11year old son and pornhub

[ScalingTheCliffsOfInsanity]

My ds is 11, nearly 12. He's only had his phone for a short while and I only check it occasionally to make sure nothing untoward is going on. He's a nice kid, friendly, kind hearted and a bit of a softie a lot of the time. I happened to check his phone tonight after he'd gone to bed and his search history shows a good 15 or so pornhub pages. Obviously I need to talk to him about it but I don't want to jump in to the deep end and have a massive go. He's growing up and is obviously curious. What's the best way to approach this? I want him to know that porn is not what normal sex is, but not totally sure what else I need to be saying to him (other than don't bloody do it again!). Help. I'm not ready for this level of him growing up yet!!

as far as im aware, you can block sites over wifi, but much harder to do so if they are using data. For that, you probably have to install net nanny or suchlike on it, which you have to pay for your account.

A lot of these companies have got it all sewn up to make sure they ARE accessible to children, and they fought like hell against having age verification. Its like a losing battle.

I make sure my kids have very little data and can mainly only use their devices on wifi which helps somewhat, and also to make sure you have conversations that may be uncomfortable.
Its not about shaming, but its harmful for their sexual and emotional development to be exposed to what is on pornhub

You need to talk to him. A lot. (Car journeys are often recommended as a good place to do this - neutral territory, no eye contact). The Guardian I think it was had an article on how to talk to teens last week.

I think the important thing to get across is that the porn industry is a massive multi billion dollar industry with no conscience whatsoever - they want to make money. Many of the men controlling it hate women, so push a stream of violence against women. They also are in competition with each other, so ever more extreme acts become pushed as normal.

Certain practices portrayed as normal in porn - eg choking - are in fact highly dangerous and can kill. Others (double penetration) can leave women with anal tearing and prolapses. Porn sets often have to have doctors on hand to inject local anaesthetics to enable performers to carry on. And many performers describe being forced into acts they'd explicitly said they didn't want to do once on set. The more extreme the porn a person watches, the higher the chance that they're watching filmed rape.

Real sex should not be like that, it should be about mutual enjoyment and respect. Even one-night stands should come with an acknowledgement of your partner as a fellow human being with desires and boundaries which you should be sensitive to - porn encourages people, particularly men, to dehumanise their partners and push for acts their partner isn't comfortable with, just to tick the act off a list they've seen in porn.

There was a terrifying study in the BMJ a few years ago on young adults attitude to anal. The majority of women (around two thirds) either found anal did nothing for them or was actively painful. The majority of men knew this but still expected to have anal even if they had to bully their partners into it. Deep throat oral, where a woman's tears from the gag reflex are seen by the man as a sign he's doing it right is also being normalised. This is the world porn is building for us. My son's a similar age to yours OP and I am terrified that porn is going to steal the chance of a normal sex life from him. I'm going down fighting on this one - I will not let porn turn him into the sort of man who thinks doing this to women is normal.

The Guardian article is still there, sorry phone refusing to do links but it's first article in the sex and love section (lifestyle).

I don’t know much about it but I know that O2 shops will help parents with e-safety and parental controls.

It’s not hard setting up parental restrictions on phones - if you don’t know how to do it then find someone who can.

Ok, I'm not sure how but if you just Google "how to block website via router" there should be steps.
Also you can add words that he would search to block results too. Such as "sex" "porn" "doggy styled" stuff like that.

And pp has a point about mobile data..you will need something to block him accessing via his own network.

"Ok, I'm not sure how but if you just Google "how to block website via router""

And likewise, your kids can google how to bypass the block.

The only way to prevent them seeing shit is supervised access only. Given a lot of kids will also watch stuff at school on friends' devices, communicating with them is also necessary.

So many people on here are so naive about what kids will do to watch things online.

And so many parents are so passive about it and feel there is no point in educating themselves about it

He’s 11 ffs. You need to take his phone off him. He should not be accessing porn at 11!

Do not bang on about inequality and exploitation. He will zone out or it will seem like a lecture, and he will likely be embarrassed you found out. You don't want him to switch off, or turn it into forbidden fruit.
Explain that real sex lives and real women aren't like that, explain that people are being hurt in the films, explain that knowing everything before you are ready doesn't help but actually makes it more difficult to enjoy real life sexual encounters because you have unrealistic expectations.

Thanks for all the more rational responses on here. I have installed some controls and will talk to him when he's home from school today.
For those that have actually answered the question I asked, thanks for your practical advice, there are some great subjects and ways to discuss them mentioned.
I'm stepping away from here now. I'd obviously forgotten why I stopped coming on this site and now I remember why.

By all means put parental controls on - I certainly have, but remember you have to talk too. Most teens/pre teens are more internet savvy than their parents. (One friend of mine told me about finding his teens happily watching YouTube in a trip to China. It's supposedly blocked. They explained they'd got VPNs on their phones to get round their school's firewall, and it turned out this also worked on "the Great Firewall of China". If teens can circumvent Chinese state intelligence blocks, they can probably get round the average parent).

So you have to talk too. It's hard, it's horrible to have to do, but unfortunately given the way society is, you have to do it.

(For the poster saying "your teen will zone out" - of course I don't use the same language I would here because I'm talking to a different audience. But you can stress the important messages: it's not realistic, some of it is very nasty indeed, you have the choice with the nasty stuff whether to watch it or whether to hit the back button, and sex should be fun for both partners).

One friend of mine told me about finding his teens happily watching YouTube in a trip to China. It's supposedly blocked. They explained they'd got VPNs on their phones to get round their school's firewall, and it turned out this also worked on "the Great Firewall of China". If teens can circumvent Chinese state intelligence blocks

This isn't unusual/high tech, I went on a uni trip to China with 150 people and everybody had done this before going. VPNs are quite standard, it means expats can watch TV from their home country for example.

I think that whilst it is obviously important to have parental controls, most children/teens will eventually bypass them.

It's much more important that he knows porn is not real life, what Emporer said basically.

I first saw internet porn at 11, some of the boys had it on their phones at school and showed it around. Even though I didn't even have internet access at home at the time, or a phone I still saw porn within about a month of being at secondary?

They looked it up on the school computers as well, it was easy to find if you knew how.

All teenagers will view porn, and I reckon most children as young as 11 will. You cannot stop them watching it, only teach them how to deal with it. I don't think you can cover it all overnight, but we need to be teaching children how harmful porn is before they get to the stage where they are watching it properly.

Try to get an 18 yr old, or a 21 yr old to stop watching it and you won't. They will have watched so much porn by then that they care more about the porn than the women. They need to learn how harmful it is before they are addicted

You need to nip this in the bud.
Parental controls ASAP and talk about safety. He maybe upset that you looked at his phone, but explain how much more upsetting it would be if he let's say lost his phone, somebody found it and handed it to the police.
And talk about dangers of porn addiction.

Try to get an 18 yr old, or a 21 yr old to stop watching it and you won't. They will have watched so much porn by then that they care more about the porn than the women. They need to learn how harmful it is before they are addicted

That's the thing, isn't it?

It's normal for teens to be interested in sex. It's normal for them to want to search out erotic material (how many of us trawled our parents' bookshelves back in the day looking for the "naughty bits" in novels?)

What you want to do is get across the idea that violent, brutal sex isn't normal. And that teens have a choice.

To put not too fine a point on it, if you watch brutal, violent porn and wank to it, you set up all sorts of pathways in the brain such that this rapidly becomes the only sort of sexual scenario you can get aroused by. This screws up the possibility of normal, consensual sex, and screws up the women you come into contact with.

I don't want this for my son. The nightmare is that in trying to explain this to a child before porn has done the damage, you feel like you are yourself damaging them, taking away their innocence.

The trouble is that you don't have the choice not to, because the porn industry is going to take away their innocence anyway.

What you want to do is get across the idea that violent, brutal sex isn't normal. And that teens have a choice.
Give example how porn addicted very young men already cannot perform without viagra

"This isn't unusual/high tech, I went on a uni trip to China with 150 people and everybody had done this before going. VPNs are quite standard, it means expats can watch TV from their home country for example."

You can do very similar with parental controls.

@ReTooth , can you tell me how to do it best then, as I am really concerned that although I can block it at wifi level, i havent found a way to do it if on other peoples wifi or on data without massively affecting functionality.
When I found my daughter had accessed porn on her phone, I was really confused as its blocked on our wifi, and then i realised she had logged into next doors wifi (we are friends)
I tried to download software to help, but couldnt find anything that was particularly effective.
Surely there must be a way, or have these companies just really got it sewn up.

I wonder if some of the people who think its really easy to block, just have much younger children? We have net nanny on main computers and as i said, parental controls on wifi, but my son has seen porn on twitter, on roblox, my daughter was targetted on discord with explicit messages, sent dick pics (at 10 years old)
The amount of stuff im just having to ban as it comes up is incredible, but some people on here make it sound so easy and in my experience its really difficult actually. Its just permeated everything, and hormonal adolescents are quite often curious, and then before you know it, theyre bombarded.
I hate it all

Branleuse it is incredibly difficult to set up effective parental controls because of VPNs, mobile data, etc. etc... and even if you do all this you have no control over other people's kids' mobile phones. And on the con side - keyword searches (as suggested by a PP) block everything - so genuine and useful help sites on sex ed, contraception, even discussions about current affairs. (I've been on web chat sites with such strict net nanny rules that you couldn't discuss the way rape was (mis) handled by the criminal justice system or American states effectively outlawing abortion, because so many words got stripped out of messages that you couldn't make sense of them any more. Not to mention the whole world of pain that was innocently using the word "fag" in the British sense of cigarette...)

I think you have to go with "social engineering." Conversations, however hard to do (if anyone works out the magic bullet for doing this please tell me - I've tried, as I mentioned upthread, but it's bloody hard to pitch it right). Rules like "no tech in bedrooms/phones left downstairs on charge overnight."

And the older they get, the harder it gets. Because at some point you do have to let them have more privacy. And later on still as they head for adulthood, you have to accept that whatever your own personal moral framework, they may choose to adopt one that is different. (for instance, I personally choose not to use any filmed porn because I can't see any way you could guarantee that the performers weren't being coerced. But I know many people who feel, quite sincerely, that it is possible to find "ethical porn" and do use porn under these circumstances, and people who don't see any problem with porn at all... and who knows, when he's grown up, DS may decide that's his attitude too).

Hi Op I've just had this exact same issue with DD 10 on holiday abroad.
Her dad ( without mentioning to me, we are divorced ) gave her an old phone a few months back, so he could 'keep in contact with DD without bothering you'. I had no idea she even had a phone until she called me from it a few times then text me as I hadn't answered ( no idea she had a phone )
I have parental controls etc set up via my router at home and occasionally check up on her internet use etc
We were abroad for a week and I noticed that she was taking her phone everywhere and when she did put it down she put it face down.
I checked her phone and was absolutely shocked to see she'd looked at Pornhub and another site. She'd looked at pages to do with 'humping cushions'!
Obviously I realised that the controls I'd set weren't working abroad so had a google for any phone controls which I found and set.
When talking to her afterwards it turned out she was watching a You Tuber who had a video on ' things you should never Google,
So of course she googled them.

There is no reason why a child needs internet access on their phone. Just disable it (and the ability to download apps) completely - it’s fairly easy to do on both android and ios phones.

OP came on to ask for help, not far a flogging.

Hope you got it sorted.

@Teddybear45 you are clearly living in an alternate universe or miles from civilisation. A device that accesses the internet is a requirement by his high school. And actually he needs to learn to be responsible and to earn trust. A blanket ban is ridiculous, how can anyone learn the value, uses, pros and cons of something if it's out of bounds? Not to mention out of bounds usually makes something more desirable. He fucked up, I fucked up, I fixed what I failed on to the best of my ability and had a conversation with him about what he did. No doubt he'll fuck up again with something at some point in the future. He's human and we'll learn from it. And with any luck the kind, gentle, funny kid will grow up to be a kind, gentle, funny well rounded adult. Who doesn't clutch pearls when someone makes a mistake.

He didn’t fuck up, though, he’s a kid.

And the device doesn’t need to be a mobile phone, does it? A laptop at home will do the trick. All he needs is a phone that can make calls and text.