The title pretty much says it all. After years of struggling with dial-up in my pseudo-remote area, we finally joined the 21st century last week with broadband.
It didn’t take long for me to realize my (about to be) 10 year old was Googling some very interesting titles.
Today, we realized she had in fact visited some hard core porn sites.
Last week I tried setting the security controls in I.E. to keep her out of such stuff, but then my wife couldn’t access Hotmail without a Spanish Inquisition after every click, so I disabled the security.
Now it appears I should set up access profiles, with password protection, for us all. Although I really don’t want to do that! I’d rather have a talk with my daughter and explain to her what my (our) thoughts are on the subject of surfing unsavory sights.
Anyone have experience in this? My sweet little innocent child apparently is more knowledgeable in the ways of life than I thought. I’d rather not censor. I don’t think she knows that we can see the browser, or Google search history. Maybe I should try the gentle approach before clamping down on parental controls? Any experience here?
I’d try the gentle approach first. Ten is a bit young to really be interested; it may just be a phase, or kids are talking about it at school, or something. Talking about it may get an, “OK, I won’t.” But if I were you, I’d be prepared to go the profile route.
Is the computer in a common area? If not, that’s another thing you could do.
I’m not a parent, so forgive what is probably going to be a stupid suggestion.
I’d first talk to her- obviously ask about what she was looking at, why, if she has any questions about what she saw, etc.
Then, I’d make sure she wasn’t on the internet without an adult within eye line. I mean really, why was she able to access the internet in private to begin with? There’s no reason a 10 year old needs to get online short of research and more so, there’s REALLY no reason she needs to be unsupervised online.
Well, she has friends with email accounts and knows how to IM them: she “chats.” As a parent there should be a level of trust, and a level of freedom that one must provide. She is, after all, an adult in training. I can’t control what she, and her friends discuss in the playground, and I really don’t want to come down too heavy on this internet stuff.
The computer is in full view in the basement. Sometimes we’re upstairs cooking and stuff.
Wow. The first day she got on the school bus by herself was September 11, 2001. It sure doesn’t seem like that long ago! And now this phase in her development…
Good advice so far, especially about keeping the computer in a non-private place. My parents kept it in the living room when I was growing up.
Also - if you do decide to go the profile route, I’d consider not using any sort of site-filtering software. There are always false positives, and frankly, I think freely browsing the web can be a heck of an education. A better alternative to filtering might be simple logging - set up your web browser to go online through a proxy server you’ve set up on your own computer, and assure your daughter that you WILL be spot-checking that log. If she goes to questionable sites, then she loses computer privileges.
(I recommend using a proxy server because, even though IE and Firefox store their own webpage histories, your daughter might be savvy enough to delete individual listings from them. The proxy server route makes that less likely - send me a PM if you want tips on how to set it up).
Another thing you could do is to install a silent VNC server on the computer, so that the screen activity can be monitored from another computer. It may be that you never actually have to use it - just tell your child that it’s possible for you to do the monitoring, and let her connect the dots.
Of course the problem with doing this is that once informed, a savvy person can start to look for ways to circumvent it.
If she is 10 years old, I seriously doubt she is getting some kind of sexual gratification out of hardcore pornography. I was a pretty precocious little thing and it was still junior high at least before I was reading hardcore porn… and that was reading, not pictures or film (That stuff squicked me for a long time. Naked people are probably not sexy to your average 10 year old.) I would say it was either a mistake or curiosity, but hey, maybe she’s an early bloomer, I don’t know. Definitely talk to her about it (possibly she will be so horrifically embarrassed that she will never use the internet again–I know I would have been), maybe give her the old “generally people have sex when they love each other” speech if you haven’t already, but I wouldn’t be too alarmed unless it becomes some kind of habit. I doubt she is going to be traumatized by it. I don’t think any kind of censoring is necessary, but then I never do.
Of course, only you can decide what your limits are, but I tend to think that kids who aren’t sexually aware are not going to be interested in porn if they do stumble upon it, and kids who are aren’t going to be harmed much by it. But that’s based on my own upbringing… it would be hypocritical of me to vote for censorship, considering what I got up to on the internet as a kid. And I made it to adulthood just fine. Well, mostly.
When you do have the talk with her, don’t just talk about the dangers of pornography. There are dangers with online porn that you don’t get with porn/erotica in other formats. Things like viruses and spyware that even people who don’t have a problem with their kids seeing porn would have a problem with.
Make sure she knows enough about basic internet safety and security to not do things like click “OK” to something if she doesn’t know what it is (too many people, and a lot of them much older than 10, do this), and what to do if she runs into something unwanted that wants to install and won’t accept “No” or “Cancel” (using Task Manager to kill the browser is sometimes the only thing that works). Make sure she knows she can and should talk to you about it if “something weird” happens when she is surfing.
A good anti-virus program and something like Spybot would be a good idea. Using a browser like Firefox instead of IE could make it a bit less likely that your computer will get infected with something nasty as well- IE being the most popular browser out there, it’s more likely than an alternative browser to have nasty stuff written to take advantage of it. Backing up any important files on the computer that she uses for surfing would be a good idea, just in case something bad were to happen.
But make sure she knows that not everybody out there on IM is what they say they are. Make sure she knows what kind of information she should not be giving out on IM to anybody (passwords and things like that), and what sort of information she shouldn’t give to anyone she doesn’t know IRL (home address and that sort of thing). Make sure she knows she can and should talk to you about it if something happens in an IM chat that really bothers her.
Make sure she knows that what happens online doesn’t necessarily stay online. You can get in trouble in the real world for harassing someone online. Some school anti-harassment policies extend to online activities, so she could get in trouble at school for something she does online. Especially make sure she knows that it’s not only her friends that can see text or pictures that she posts online on a blog or a site like Myspace or Facebook. Her parents and teachers can also find those things without too much difficulty, as can the police, college admissions staff, future bosses, and the like, which makes it a bad idea to post pictures or text about activities she wouldn’t like those people to know about. It’s not a good idea to post online about illegal activities like shoplifting or using drugs, especially using your real name, and it’s a worse idea to post pictures of yourself doing these things- police can and do use this sort of thing as evidence. 10 may be a bit young to have to worry about such things, but nothing that’s online is ever really guaranteed to go away, thanks to Google caching and the like, so it is possible that something she does online now could come back to haunt her years later when she tries to get into college or get a job.
Man, how the times change. At that age I was reading up on sex in the encyclopedia. The S volume, of course, but also the P volume for “painting”, since classical art contained the only penises I could get a look at. Also, I learned a lot from Stephen King. But try looking up “orgasm” in the dictionary and pretend you don’t know what it is - does that actually tell you anything? No, my friends, it does not.
It seems that it’s nearly impossible to play around on the net for too long without running into some adult content. My SIL had a Christmas party a few years ago and some of the kids (say 5 to 12 years old) were upstairs in my nephews room playing around with the net. Mostly they were watching music videos on Yahoo and playing games, and when they thought nobody was really watching looking at sports crash videos on Ebaum’s World. I wandered upstairs to see what they were doing, and was chuckling at some of the more gruesome leg injuries that trying to skateboard down a handrail can cause when my nephew decided to close the current browser window and launch a new one. Well right there on the desktop was a rather risqué icon that was probably some form of dialer program and of course he says “Hey, what’s this!?!” while clicking on it.
You’ve never seen an uncle move so fast to unplug anything in your life. This thing just cascaded windows of hard core stuff, just filling the screen. I managed to knock him out of the way and kill the computer, but only after hearing a bunch of “Ewwww” ‘s coming from behind me.
Everyone was ordered downstairs RIGHT NOW and I called my BIL upstairs to show him what was going on. My nephew was 8 or 9 at the time and clearly was going to be exposed to things that I had to wait until I was 18 to find out. It took hours and hours of work to get that program removed, but by the kid wanting to visit these viral sites those things are going to happen.
We took a viral based approach to this talk at exactly the same age with my son. 10 is NOT too young to be horny and turned on by explicit images (sez the girl who grew up with a three foot stack of Playboys in her parents’ bathroom). But it is old enough to learn about internet security, privacy and having the respect to not gross Mom out with pop-ups of ejaculating penises at 7 in the morning.
Let her know that she’s not weird for wanting to know more, that’s she’s not a pervert, but that she does need to knock it off because it might “break” the computer. If you’re a progressive type, save her a bookmark to goaskalice or some other actual informational site, and remind her that she should be bringing questions to you, Mom or trusted Adult Friend instead of trying to find things out on her own. Google information on the Moon Landing denals, and point out that the information she finds about sex online is likely to be as accurate as that.
The other thing I told my kid was that I didn’t want him thinking that most “real” relationships involved some of the things he was looking at, and I didn’t want him building up false expectations of what sex is likely to be. That the people were posed for the camera, not for what feels good, and that he’s probably not going to find himself in a threesome with bisexual twins and a container of Crisco until college, at least!
Dialers can be really dangerous. They can use your modem to make international calls, which can cause a very unpleasant surprise on your next phone bill, to the tune of hundreds or thousands of dollars :eek: It’s not always trivial to get those charges taken off your phone bill, either, from what I’ve heard. Most other spyware is just annoying- it brings up pop-up ads or slows your computer down, but it doesn’t cost you money.
Have got to agree with WhyNot. 10 seems about right for underlining the dirty bits in V.C. Andrews books and sneaking peeks at parents’ ‘secret’ porn stashes and ‘hidden’ copy of the Joy of Sex. Only she’s doing it in the 21st century. She doesn’t need a talk about sex (except for the one you’d give her anyway), she needs a talk about online security. You can be completely fine with her curiosity about sex and still not want her opening the computer up to viruses.
I like that idea. And “don’t believe everything you read online” is a valuable lesson in itself. Teachers complain these days about students not being able to properly evaluate sources, especially online sources, in doing research, so teaching her something like this might even help her in school.
TANSTAAFL is something else she should know that applies online. A lot of stuff that’s offered “free” online isn’t consequence-free- it will install some software on your computer that might show pop-up ads or do other stuff you don’t want. If you give your email address out to get free stuff, you might end up getting a lot of spam. Dialer software, which I mentioned upthread, often bills itself as free- the software is, but the resultant phone calls are not. And she should know that she may not be told what the consequences will be when she signs up for something free, or that they may be buried in fine print.
My sister and I were her age in the pre-internet age, but I remember wanting to send away for free stuff from kids’ magazines around that age, and my sister wanted to (and did) join one of those “10 albums for a penny” record clubs when she was about 10 (she regretted it later- I think letting her do it was a good teaching move on the part of our parents). It’s easier to sign up for free stuff online now, so if anything TANSTAAFL is a more important lesson now than it was back when we were kids.
Tell her that circumventing your monitoring is against the rules, and that there will be consequences if she tries to do it. Then when she tries to do it, punish her in the same way you would if she went to questionable sites.
I’m not sure what kind of parental controls are in Windows XP (I’m taking a stab in the dark here), but I’m really impressed with the built in parental controls in Vista. I set both of my daughters up with profiles and the parental controls allow me to see what internet sites they visit, what programs they are running, any email or IM activity, and lets me set up times when they are/aren’t allowed to log on to the computer while keeping track of how often/when they log in.
There are really only two things you can do, and one here knows your daughter well enough to tell you which is best.
Talk to her about your expectations; then trust her to follow them. That is a trust AND verify situation though.
Or… set up a filter that will prevent the behavior you don’t want.
In either case, though, she has a curiosity that is a little advanced and that you apparently didn’t know anything about. Don’t you think that you should talk to her about that, and sooner than later, regardless of what internet rules you settle on???
OP checking back in here. Lots of good advice and input.
At some point tonight I’ll have a chat with her and let her know that I know what’s been Googled and visited. I think the embarrassment alone might be enough to keep her in check.
My parents gave me lots of freedom as a kid to make my own decisions and mistakes. Of course that was before the internet, but I did sneak the odd peak at my Dad’s penthouse mags. I turned out reasonably fine.
Lotsa good advice here.
I’d also be more worried about viruses, spyware and autodialers than OMG!! NEKKID PEOPLE!!!1!
One thing I’d like to add, though–when you have your talk with her, don’t let her know how you found out what she’s been looking at/for. One of the joys of being a parent is the appearance of being psychic.
Also, if she knows, she can figure out how to get around it (if she’s that type of person).
