Is it normal to be extremely private around your parents?

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well im pretty private myself. i used to tell my grandmother everything until she passed away. i tried telling my family things but they would judge and give negative feedbacks and pick on me about it. my cousin gossips which is something i dont like so i remember not to tell her anything. everything i do has to be a secret. its like enjoy it. it can be fun keeping secrets.

haha, over the years it's gotten better. I'm 25 now and swear and openly admit to being Buddhist and just last night I was talking about how my aspie sensory overload things overlap with emotional overload and mentioned an example where a guy who wants to date me texted me and I had to hide under a blanket to text him back. my mom has gotten to the point where she doesn't care if I'm gay she just wants me to be christian, and she's started extending extremely charitable interpretations of my Buddhist praxis as christianity by another name. my dad not so much, but it's definitely gotten better with time.

course, by 15 I was catatonic and I've dropped out of school approximately 8 times and was just hospitalized for a stress disorder seen almost exclusively in child abuse victims, so they have kind of learned to back off a bit and seen the impact of their old ways...

There was a period when being secretive went into extremes... dangerous extremes.

My parents were pretty demanding in terms of school performance - even a grade of C was a tragedy, followed by scolding or even getting grounded (after which my tedious grandmas would call me to express their concern about my "failure" as a human being and how I would become poor and unemployed when I grow up, etc.).

Naturally, I was afraid of all that. That is why I actually faked my grade book. Twice.

I was horribly worried about a low grade in math, so I used my free time to "edit" the grade book - I did not change the grade, I changed the name of the subject to one I knew my folks wouldn't care about. And it worked - they didn't notice the traces of the "editing".

Of course, this thing came back to haunt me later - grade books were sometimes collected to fill in missing grades (for consistency purposes). And the bad one popped up again. So I had to engage in forgery a second time - this time I simply crossed it out (with red pen). When asked about it, I just said the math teacher made a mistake and then cancelled the grade. Luckily, no one bothered asking her if this were true (otherwise, the lie would have been exposed).

And this was the end of the story. When I think about it nowadays, I can hardly believe I had the courage to do that. It was a great risk.

But hey, it's an experience. I am sure I have learned a few things from it

Yeah I'd say its completely normal. My parents are conservative so I know what they approve of and what they dont* approve of. I normally try to keep certain opinions too myself although sometimes it scares me when my mom makes certain "innocent" assumptions about me. I think "wow your really off track". I am trying to keep the peace cause otherwise, I'd end up arguing and debating.

I sure am. They can be domineering, which rankles me.

My mother once grounded me from the computer for three weeks because I wouldn't let her check my email. She said she grounded me because I was being too secretive. I wouldn't let her see what I was reading online, wouldn't let her read my IM chats. Then she tried to check my email so I pushed her and the keyboard and she told me i was so rude and grounded me from the computer. I knew she wouldn't approve what I was looking up online and I didn't want her to see my chat about it so I was secretive. Plus I was in the yahoo groups about it too so some of it was in my email.

no my parents will not be unblocked on facebook. I don't like sharing some aspects of my life with my parents and yes I think it is a little odd.