My daughter is thirteen.
You said your children (now grown) didn't get the intrusive scrutinizing that was described in this article and they're now successful and responsible adults. They didn't get that way by accident, it's a result of good upbringing and you'd be right to feel proud.
My daughter is on track to make it to adulthood as a responsible and self reliant young woman, although she started to make a detour around age ten after her mother departed. She became disrespectful of others including her teachers and began lying about everything for no reason. It took a lot more diligence on my part and she lost a lot of privileges for about a year because of her pattern of misbehavior, but she got the message eventually and has earned back the trust she lost. I can't see myself using the extreme tactics described in this story because those seem to me to be a tactic of last resort, when all else fails.
I'm surprised it hasn't been posted yet on this thread but to me it's obvious that if the girl is seventeen and she doesn't trust her parents and her parents don't trust her, then the problems they have started a long time ago and involve a lot more than bugging the family car.
Both our kids were 'know-it-alls' and real pains in the ass when they hit puberty. But we kept on them with consistency in raising them. If it were "no" yesterday, it's still "no" today. We never let the children play one parent against the other. If my wife said no, and they asked me the same permission request, I'd ask the kids if they'd asked their mother, and what did she say... We were always consistent, even if we parents disagreed after one had made the decision.
As for lying, we set that down in stone, big time. When my son lied to me, after I proved that he had lied, I spanked him with a belt on his bare behind. That caught his attention!
We also explained to them that no matter what kind of trouble they ever got into, as long as the TOLD THE TRUTH, we would help them resolve the problem.
That's the wy we parents were raised.
I burned up my Dad's 6 month old Chrysler 300 by going 130+ mph (electrical fire). He asked me what I was doing, I told him the truth, and heard nothing more of it.
