You know that old saying Boys will be boys? There are many situations where that saying does not hold up — especially if those boys are caught staring at their 20-something neighbor while she takes a shower. It’s a yucky situation for an adult to be in, and now the woman isn’t sure how to make sure it never happens again. Does she go to his parents — or let it slide?
The woman has been renting a house next to a family with three young boys.
As she explained in a letter to the Care and Feeding advice column, the boys range from elementary to middle school age.
The only problem is that her house is a little “architecturally quirky” and she has a window in the shower.
The window is behind a tree and has a frosted panel at the bottom — so in theory you shouldn’t be able to see anything.
But she found out in the worst way that this wasn’t true.
“The other day, I was having a Zen moment in the shower, and looked up to the neighbor’s child staring at me from a second-story window,” she wrote. “I have no idea how long he was watching me or if it happens regularly.”
She’s working on getting the window covered, but now she’s wondering if she should tell the boy’s parents about what happened.
“I’ve literally never talked to these people before,” she continued. “I understand kids are curious, and I’m not angry with the child, but I do think the household adults should probably know.”
Many people thought the mom should get her window covered and leave it at that.
"Fix your own window problem without telling the neighbors that you flashed their kid. Then forget this ever happened," one commenter advised.
"Shower Letter Writer is every curious young boy's dream. Leave it be," someone else wrote. "Cover your window. Let him have just this one time. Don't tell the parents."
A third person had this to say:
"I find it hard to believe that you've never noticed that the second floor window of your neighbor's house looks over the window to your shower unless you just moved in. Either way, now that you know, get that cover for the window and leave it at that (a d–n curtain from Target will do so there's no need to shower at the gym for 'a while'). The onus is on you to cover the window when you don't want people seeing in, not on the neighbor to just not look out their window."
But at least one person thought the woman SHOULD talk it out with the boy's parents.
"Shower LW should definitely tell the boy's parents. Otherwise, when he grows up, he'll be watching pornography on the internet," the person wrote.
Columnist Jamilah Lemieux, however, thought the woman should just forget it.
First things first: Was this an elementary-aged boy or a middle school-aged one? Because that's a big difference, Lemieux explained.
"Those two ages would have relatively different levels of understanding about the inappropriate nature of staring into a woman’s bathroom," she wrote.
Either way, the woman only saw this happen once "and because it doesn’t seem that this young person had to put forth any extra effort to look into your house, I think the right thing to do is to let it slide for now," she added.
In fact, the boy might be embarrassed that she caught him — or that he looked in the first place.
"Hopefully he doesn’t attempt to do anything like that again," Lemieux added. "If he does, you tell on him posthaste."
