Here’s the short version of this blog: No. Your kid is not good enough to stay away from pornography.
Here’s the longer version of this blog:
On a flight home last night after a non-stop work trip, I found myself sitting next to an LA mom who wanted to talk. Like most people who end up beside me in a terminal, plane or train, she was undoubtedly curious about the text flashing across my screen and the notes crumpled up on my lap… it’s not often that you see someone writing so freely about and reading publicly about pornography and blowjobs.
The conversation started as most do, “so, are you heading home or somewhere for work?” Gradually, she asked what she had been dying to ask since we sat down together: “So, what do you do?” This is almost always an uncomfortable topic. If I ever mention that I deal with pornography addiction and the impact of the sexualization of our culture on kids, adults start shifting uncomfortably. This mom just smiled brightly: “My kids are just young… they just aren’t even interested in sex yet, and they’re really good kids… it’s sad that so many parents have to worry about it for their kids.”
It was the classic clueless mom response, and so I launched into a conversation that has probably become a bit too canned. Like far too many parents, she didn’t (yet) have a filter or any type of parental controls on their computers, smart phones or TVs. Her children were seven and nine and undoubtedly very tech-savvy. She had never checked the computer’s history and she “trusted” her kids to make the right decisions.
Parents, if you’re like this mom, it’s time for you to wake up to the reality that pornography is almost ambient in our culture today. You can find porn-inspired scenes in most magazines, advertisements and television shows. The average age that a child is first exposed to pornography is at age eleven, but most of the kids that I talk to were exposed much earlier. Seven out of ten youth who have come across pornography come across is accidentally, and eighty percent of accidental exposure happens in the home. Pornography sites use misspelled words, popular children characters and even cartoons to expose young eyes to their products. So even if your little son or daughter isn’t looking for it, chances are they will still encounter Internet pornography, and more likely than not, you will never know. The vast majority of children never tell an adult when they encounter sexual or scary content online, because they worry that they will be punished.
I once was speaking to a group of fourth and fifth-grade children about Internet safety. After the session, a darling little fourth-grade girl came up to the school’s guidance counselor and me and told us about how she had been trying to find pictures of reptiles online to make a card for a classmate. Guess what she encountered? Bestiality. Loads of it, and other even more twisted stuff. She had never uttered a word to her parents, because she was afraid of what might happen to her. It had been over a year, and those awful images were still in her head.
As parents, we have to get our head of the sand, and recognize that even good, smart, innocent little kids can easily be exposed to pornography if we aren’t doing our part to protect them. If you aren’t using parental controls (we recommend SafeEyes) and a filter on your computer, today is the day for you to do the responsible thing and protect your kids from the content that they should really never see, accidentally or intentionally online.