One of the recurring themes I hear over and over as I talk with parents who have attended my Internet safety seminars is “I was so naïve”. What they’re referring to is their naiveté (a little French lingo) on how easy it is for their kids to access porn on the Internet. Parents often think that porn is locked away somewhere on the web, and you need a credit card and have to be an adult in order to access it. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Your kids can access porn by simply typing in any number or website addresses which are easy to find if your kids know how to do a Google search (and what kid doesn’t?). These websites will provide your kids with mountains of porn for them to look at and watch. Yes, I said “watch” because there are tons of free porn website where your kids can watch XXX movies. I am talking about hard core, nothing left to the imagination type movies. Parents are shocked at what’s available for their kids to see and watch, for free, on the web.

Some of you are probably thinking, “My kid would never look at that kind of stuff”.  I’ve had several conversations with parents who thought just that, but came to me for help when they discovered they were wrong. The statistics are pretty clear. On the kids side of things 9 out of 10 of them, between the ages of 8 and 16, have viewed porn online. On the parents side of things 62% of them are unaware that their kids have accessed objectionable websites. So you have a lot of kids looking at porn and most parents aren’t even aware that it’s happening – they’re naïve.

I am sure some parents reading this may go to church with their kids and are thinking the statistics above might not apply to them. Unfortunately 68% of kids at religiously affiliated schools said they had intentionally looked at porn online. There is no comfort in that statistic.

So what are parents suppose to do about their kids and porn? How can they stop the tsunami of sexual explicit websites from flooding into their homes and stealing their kids’ innocence? One thing you can do is educate yourselves. Go back in the archives and see what we’ve written here. You’ll learn a lot and then you’ll no longer be naïve.