When I was a kid in the 70s, it was pretty standard. You waited till your older brother, (or possibly your Dad, if he was cool) to get a Playboy and leave his hiding place unlocked or discovered then you looked at it.
I mean in my day you were lucky to “sneak a peak” before you were 12.
Of course now with the Internet everything has changed.
So my question is to parents now-a-days.
What do you teach your kids about porn? Obviously you can’t just hope they will avoid it or it will be limited to a relatively mild magazine like Playboy, like in my day.
Balance was a common theme in my parenting. To illustrate I once told my sons there was nothing wrong with someone occasionally looking at Playboy. I said that if someone’s total social interaction was with Playboy there would be a problem. My then thirteen year old immediately said “Dad, I have a problem”.
With regard to internet pornography, I had a long talk about the problems of unrealistic expectations that porn can create.
I think parents need to find a way to put pornography in context to provide a means for children to deal with it. Isolation isn’t the answer because it rarely works long term and short term it would likely add the allure of the forbidden. On the other hand, saying that it is everywhere and essentially ignoring it doesn’t seem viable either.
When my children were early elementary age, we would watch TV together and discuss the actions of the characters. A car game was “real or pretend” from a very early age. Dealing with lots of issues became “casual” instead of “the big talk”.
Once my kid becomes smart enough to bypass all my internet firewalls then he’s free to look at all the porn he want’s. The only thing I gave him a “speech” about was the trouble he (or I) could get into should he decide he wants to trade pics with a girl who is under age. (His smartassed response was “Well, duh, Dad.”:rolleyes: )
I’m not sure I buy into the idea that porn can damage a young kid’s mind.
My parents NEVER prevented me from watching R-rated movies at any age. My Dad kept Playboys in the bathroom unhidden.
I’ve always been a big fan of the female form for as long as I can remember. But naked boobies were never really much of a wow factor for me as a child. Or at least not as much as it was for other kids.
When I turned 12, my parents gave me the antique pornograph (made in 1879) that has been passed down to every generation of males in my family since the days of my great-great-great-grandfather. I still have it, right here on my desk, in fact. It’s seen its fair share of abuse - the needle has been replaced countless times - and the brass trim around the edges has long since lost its sheen, but the hand-carved reliefs in the wood panels of the cabinet - depicting every conceivable orifice being penetrated by rock-hard cocks - are as beautiful as ever. The thing is probably worth around 25,000 dollars, but I’ll be damned if I’ll ever sell it. When I have a son, I’ll pass it down to him when he’s at the right age, and I’ll give him the same talk that my father gave me. I’ll tell him the history of the family pornograph, and explain that while it may provide great thrills, it is no substitute for real human companionship, and is to be used only in the absence of an actual female partner. But I will make it clear to him that when he is in times of need, that venerable old antique will be of far greater value to him that any newfangled computer machine.
Some porn sites can, however, put adware or spyware on your computer, so some caution is in order, even if you’re pretty sure that viewing porn won’t damage anyone’s mind.
Make sure before the kids go looking for porn that they know why they should not click Yes or OK to dialog boxes without reading them. Make sure they know what to do if a dialog box won’t let them out if they click No. (Shutting down the browser in Task Manager worked for me the one time I encountered this.) They should know that they can tell you if they clicked something and the computer is doing something weird, and the consequences won’t be as bad as if they try to hide it.
We’re very open with our daughters about sex. We haven’t come right out and dumped every possible thing at the older one (12), but we’re happy to answer any questions honestly and we let her know not to believe what she hears at school until she comes to us for the real story. I don’t think we’ve directly addressed porn, but I think she knows it exists on the web.
She mostly plays games and does email online, and we sometimes will check the browsing history to make sure. I have no idea what she does at her friends’ houses. She’s just hitting puberty now, and some of her friends are right in the middle of it, so I know the topic is getting closer. When it pops up, I figure we’ll be honest with her and let her know it’s not happening in our house and that she shouldn’t be watching it with her friends. That will probably lead into the “But if you do see it…” discussion.
The kids know that already. It’s the grandparents who need to be edumacated.
I didn’t have a dad in the house, so I had get my own Playboys. When my ultra-fundie Mom found them, she went to the library and checked out some books she thought were appropriate like “Facts of Life & Love for Teenagers”, which mostly told how bad, immoral and dangerous sex was outside of marriage, but didn’t really tell you how to do it.
Of course, I had been screwing for years by that time and the books were laughable, so it shows how ignorant and unaware parents can be. Let’s hope the Internet has changed things for the better for all ages.
When I found out that “someone” had been visiting adult sites on the family computer I simply told my sons that I didn’t want the spyware and spam that came along with sites, and, by the way, they’d have to have a credit card to get to the really hardcore stuff.
I never asked who was visiting the sites, but it stopped.
The escalating Porn Wars between my brother and my parents has been a great source of amusement. For me, anyway.
It all started when my parents caught my brother late at night on an X-rated site, and took away his computer for three months. Since then, they’ve tried passwords, NetNanny, parental controls, and limited computer time. (And he has to have the basement door open). Little Brother tried to thrwart them at every turn, dosnloading anti-parental control software, and at one point even installing a keylogger to get the passwords. He matches their lectures about why Porn Is Bad with “I’m a fifteen year old boy. What do you expect me to look at, flowers?”, “But cousin M’s parents let *him * go on dirty sites”, and “All my friends at school talk about sex all the time.”
As his responsible big sister, I try to help out by smugly informing him that I never looked at smut at his age, and making fun of his sexual fantasies.
I seem to recall my sister making an impact on me at this age by giving me a calm but firm lecture on the need to respect women and so forth. Pretty strong stuff coming from a sister.
But then again, my sister loved to look at my dad’s Playboys (for the cartoons, she said). I’m not sure I would even call Playboy porn, but anyway …
It’s sort of interesting that parents these days seem to go to absurd lengths to be overprotective in some areas, yet they pretty much abandon their kids when it comes to the TV and Internet (lame efforts like NetNanny notwithstanding). I would think having an open dialogue with your kids would better than the constant policing, although armchair parenting is obviously an easy kind of sport.
I’m 34, don’t have kids yet, but once I do. . . I can’t imagine anything this side of not giving them a computer at all will keep them from it. I remember how industrious/devious I was as a teenager at getting access to stuff-- and it was far, far harder to get the dog-eared Hustlers and hand-me-down VHS tapes back in the day than it is to simply turn safe-search off on Google and go hunting for free stuff.
Realistically, education is the only answer. If you’re anti-porn, then you better raise a kid that wants nothing to do with it. If you’re okay with porn, then you have to put it in context/right place in life.
What I do know, however, is that if I had access to all the free porn there is out there today, I might never have graduated high school.
So, you lied to them? Who pays for porn anymore? File-sharing is very simple-- I can’t imagine a teenager eager for porn wouldn’t figure out BitTorrent, Rapidshare, etc. very quickly.
That’s why some parents limit the time their kids are allowed to spend on the computer.
ETA: If someone is spending enough time looking at porn that their school performance is suffering, clearly that’s a problem. Just like it’s a problem if all your social interaction is through porn.
I’ve tried to impart to my kids that anyone doing porn has run out of options in their life.
They are someone’s sister or daughter or friend and have such a low self esteem or drug issues or probably mental health issues and cannot stop themselves from exhibitionary behavior/manic episode, that they feel porn is the only way out of whatever they are in.
Porn has always been around.
Porn will always be around.
Life, in no way, imitates porn. (Except Clown Porn.)
That’s a really broad brush you’re painting with there. May I ask how many porn actors you know personally whose lives you are intimately familiar with enough to make that assessment?
True, and that’s where raising a good kid comes in.
I’m just sayin’-- with MY parents, and MY technical skills, and MY enjoyment of the naughty stuff back in the day. . . if the online porn environment of 2009 had existed back in 1989, I would have ruined myself raw. :
They should be aware of possible legal consequences of using file sharing, also of possible legal consequences if they stumble onto child porn. Before they share files or post anything, they should know that what goes on on the internet doesn’t always stay on the internet. There can be real-life consequences to things you post on the internet. Something you post on the internet could get you in trouble with the law, or could hurt your chances of getting into college or getting a job a few years down the road. A lot of kids don’t seem to understand this.
All true, which is why I zinged about the “you need a credit card for the hardcore stuff.” Smart kids will quickly figure out that they DON’T need one-- which opens up the whole other can of worms you mention RE: file sharing, piracy, surfing very bad forums, etc.
Who pays for porn anymore? File-sharing is very simple-- I can’t imagine a teenager eager for porn wouldn’t figure out BitTorrent, Rapidshare, etc. very quickly.