We did a good job keeping our kids away from porn on our home network but my 11-year-old daughter was shown porn by one of her friends during a sleep over. This was years ago before unlimited phone data and before pornhub was doing mainstream advertising. I cannot imagine how a parent can keep their children safe today.
You can't keep your kids "safe" in the traditional Leave it to Beaver avoid at all costs and block it out sort of way.
You can keep your kids safe by educating them about what is out there, and by troubleshooting what they can do when confronted with it, as well as having on-going discussions about whatever the topic is and providing safe, non-judgmental escape chutes for when they need it.
And even then, you just have to hope for the best.
My two cents, for what that's worth. I have no research to back this up, just my own experience with my kids.
> cannot imagine how a parent can keep their children safe today
Is there evidence such prohibition keeps kids safe? It’s the environment I grew up in. But the kids who had healthy home environments where such topics weren’t taboo seemed to have a leg up.
My daughter has a girlfriend who was watching hardcore porn at age 7 or 8 and telling my daughter all about it. That is not healthy for that kid. They are going to get the wrong impression of how to interact with boys and it is pretty clear something is off with that kid now.
We limit alcohol, driving, tobacco, voting for minors because we judge them not smart enough to make good decisions. Why do you feel we should not exclude hardcore porn?
> Why do you feel we should not exclude hardcore porn?
I don’t think kids should watch porn. I do think banning it will be as successful as we’ve been with alcohol, with the same blowback that comes from surrounding something in mystery and black markets.
Raising barriers to access works. Kids generally do not drink alcohol, drive, vote or smoke. There are exceptions but it makes it a lot harder and does reduce access. And when they do drink and smoke it is generally when they are close in age to the end of the ban.
To say that some will get around it doesn’t mean we should not do what is best for that group as a whole.
Unlimited and early extensive use of social media and hardcore porn is not healthy for kids. It will screw up their worldview. We should ban and limit them smartly if we want to support healthy kids.
Porn, a digital good, is easier to circumvent access controls to than alcohol. And we’re crap at keeping our kids from drinking before they’re even fifteen [1].
So I agree with the goal: less porn in front of children. But I disagree with the method: trying to ban it.
I'm not sure this statistic tells us much. It'd be more interesting to compare something like teen alcoholism rates vs legal drinking age. For all we know an age requirement may very well lower alcohol abuse rates. Besides, I really don't see a reason not to restrict it - should we just legalize alcohol for all ages? I think not, because what we have right now most likely does not hurt. Same logic for porn.
No controlled trial means we don't know if it's helping or not. Nobody is saying that the legal drinking age is the sole determinant of addiction rates.
It's a bit of a leap to assume that not wanting or allowing your 11-year-old to watch pornography means that such topics (presumably, sex) are completely "taboo" in the home.
The difference is that my comment didn't suggest anyone had an unhealthy home environment based on their opinion on this topic. The parent comment did.
A leg up in what? In having more mental health problems?
The majority of kids now have pretty much unlimited internet access and mental health issues have risen exponentially. Statistics don't seem to support your stance here.
There's growing evidence that it's social media in its entirety which is the problem for kids - as a vehicle for unrealistic expectations, distorted self-image, and bullying. But the social media platforms mostly ban porn.
It's the constant easily obtained dopamine hits that are the problem. Porn and social media are exactly the same in that regard.
I would also disagree that social media does a good job of banning porn. There's also sorts of nasty stuff that gets shown to kids on social media, not just porn but violence as well.
> There's also sorts of nasty stuff that gets shown to kids on social media, not just porn but violence as well.
I remember writing much the same in a letter to the editor back in the late 90s, while I was still at school[0].
Only difference is, I was pointing out how weird it was that 16-year-old-me was banned by law from seeing acts that I was allowed to perform[0] while at the same time outright homicide was a thing that sometimes got included in cartoons specifically deemed suitable for young children.
[0] the UK age of consent is 16 but the age to go into adult shops or see adult films is 18… or at least it was when I was 16 myself, I've had no reason to check if it still is or not.
It's interesting that there's broad consensus for this but if the related question of misogynist-but-not-actually-pornographic influences from, say, recently arrested rapist Andrew Tate had come up, the question "how do we keep misogynist influencers away from children" or "how do we ensure kids are 18 before they first hear a racial or homophobic slur, let alone repeat them" would have met incredibly strong pushback.
The belief seems to be that ideological content is necessarily always entirely harmless, whereas nudity is magically harmful?
Not to mention widespread book-banning on the mere mention of LGBT people, which are deemed "not suitable for children" despite not actually having sexual content?
How do we actually determine harm here, and avoid being buffeted by propaganda? There's a long history of banning all sorts of things on think-of-the-children grounds. Things like "access to information about contraception" have previously been considered obscene. How do we avoid going round this discourse treadmill forever?
When I was a kid I used to walk my dog around this nearby area that wasn't developed at all and every year some coomer would leave a giant pile of porn mag subscriptions from like a long time back, he'd be cycling out stuff from like 10 years ago and just leaving it on top of these rocks. I guess he was thinking someone might find them and take them away like some kind of treasure or something when really they'd just blow all over the place and cover the area in porn until it rained and sunbleached away while us kids would just laugh at it and try to keep the dog from sniffing it.
I saw porn when I was 13 and not only do I have lots of fulfilling friendships and relationships, but I'm also high income. I'm getting the impression that perhaps this is just another in the list of dangerous things that aren't dangerous.
