish, one of the things she pulled from under my bed was a pair of shorts that I had attempted, with my amateur sewing skills, to turn into a skirt - this being because I'm transgender, didn't know it yet, was fascinated by girls' clothes, and couldn't think of any other way to own some.
She just sort of looked confused at that sorry scrap of material before I snatched it away and put it deep in the black bin bag she'd brought up.
So far as I know, she never figured it out. She's not the kind of parent I could tell about being trans, so she'll likely never know. Luckily I'm now living in my own place and can wear whatever I like.
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82points
#28

I've told this story before but a year or two ago I slowly started cleaning my son's room--he was 13 at the time, I believe. I wanted to see how long I could do this until he noticed his room was magically getting cleaner. I would go in his room when he wasn't home and tidy the bookshelf one day. Another day I would go through the box that had his old schoolwork, etc. I knew I was opening myself to finding something I didn't want to find, and I was relieved and amused that all I found was candy wrappers. So many candy wrappers. We should own stock in Hershey.
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80points
#29

My kids friends all hang out at my house to use my computer. Although my kids are younger, their older friend is 14. I found that he has been using my computer to look at p**n, which is like, eh. Big deal. His younger brothers came to tattle on him to me and I was like, do you seriously think I didn't know? They now think I'm a computer God.
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75points
#30

TL;DR below For context, my mother had a huge falling out with my aunt and grandma. Big enough that she cut off all contact, even though grandma has been in and out of hospital. We aren't allowed to visit, she gets angry if we even mention them, and she made us block them on Facebook. I had been out shopping with my mum and found a preowned plaque. It was a heart with a poem on it, basically saying "I love you grandma". I bought it secretly and hid it on the way home, and went to the post office alone to mail it to them (they live about 4 hours away, in Bendigo). Grandma sent back a little card saying thank you and that she loved me and she was sad about the falling out, and I sticky taped it to my bookshelf so that I would see it every now and again (the left side of my bookshelf faces the door, and the right side faces the wall of my room, where you only go to access my wardrobe) Somehow, even though she hadn't been that far into my bedroom for about 10 years, my mum found it and flipped. Her. S**t. You'd think I had personally threatened her. She refused to speak to me for a week and my father came in and spent close to an hour yelling at me, telling me how awful grandma was and how he looked forward to p***ing on her grave. TL;DR: Mum found a card from my grandma, who we weren't supposed to be talking to and treated it like I had slapped her.
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75points
#31

The absolutely atrocious way her father and stepmother treat her. Small stories come to surface but she's sworn to secrecy and I can't actually prove anything. She's 11 and asks about very specific mental conditions she's "heard of in movies" she overeats constantly and sleeps with all her lights on here...
If you think I haven't tried everything in my power to protect her, you underestimate how good some people are at putting the fear of God in their children when it comes to hiding the fact that they torture their children emotionally.
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68points
#32

My son is very honest with me, so I've never felt the desire to snoop on him.
Over the summer, I was looking for my tape measure, and remembered that I'd asked him to measure the space above his desk for shelving. I went into his room (he was away at camp for a couple of weeks) and looked high and low before spotting the tape measure under his desk. I couldn't comfortably reach it because of how the desk was constructed, so I pulled the desk away from the wall. While doing so, I heard a soft thud.
After I'd created enough of a clearance to shimmy between the wall to the back of the desk, I saw the gift box that we'd wrapped his birthday present in, splayed on the floor with what appeared to be an assortment of fabrics. Upon closer inspection, I saw what the "fabrics" really were - a box of washed and unwashed women's underwear.
I put the desk back, but couldn't recreate how the box was situated before. After thinking about what to do, I decided to broach this with him when he returned. More than anything else, I wanted to be sure he wasn't doing anything dangerous (so many thoughts ran through my mind, the strongest being that he was somehow buying them from or bartering with girls at school...).
When he came home, I told him that I needed to talk to him. He seemed nervous, and as soon as I mentioned the tape measure he started to cry. He knew I'd found the box and was crying not because of that, but because he thought that I'd found out that he was stealing his best friend's mother's underwear, from his best friend's mother. I'm not sure why he arrived at that conclusion, but such is the mind of my 13-year-old.
It turned out that over about 20-month period, he'd taken to swiping my wife's coworker's (mother of his best friend) underwear from her laundry basket, hamper, and even her bedroom drawer whenever he had a chance. There was a total of eleven pairs of underwear.
It took me a few days to have a heart-to-heart with him, and it was one of the most difficult conversations I'd ever had to have with him.
Maybe I stopped him from engaging in progressively more perverted behavior, maybe not. I just hope that he doesn't go down a path like that again, and that his sexual proclivities manifest themselves in more natural and non-illicit ways.
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67points
#33

My son (35) lives at home and hid an opiate addiction for 15 years, fueled by my junkie mom. It was far more extensive than I could've imagined. I got wind of this when he admitted it, wanted treatment, and is now 2+ years clean and is still attending meetings. I am so proud of him but Jesus, they can be incredibly sneaky.
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67points
#34

The child of the story, but my parents have two houses, one main one, and a little beach place. I maintain a room in both. My fiance and I use an ammo can for storing our sex toys, rope, lubes, etc. Last take we were at the beach house, it got left behind. This time when we went there ... it was where we left it, but opened. If you don't know how to close it, and you're nervous due to the nature of what you found, it can be hard to close. So, one of my parents, assumably my mom, found the sex toys... Either that or the house keeper was snooping, and I doubt that.
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65points
#35

My mum was helping me pack up my house after my husband died earlier this year. I had told her I'd handle our bedroom, but she went in there anyway and opened all the drawers! She found sex toys, lots of lube, boxes of condoms from when hubby and I first started dating, all my lingerie, photos of me in said lingerie. I don't know what she expected but maybe don't open your 30yo daughter and her husbands personal drawers? I just about had a heart attack! Thankgod she didn't snoop much further because we had some c**e and V****m in the back of that drawer, I'm sure she would have freaked if she found it.
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65points
#36

I actually found some crazy stuff of my dad's when I was snooping around as a kid including a gun (I live in the UK, guns are most definitely illegal here) and huge plastic bag full of cash in the laundry basket. Turned out he was "away on business" a lot for a reason.
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61points
#37

My daughter went through a phase when she was around 6-8 where she only ever put dirty tissues under her bed. I would regularly be on hands and knees sweeping boxes worth of tissues out from under there while going "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? WE HAVE A BIN!"
Thankfully she's past that.
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59points
#38

Not sure if this counts, since i never really had an own bedroom growing up. But when i started dating, mom went through my cell phone and found my sexts... All the sexts...
what made things worse was that as an Indian kid, I was never really allowed to date. Im 27 now. Still not really allowed to date ><
56points
#39

My 13yo son is depressed. First off - No I wasn’t spying on him. We recently replaced his phone and the old one was still logged in to his accounts. Some messages popped up on the lock screen and it concerned me so I looked closer. He talks to his ex-gf a lot (He’s never admitted to having a gf) about how he’s been depressed for over a year. Now, I open the old phone once in a while to keep an eye on his mental state. I don’t care about the p**n or the weed references or anything else, I just want to make sure he’s ok. Is it wrong for me to keep checking up on him like this? And how do I help him without letting him know what I’ve seen?
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54points
#40

Letters from the school pertaining to grades and behavior issues.
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48points



