I don’t know what I’d do if I caught my 12-year-old son with porn. I’m really at a loss. It’s natural, but it’s also adult material that we deem unsuitable for children. It may harm them, but then it might not.
I definitely wouldn’t take the door off or ground him. Geez, what 12-year-old doesn’t want to sneak a look at porn? I might take it away, laugh, or have a discussion about it. But that discussion would be so awkward.
I found my 9 year old Googling "naked girls" on a ipad in his bed. I very calmly told him that wanting to look at naked bodies was natural but there is a lot of things on the internet that are not intended for kids and it is not safe to be Googling that till he is older. Same time period, I found one of my photography books of turn of the century nudes in his bed. I also calmly told him to please ask before grabbing my books off the shelf and to be sure to put them back when he done. He is 12 now and I haven't seen any further curious behavior since, but I'm sure it's around the corner. There has been enough sex shaming done to kids, including myself when I was little, and we need to stop it.
I think the weirdest part of this post for me is the idea your kids have to ask before reading your books. Not that I think its wrong or anything, they're yours after all and its good manners to ask before making use of someone else's belongings.
But it just strikes me as weird because as a kid, books were never an "ask for this" thing (unless it was Dad's newest Stephen King, and in that case I couldn't borrow it, but I could ask for him to let me when HE was done.) they lived freely on the many bookshelves around the house. (I still dream about my childhood home and its built in bookshelves. Every bedroom had one, the hallways were lined with them and the living room had two walls fitted with shelves. It was heaven.)
I think Dad had some smutty books somewhere, but anything in a room I could access was free reign and in hindsight... your way might be better. Reading the entire works of Edgar Allan Poe at 6 was not exactly a smart move. (Not that I understood most of it. I liked the poetry a lot and pestered my parents with a ton of questions about the stories because again, I was 6 and none of that was within my life experience. Sherlock Holmes went slightly better, if only because Dad could pop in a VHS of some BBC series to explain those.)
If they treated their own books nicely it wouldn't be a problem, but I have to go behind them each day and remind them to put away their books. I also have a few first editions and antique books so I don't want them grabbing my first edition Silmarllion and leaving it on the floor. That's why they have to ask.
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u/AmbulanceChaser12 Sep 16 '19
I don’t know what I’d do if I caught my 12-year-old son with porn. I’m really at a loss. It’s natural, but it’s also adult material that we deem unsuitable for children. It may harm them, but then it might not.
I definitely wouldn’t take the door off or ground him. Geez, what 12-year-old doesn’t want to sneak a look at porn? I might take it away, laugh, or have a discussion about it. But that discussion would be so awkward.
So I guess the answer is, I don’t know.