Help - teen son and porn

[helpmumof3]

Posted here for traffic, sorry

Just doing a spot check on my sons phone, he's only in year 7 so every now and again I check his phone and search history.

He's been searching for lots of porn videos, but we obviously have strict internet controls at home, but he's watched them when staying at his grandparents house and cousins houses as I hadn't thought to check what controls they had in place (I know really stupid, please don't criticise me)

I'm really upset but can't think straight, feeling emotional, i don't want him watching horrible things, I want to him be 11 and I know he's going to be curious but I want him to have a childhood and not be exposed to such adult content any this age

Now we don't know what to do, if I admit I know how to search his history he will probably figure out how to delete or get around it. I've told my OH he needs to have a chat with him but my OH is not great at being the strict parent.

Other mums please help with advice, how to tackle and is there any apps to monitor the phone usage that we should be using going forward?

This young ish boys looking at porn has been on the go for years.

I was always facinated by the naughty mags my dad kept under his bed!

I don't think it did me any harm long or short term;!

This isn't the same as looking up rude words. It Is damaging, distorts young pls ideas about sex, distances them emotionally, exploits and objectifies women and men. It's pernicious and nasty.

Talk to him, keep talking

So, you tell your son that, GPs or C's or both have had an email from their provider saying that porn has been accessed from their account and are they ok with this, and that the GP or C has come to you to ask what DS has been doing as they know it is him don't want to ask your son about it but don't know what to do about it.

Your DS maybe very tech savvy but generally teens still don't know what adults can find out (and still have a suspicion that you have eyes in the back of your head).

Tell him that they will continue to get reports of any access from their computers.

At that age I was looking up dirty words in the dictionary (I'm now 64). At that age my son ran up a £100 phone bill on sexlines (I made him pay half of it from his pocket money over a few months - he's now 42). I'm pretty certain at his age it is curiosity and he needs to know that (1) you will know and (2) it has consequences
and that should be enough to stop it.

It's natural to be curious at that age BUT what isn't natural is what they can access and that it sets them up to have a very distorted view of what sex is all about.

PLUS - do have words and get these computers set up to block his access

Things have changed. Porn is a lot more violent and explicit these days, promotes coercive behaviour. It is addictive and interferes with relationships. Teaches disrespect And selfish aggressive behaviour.

Please don't do anything to humiliate him in this process - that will not be helpful. Yes he needs to learn but there's a balanced way To do that

So, you tell your son that, GPs or C's or both have had an email from their provider saying that porn has been accessed from their account and are they ok with this, and that the GP or C has come to you to ask what DS has been doing as they know it is him don't want to ask your son about it but don't know what to do about it.
Your DS maybe very tech savvy but generally teens still don't know what adults can find out (and still have a suspicion that you have eyes in the back of your head).

Tell him that they will continue to get reports of any access from their computers.

Sorry, why tell some utter made-up lie like this? When he finds out it's a lie (which he will, the first time he accesses porn but Mum doesn't pull him up on it) trust will be shattered.

He's 11, hormones are starting up, he's starting to get erections, boys at school are starting to boast about sex and to top it off we have porn everywhere in a way we didn't even when I was at school (late 1990s). He will be curious about sex and hey presto, videos of supposedly real sex can be on every phone and computer.

Be open and honest about it, don't treat it like some dirty secret or treat him like he's done something naughty or terrible. Give him real information and make him aware porn is staged and false.

FFS don't let him read any Gail Dines, her work is completely dishonest and full of ignorance, bigotry and spite. I'm also unimpressed with the sex-shaming, bullying poster who had her kid repeating nasty misogynistic nonsense till he was crying.

Porn is entertainment, not sex education. Some of it is produced under exploitative conditions and presents an extremely narrow view of sexuality, some of it is not/does not. There is a huge amount of misinformation about porn, mostly propogated by, you know, the sort of maniacs who who are behind the latest American legal challenges to women's bodily autonomy.

There's some useful stuff about SRE including porn discussion here. And also Scarleteen.

Fucking hell, there's now some even more terrible advice coming out. Do NOT try to terrorize him with made up bullshit about how his grandparents will know he had impure thoughts. Do NOT try to bully him with lies into buying in to some warped, unhealthy view of sex-for-entertainment as filthy and shameful.

In what schools are teenagers in Year 7?

@NaomifromMilkshake Find it a bit weird that your 11 year old son’s first reaction on being caught looking at porn was to be defiant and then to question his own convictions but sure. It wasn’t the length of it I was questioning.

I don’t know but perhaps you could take his phone away? Does he need one so young? Alternatively can speak to him about it and see what prompted him to look.

He just needs to get better at hiding it from you, that's all

It went like this, that girl was...........

I know what you're saying and great it worked for you but I feel weird about that kind of argument. What if she isn't anyone's grandchild or sister? Why frame her by the people around her?

Things have changed. Porn is a lot more violent and explicit these days, promotes coercive behaviour

^ this.

Its not looking up sexy words in dictionary, or even naked women in magazines etc.

I have two friends who discovered their young teens (around 13) watching stuff and they were so disturbed they went crying to their mums!

Some boys will be more curious than others - but hopefully giving them a sense of boundaries and respect for others will help - talking about it when appropriate - as well as strong controls on their phones and not giving them free access to the internet for as long as possible.

Its sad what many youngsters see as the norm these days (sexually), and what boys expect girls to do because they've seen it in porn.

I really think we need to educate our boys and girls on this - because the level of exploitation out there re. the darker side of sex is high. But of course we also have to try to find a way to do this without being shameing or hysterical. Its a shock for you OP, but I agree with others about staying calm and not reacting emotionally.

It makes her human, not a piece of meat to be sold.

Good point Brenda.

I feel porn ultimately degrades the sacred and very person aspect of sex, something which is at the heart of it and that seems to be completely lost in the discussion.

So its irrelevant whether she has relatives or not.

@Missingstreetlife I completely agree but I’m not sure at 11 that is going to have quite the resonance.

Sex is not 'sacred' (well, if that's your fetish, then fine, but other people don't have to share it.) Sex can be casual, fun, enjoyably scary, dull, dutiful, undertaken purely with the aim of concieving, and many other things.
There are far worse things than porn that a teenage boy could start looking at online, too. They are still going to look at stuff. Make sure your kids are taught some critical thinking, and some research skills: this will equip them far more for making their way into the world than feeding them bigotry and narrow-minded nonsense.

Dd is in y9 but when she started y7 about half a dozen of other y7 boys were suspended with three later being excluded for playing graphic violent porn on the school bus, trying to force the girls to watch it and asking them if they like doing what the whore in the video is doing.

Couple of the parents were very angry and said it's just boys being boys, and the girls need to get over themselves. They can parent their children however the fuck they want but I don't think my dd should have to worry about being surrounded by five boys on the boys trying to shove their phone in her face while it plays a woman being forced to eat the puke she's just thrown up from having her head pushed down on a Mams penis and being told she looks like she could take it without gagging. It upset quite a few of the girls and some of the boys too.

She's far from sheltered and I'm no prude but a lot of the free clips on sites like porn hub are violent towards women and I genuinely do think the affect of watching this content regularly is different to looking up the word sex in the dictionary.

Those pps who say it isn't "looking up words in dictionaries" from my post- it absolutely is. It is pushing the current boundary as far as you can. I'm in my 40s, that was all we could do. Do you really think that if we could Google "rimming" in 1985 we wouldn't have done so? We did everything we could x amount of years ago to find out information and bingo! Year 1997 or whatever, you type in a word and not only does it tell you, it explains it in a thousand ways. Don't be so naive to think this is new, teenagers seek information and always have, it just so happens that adults have given children the means and power to seek out their answers much more graphically. I'd prefer kids were wanking over underwear models in catalogues, but the genie is out of the bottle and will never go back in. We wished for shared , open and easily accessible information, this is the cost.

oh SGB you are really cool.

Porn is entertainment, not sex education
An adult understands this but after reading an article on here a year or so ago about a village doctor discussing the amount of teenage girls turning up with anal injuries after their teenage boyfriends have copied what they see in porn is very worrying.

A lot of today's porn is violent and not very woman friendly. An ex friends son has been watching it since nine years old, he's parents didn't remove devices and continued letting him online unsupervised blaming hormones and not wanting him to feel ashamed and felt it's harmless, it's normal and is what boys do, the Dad said he watched his Dads vids when 13ish, when he was 13 he showed a friends younger brother it, his man was absolutely horrified at what he was watching and went to complain to my friend, who for the first time actually looked at the content he'd been watching and was horrified herself, as was his father. They'd assumed it was like the porn from their own teenage years and would have done everything they could had they realised just how violent the stuff he was accessing was.

Her son is 14 now and has some real problems, zero respect for girls and women at all and almost had the police at his door after telling a classmate he's going round her house to give her a good fucking whether she wants it or not. He's ran up credit card bills after stealing his Mums card for webcam stuff and there's been a few parents complain about him groping their dd at school. My own dd I caught him trying to pull her trousers and knickers down when they were 11 and is one of the reasons she's an ex friend.

All this could have happened without him accessing any porn but I often do wonder if his parents saying it's normal for boys to watch it and not discussing stuff with him and him having years watching some pretty graphic violent porn contributed in some way.

I don't know what the answer is, I really don't but I don't think the type of porn that is mainstream is harmless when regularly accessed by children who are not being taught about sex from a responsible source.