Have you seen those Epic Fail videos on YouTube? The videos are usually pretty short. For the first few seconds everything is going along as it should, people are dancing at a wedding or kids are skateboarding outside, and then suddenly everything goes wrong. One dancer does a move that’s beyond their dancing skills and suddenly they’re face down in the wedding cake. A kid jumps his skateboard onto a rail, slips and does a faceplant into the cement. Ouch! The time between normal and disaster in these Epic Fail videos is brief. One wrong move or misstep sets up a chain reaction of events that often ends in pain and embarrassment – two things that most of us want to avoid.
Porn viewing can happen in much the same way as other Epic Fails. Your kid is surfing the web and everything is going along normally. He’s chatting on Facebook then goes over to ESPN.com to check the latest scores. Then he notices some pictures of some good-looking cheerleaders (he’s starting his nifty dance moves). He decides to type in cheerleaders.com to see what comes up (this is when his shoe starts slipping on the dance floor). No pictures come up so he clicks on a link titled “Hot Cheerleaders” (his bodies momentum is carrying him uncontrollably towards the cake table). Naked girls pop up on the screen and Mom walks in the room (faceplant into the wedding cake).
Epic fails don’t take long to happen but they are often a result of people doing things they should not have been doing in the first place. The wedding dancer that hits the dance floor once a year shouldn’t be trying those “Saturday Night Fever” moves. The skateboarder should have tried grinding a low rail on his driveway before he tried the long rail going down the steps at his high school. If either one of these people would have shown a little restraint they could have avoided the embarrassment and pain they experienced. But restraint is often the thing kids lack. That’s why God invented parents. Kids learn restraint from them. Many times parents have to put things in place to protect their kids from their lack of restraint (plastic covers for the electrical outlets / parental codes for cable TV / Internet filters to block porn). If parents don’t take these kinds of actions things can go from normal to disaster quickly and the pain can last a lifetime. That would be an Epic Fail!