Posted on 10/14/2011 12:54:16 PM PDT by Cardhu
Access to online pornography is changing the way young people learn about sex, a trend that has many parents worried. But German experts believe many of their fears are unfounded. Instead of trying to prevent porn consumption, parents should focus on teaching healthy sexual values, they say.
Carl was 13 the first time he watched porn. His best friend showed him a video on the website Youporn that showed a woman being penetrated inside a tent. The boys giggled a bit, finding the situation embarrassing.
A couple weeks later, Carl decided he needed his own Internet connection. Until then, he'd only been allowed to surf the Web in his mother's study, where anyone could interrupt him at any time. So he got hold of a WiFi stick and started watching porn several times a week. The videos he watched taught him that women moan like crazy and are always aroused, and he found them very beautiful. Carl himself had not yet kissed a girl.
These days, it's almost impossible for parents to prevent their children from learning about sex long before they have their own sexual experiences. Ninety-eight percent of adolescents have Internet access. They have profiles on Facebook, they flirt in chat rooms, and they watch porn. Nearly half of all 13-year-olds have seen a pornographic video; for 14- to 17-year-olds, it's almost 80 percent.
The World Wide Web has transformed teenage culture, and it defines the topics parents need to talk with their children about. And we're not just talking about the birds and the bees anymore; we're talking about frank discussions of sex in general, including pornography.
Separating Fact from Fiction
Corinna Rückert, Carl's mother, takes a laid-back attitude. "It used to be that boys would sneak forbidden magazines out from under dad's bed," she says...
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Contrary to the title, it sounds like the article is saying that parents fears are well founded, they just shouldn’t worry about it.
No, not possibly... Porn is healthy for marriage, is it not?
/sarcasm
“Experts” are the bane of sensible parents everywhere. Let them show their own kids porn, if they want to, which they probably do.
While it’s perfectly normal for boys (and girls) to be interested in sex and even “porn”, one problem with it is the expectations of sex that it presents to young minds. Most women are not playboy material, don’t orgasm every time, or at all, and don’t want to have sex in a tent or bouncing on a trampoline. It’s little wonder so many kids are jaded and disappointed over sex when it’s promoted (mainly) as just recreation with no feelings involved.
We know what the internet is for... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNARJPNz2CA
I have grammar school aged kids and have put this on all of our computers. It is free and works very well.
http://www1.k9webprotection.com/
Hmmm ...
I didn't.
It wasn't there to be sneaked.
I would know ... I knew where pretty much everything in the house was, even the things I wasn't supposed to know about.
I’m not really worried about 13 year olds seeing a little porn here and there. Didn’t destroy me.
I am worried about 13 year olds finding an easy to get, limitless supply of porn and I’m worried about 8 year olds being exposed at all.
My daughter became a teenager last week. Because of pop culture, and access to porn sites through friends (which she swears she doesn’t watch even though I know she has been exposed by at least one friend when she was 10), the result is that she and her friends already know pretty much everything there is to know about the act of sex. Do you know what a ball gag is? A lot of my adult friends don’t, but my daughter and her friends do, thanks in part to songs like Rihanna’s S&M and the natural curiosity that such lyrics inspire to learn more.
It is completely appalling to me. I was in my late 20s before I knew about some of the things these 12-13 year old kids know today.
I suppose there is an upside, however, which is that 1) these kids are pretty jaded now and don’t seem to find this stuff all that titillating, and 2)it makes it much easier to talk bluntly with her about things of a sensitive nature.
Not that she needs any explanation about the mechanics and the possible acts from me (we don’t get into that). But it does make it easier to talk about what’s right and wrong, and what the risks are in terms of developing relationships with boys as she heads off into her teen years.
Actually, she finds the whole sexualized cultural atmosphere pretty off-putting, which makes me glad. So I’m pretty confident that she has good values around this stuff and won’t do anything really stupid out of naivete.
Still, I’d much rather things be the way they were when I was a teen-ager in the early and mid-60s, before the “sexual revolution” hit in the late 60s, and the Internet turned every computing device and smart phone into a porn theater.
But as they say, you can never go home again, so we parents have to learn to deal with reality as we find it. So far, I’m pretty comfortable with where my daughter is at about this stuff.
It’s really all about instilling values, after all.
There’s nothing to be sneaked in our house, either, unless you count the rather limping translation of Ovid, which I bought because the “Metamorphoses” are a major source of our knowledge about all classical myth.
For boys, I think Lord Byron's quote:
"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'Tis woman's whole existence."
is on the mark.
“It used to be that boys would sneak forbidden magazines out from under dad’s bed,”
In my day we’d sneak a peek at the Sears catalog underwear section when mom and dad weren’t looking. Pretty racy stuff in those days
Yes this free highly configurable filter http://www1.k9webprotection.com/ works great for this problem. For crafty computer smart kids you should also not allow their login to be a local administrator level account to add further protection against them bypassing it.
Ahhh, the male penchant for compartmentalization...
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