Wait, your daughter wanted to express herself on a topic that she finds important, and you told her all the reasons why she shouldn’t? I hope you don’t shut her down like that very often. I don’t know where or why she got this idea, but it isn’t completely out of line for a ten year old to have an opinion on this. She probably doesn’t understand it, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t thought it through as best she can. Let her do the assignment, and let her know she’s entitled to her opinions. You do want her to keep sharing her ideas with you, right?
And on second thought, I agree with LHoD. If she’s thinking, she doesn’t have to agree with you.
I think you should let her write it, regardless of how YOU feel about it (and I’m on your side in all this).
By allowing her to do this and also having conversations about the opposing view with her, she is learning:
That it’s ok to express her views even if they are not popular.
That there will usually be an opposing view to hers and she needs to learn to listen to and accept it, even if she doesn’t agree with it.
That she can embrace her feminist side and express herself (just like the women in porn).
Think of the conversations this can lead to between you and your daughter. The door to talking about the amendments is open, as is the door to some deeper issues surrounding the birds and the bees. It also shows her that mom and dad don’t always agree on everything, and (I hope) that you can talk and disagree about it in a calm, adult way.
She could learn a TON of things from this, you just have to do it in the right way. Just don’t tell her she’s wrong and leave it at that, present your view and allow her to come to her own conclusions.
Having said this, grade four is SO young to be thinking about these things, imo. This is more of a grade eight subject in my mind. But I guess that’s the way things are these days.
My wife wouldn’t have really made me sleep on the couch. She was just being hyperbolic. It did let me know that it wasn’t a subject she was going to bend on, and that purusing it would just lead to tears, but she has never literally kicked me out of the bed.
I never told my daughter not to write anything, I was only trying to explain why porn couldn’t be made illegal (not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of law).
I ended up agreeing that the kid should write whatever she wants to write, but I’m still going to try to pick some spots in the future to try to explain free speech.
I asked my wife how the kid knew what porn was, and I guess she had come across some stuff on google image searches, and my wife had tried to explain what it was. My diaghter doesn’t get it, and it disturbs her.
Thanks for the feedback. It’s nice to read what other people think about this.
We’ve been married for 12 years, but lived together for 8 years before that, so it’s a 20 year relationship. I learned in first 6 months that it doesn’t matter who’s right because she’s right. There’s a comic named Ralphie May who says that married guys basically have to decide whether they want to be right or they want to be happy. That pretty much nails it.
Porn is not an appropriate subject for a fourth grade school assignment. I have a fourth grader in a GT program, and as liberal and open as I am, I would be concerned that my kid finds porn an important subject at this age. We’d deal with it at home, but I would suggest another subject for school. It’s important to teach kids which subjects and behaviors are appropriate in different settings, anyway.
I’d also put some tighter safety settings on the computer. She’s still just a kid, no matter how bright or precocious, and even if you discuss things openly, she still needs certain protections. Some images shouldn’t be seared into a young brain.
Of course it does. Your daughter’s at an age where she’s becoming conscious of her body, maybe she’s beginning to develop, and she’s wondering what it’s all about, how it’s going to turn out (will I get big boobs?), what she’ll do with a grown-up woman’s body, what’s expected of her. She’s confused. She’s going to be a woman someday and she’s thinking about what women do, what’s okay for them to do, what she might be expected to do.
She might be precocious but she’s not an adult, and you can’t tell a 4th grade girl that getting naked and having someone take your picture is okay. She won’t know how to process that, how to differentiate between the little girl she is and the grownup woman she’s going to be. Seeing pictures of naked women makes her uncomfortable, and I think that’s normal, at her age.
Yes, I’ll third that–motion carries! I don’t think the wife should lay down an ultimatum, but at the same time I don’t think Dio should tell his daughter what she can and can’t write. It’s her letter.
I do think it’s an odd topic for a 4th grader to write back. I was vaguely aware of porn at that age but it wasn’t something I thought of as good or bad. I mean, I guess I just thought it was gross, and I had a vague not very well formed idea that whenever you saw a girl dressed scantily clad (like for a car wash), that was Sexist. Not because I knew anything about feminist theory, but because of Jessie “Bringin’ shrill feminazi back” Spano on “Saved by the Bell.” But I never thought of porn as something bannable, exactly. Like, if you asked me about an important issue back then, I’d probably have said animal rights/testing on animals, or the environment, or poverty, or drugs. I didn’t start thinking about porn as a debatable topic until high school or so.
According to you, it’s just supposed to be something she’d like him to do—no mention of whether he’s able to do it or not. So she could write him a letter saying she’d like him to give everybody a pony. From that standpoint, I’d say, let her write what she wants.
What bothers me is that it sounds like you may be coming dangerously close to not allowing your daughter to have political opinions that differ from your own. If she believes something that you disagree with, you can and should explain why you disagree, but you have no right to forbid her from holding or expressing her own opinion. (Speaking of the First Amendment…).
It’s also reasonable and proper to tell her the facts, about what the President can and can’t do, and about what the Constitution allows. But, the First Amendment notwithstanding, some things are illegal (like child porn), and other things have been in the past; so the First Amendment doesn’t just trump any restrictions on porn.
Extremely strong 1st amendment supporter here, so of course I believe your wife’s position is wrong. But I’m also a lawyer/ex-debater, so there is nothing wrong with making an argument for a position you don’t believe. So I’d let my kid pick whatever topic, and then just express my opinions either in helping her anticipate counter-arguments, or just as conversation.
I don’t know if this has been covered yet, but if I were you I’d be a little concerned that the teacher (and perhaps other kid’s parents who might not like the subject being brought up in front of their 9 and 10-year-olds) might be concerned about how she’s being exposed to pornography and notify the authorities who just may come to investigate conditions in your home. I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility, given the hysteria over kids and sex these days, that you could find your kids being taken away pending investigation of your computer and interrogation of both you and them.
All in all, I think there is little that is good that will come of her bringing up the subject of pornography in her 4th grade class.
Seriously, Dio you need to be thinking about this re how it’s going to be perceived. We Dopers can armchair quarterback all we want, but if you have a *4th grader *marching into school IRL with an opposition argument to porn they’re possibly likely (depending on the teacher and admins) to get interested in how she knows about porn, and does anybody at home do anything that makes her “uncomfortable” etc. etc. Maybe I’m being overly cautious, but given how hyper-sensitive people’s antenna (esp school authorities) are on this topic, if it were my 4th grader I’ll tell her to choose another topic.
It strikes me as an unusual topic for a 4th grader, but it’s not that surprising given that DtC’s wife probably explained to her about how degrading porn is. I know that when I was about this age, I already had strong feelings about abortion and gay rights, from conversations with my mom. I can see ten-year-old me writing to President Bush I about why it’s important for abortion to be legal. (Although my arguments would have probably been pretty poor and not based in the law.)
Like some others have said, I would be a little concerned about school reaction. Maybe you can email the teacher and explain the circumstances behind the letter?
So um, which do you do more often: jerk off to porn or have sex with your wife? Just sayin’ your wife’s flaming anger might have been one of those i’m-angry-about-something-else moments.
It might help to separate the discussion with your wife and daughter into two parts:
[ol]
[li]Personal opinions on the issue [insert long, heated family discussion here][/li][li]Relevance for a school project[/li][/ol]
Make sure that your wife and daughter realize that you are not using (2) to suppress their opinions. One solution is for your daughter to cover a less controversial topic for her class assignment, and then write and mail her desired letter to the President from home.
This, this, a thousand times this. Teachers are mandatory reporters of suspected abuse. Plus, Jesus Christ, what if the teacher asks the kids to read their letters aloud? My kid wouldn’t be writing a letter about banning porn because it’s a FA violation, she wouldn’t be writing it because it’s inappropriate.
As a teacher, there’s no way I’d consider this reasonable suspicion of child abuse. My god, I have seven-year-old kids playing Grand Theft Auto at home with dad, far worse than realizing that porn exists, and I don’t report that, do I? Reporting something like this would be borderline actionable frivolity.
Reasonable suspicion of child abuse has, as far as I know, a much, much higher standard than knowledge of (or even opinion about) pornography. Were I her teacher, I’d probably ask her–in the presence of another adult–how she’d formed her opinion, trying to get at the source of her knowledge. On finding out the regrettable, predictable, innocent source of the knowledge, I’d probably advise her that it wasn’t really an appropriate topic for a fourth-grade assignment, and that I’d like her to choose a different topic for a letter–but that she should feel free to send the letter on her own time. It’d be one of those “this isn’t appropriate school behavior” conversations that I have so many times a week with kids.