The home network security discussion is fascinating, but I’ve been trying to find some literature on kids’ exposure to nasty internet stuff. I’m not finding much, but I’m probably not searching correctly. This is way out of my field.
Bricker’s impassable porn moat notwithstanding, I’m kind of curious myself if any studies have found access to porn causes or is even correlated with antisocial behaviour. I was under the impression none had.
Okay, I think I get where you’re coming from a little better now. I still don’t think it’s common for this sort of thing to happen, but I can certainly see why you’d consider your personal experience more compelling than my personal experience.
So the question is whether it would be harmful for your kid if he accidentally found tentacle porn or other extreme adult content online. My opinion would be that it’s not totally harmless in that he might be disgusted, frightened, or otherwise upset by what he saw – heck, there are things on the Internet that would upset a healthy adult – but I’d be more worried about nightmares, etc., if he were younger. I’d think that by around age 12 a kid would have a moment of :eek:, quickly close the browser, and feel grossed out for a while. That’s not an experience I’d want a 12 year old to have, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not that bad.
For a 12 year old I might actually be more concerned about porn that’s rough or “edgy” without being as freaky as tentacle porn. A 12 year old boy presumably knows that people sometimes say and do gross things just to be shocking, so that’s an explanation for tentacle porn and the like that he could understand. But a more realistic video might wind up being more confusing for a kid who doesn’t know much about sex: “Eww, do girls really like that? Wait, am I supposed to like that?” He’d presumably figure things out eventually, but I would consider unnecessary confusion or shame about sex to be somewhat harmful. On the other hand, some might argue that excessive parental concern about Internet pornography could also cause a kid to feel confused or ashamed about his burgeoning sexual curiosity. I don’t have any good answers there, although I assume that either way most kids would probably turn out fine unless there were other, more severe factors involved like mental illness or abuse.
Personally, regarding internet access, I’d be more worried about the types of people my kid is associating with. The internet is the new playground for pedophiles, and a lot of grooming can happen under an innocuous username who is very willing to console a child having a bad day at school, mad at their parents, or confused/embarassed about puberty.
In a lot of cases of very severe cyberbullying, there was a lot of openess on the part of the victim (probably due to foster a connection with other people) which ended up making the bullying much easier.
With porn, I’d be much more worried if I had a daughter and she was into My Little Pony, since Bronies have heavily pre-empted the fandom of the show and produced a lot of porn and violent images associated with it. I’ve been told it can be risky to google image search, only to have this appear on the computer screen :eek:
What an absolutely moronic thing to say. A father is concerned about his child.
Lyra Heartstrings! Nooooooo!!111
Is this an extension of the helicopter parent pit thread? Tentacle porn is (an important!) part of life. The kid is 12; it’s time to let go and let him see these things. Besides it’s so silly he’s probably just going to laugh it off. I remember finding some porn magazines when I was younger than that, we laughed it off.
I’m thinking some of the islamist decapitation videos and stuff coming out of Iraq and Syria could cause some nightmares. But only damage if he obsesses over them and watches hundreds.
Pick any superhero or cartoon character. Google with safety off. You will find “what the fuck” stuff quite fast, from men bigger than the Weather Girls dressed up as Powerpuff Girls to slash.
Bricker, I think your worries are perfectly logical. I also think that once the current setup starts being too small for him, you’re unlikely to be the person to whom he goes for… certain… questions… you know, the ones my brothers still call “things we couldn’t ask Mom and Dad” but which apparently I was good for, at least some of them. Look around you, metaphorically speaking. Other than you, your wife and his own peers, who are the people you think he might go to with those questions? If you can see a few resources you’d be happy for him to use, that’s good.
Don’t google anything to do with MLP without safesearch on. It’s just a really bad idea. I’m reminded of the statistic that back when Pokemon X and Y came out, MLP stopped being the fandom with the most R34 submitted to one of the big R34 portals on the web… For the first time in, IIRC, 2-3 years. And do not let them anywhere near the fanfiction websites.
I agree with Bricker that some controls on web surfing make sense for 12-year-olds. I haven’t put in place all of the tech that he has, but I’ve put the computer that my youngest uses in a public space.
However, I cannot agree with blocking youtube! That’s like child abuse or something. 
I just Googled the Powerpuff Girls and didn’t notice anything that struck me as unwholesome or inappropriate for kids on the first page of Google or Google Images, and that was with the safety off. I wouldn’t normally be searching for cartoon characters with Safe Search off though, because I’m not trying to find adult content about cartoon characters. If I wanted to find that sort of thing I’m sure I could do so in a matter of seconds, but I don’t.
Safe Search probably wouldn’t filter pictures of men dressed up as the Powerpuff Girls, but I also can’t see being worried that my kid might see some nerd’s cosplay photos. Even very small children understand that people sometimes dress up in silly costumes for fun.
Your concerns are reasonable, IMO, although the effort you put into controlling your child’s browsing could give those forbidden sites an irresistible air of mystery. Five years from now your son might well be obsessed with those very sites because of that mystery.
When my boys were in the 12-13 ranges the internet was still a wild place. It seemed that some form of porn was always a click away and the blocking software was slow and full of holes. I chose to not try to block anything but let my sons know that I, a technical person, have ways of finding out what they have been looking at and that I would not hesitate to disconnect the hole house from the web if necessary. Not so easy these days, I know. What kid wants to think of his dad looking over his shoulder while he rubs one out?
Anyway, I couldn’t stop them from looking at anything they wanted over at friends houses. Those friends who’s parents don’t believe (I find out later) that children should ever be told no. A surprising number of parents don’t bother to even be home when their children have guests, or they even actively help their kids cover up the fact. In the end, I figured they could always find a way - but that it didn’t have to be at my house. Telling my kids what I will and will not allow in my house, and why, sets a benchmark for them to work with, at least. They seem to have grown up without major sexual issues.
Try again with Bing. Google automatically has safe search on, unless you use adult search terms, in which case it turns safe search off automatically (although you can turn it back on manually).
I been to that site!
I do some light control with opendns, but thats it. My concerns are less about content and more in the realm of nefarious adults looking for live interactions with underagers. No live interactions or sharing personal information with strangers online is really the only hard rule. They know why and it’s a topic we’ve discussed many times.
For me the question would be…
Does your son now have this ‘expectation of sex’ after watching any kind of porn. Will he think, “well, she’s wearing a short skirt, and she’s had a few drinks, she must want my dick in her mouth”?
But that doesn’t come necessarily from ‘weird’ porn. The most ‘damage’ it might do is that he’ll develop a fetish of some sort.
And its inappropriate. He shouldn’t think that porn should have any debilitating influences on his kid.
Well, if we’re going by what a parent shouldn’t factor into childrearing because of a lack of supporting evidence, I submit exposing a child to organized religion is potentially far more dangerous than porn.
So to “accidentally” find extreme adult content it’s not enough for me to manually turn off Safe Search in Google, I have to go to Bing (a search engine I do not normally use) and search there. Well, I’m still not seeing anything sexually explicit, although I do note that Bing automatically has Safe Search set to “moderate”. Since I don’t actually want to see Powerpuff Girls porn I’m fine with that, but in the spirit of research I’ll manually turn off Bing’s Safe Search.
Okay, after scrolling down past a bunch of totally innocent images I finally found one thumbnail showing Bubbles with a large (cartoon) penis next to her. I think it was actually an ejaculating cartoon penis, but I chose not to take a closer look. Now, I would not want my hypothetical child to see a picture of a penis while innocently searching for a favorite cartoon character, but it took some deliberate effort on my part to get to the point where I could “accidentally” see an inappropriate image. And even then it was just a stupid cartoon penis, not something really disturbing like a graphic rape scene.
I’ve seen pictures of real penises online when I wasn’t looking for them, so you don’t need to convince me that it’s possible to stumble across adult content by accident. But like I said before, in my experience an innocent search rarely leads to anything more extreme than photos of naked people and Bricker has said that nudity isn’t really what he’s concerned about.
To be clear here, I do agree with Bricker that there is content on the Internet that would be disturbing for children. Heck, there are things on the Internet that would be disturbing for most adults. I think it is appropriate for parents to try to shield their children from such content. I just don’t think it’s very common for someone to accidentally stumble across tentacle porn or other extreme content if they’re not already looking for (less extreme) porn.
Sara Juarez Koch wrote a seminar paper entitled, “The Effects of Pornography on Adolescent Development”: it was for her Master’s thesis. It basically consists of a literature review. Pages 13-17 are most relevant.
Many of your son’s peers will watch porn at one time or another. “…in a recent survey by Thompson (2007) of 429 Canadian adolescents aged 13-14, a vast majority of both male and female students reported having viewed explicit pornography at least once, with 33% of the males reporting very high usage compared to eight percent of females surveyed.” Nonetheless, there’s been no great uptick in psychological derangement, despite the vastly expanded access to the material. So keep that in mind.
In Sweden, porn viewers were more likely to experiment with kinky sex: having a discussion about birth control and STDs is probably a good idea regardless. Also, “… adolescents who view an exorbitant amount of pornography tend to have more contemptuous attitudes about love and sexual pleasure, with little or no warmth towards partners.” Perhaps the dose makes the poison (as it does in so many other contexts). There’s also the matter of confusing cause and effect. Other studies are more dubious about the links between porn and bad behavior.
Personally, I’d give your kid explicit permission to hack your system, providing he tells you about it soon after his success. Nothing wrong with presenting challenges.
PDF!:
minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/56253/Koch,%20Sara.pdf?sequence=1