It's a universal concern: the ease with which our children encounter adult material on the Internet. Even with the use of strong filters, the junk seeps into our lives. It is often because the porn vendors use aggressive marketing techniques, linking their sites to normal search terms and causing us to accidentally arrive at their site. Also, it's a normal developmental curiosity for our teens to "check out" nude celebrity photos or videos and other forms of porn. There is substantial peer pressure, especially with photos of a famous person, such as Edison Chen in Hong Kong or Vanessa Hudgens in the US. Perhaps we even encourage it with our concern about porn.
Every teen I talk to has seen some porn online, and most are very unconcerned about it. A recent study Symantec sponsored in Hong Kong found that nearly 71% of parents are concerned about their children browsing porn websites, but only a paltry 10.6% of the youths were similarly concerned. Ask the teens in your life. They will tell you it's just the ugly side of the web and we adults should "get over it."
If you are like me, you probably have some opinions already about the inappropriateness of pornography in your own home. I think it's very necessary to educate our children about norms of human sexuality versus what they might stumble across on the Internet. We've seen in other studies that viewing pornography dramatically impacts teen sexual activity.
In a recent meeting in Hong Kong with a representative of the largest local youth organization, I was asked what a parent should do if they discover some evidence of pornography on the family computer, as a local parent had found recently. I replied that the worst response from the parent is to overreact, to punish or humiliate your child with evidence. This event, though very unpleasant, is an excellent parenting moment. It is an opportunity for you to partner with your child and seek to understand how they arrived at the porn site. Sometimes it was just a mistake, a click on a wrong link in a search engine's results, or they clicked on an advertisement out of curiosity. It's also possible you will get only denials from your teen but you have to ask anyway.
Even if you never fully discover how the porn got onto the computer, make sure you take the moment to explain your family rules about porn and what future consequences will be if it happens again. Let your teen know that you will continue to review the computer's history and will be monitoring the computer's usage. I can't emphasize enough the need to let your child know that you will always try to understand when something bad happens on the Internet and that they can come to you for help.
I asked the youth organization rep what happened in the local family that found the porn on the teen's computer. "Oh," he replied, "the parent ripped the computer out of his kid's room and took away his Internet access. No discussion."
I think we can all try to do a little better.
Original posting date: Friday, May 9, 2008 | 3:00 PM |