Son’s internet history is really weird. No idea what to do.

[Flippersfriend]

A few months back, when he first got his own iPad, I discovered my 11yo son had been looking up videos of something really really strange.

Firstly I apologise for not writing what it is here. I’m worried this post will come up when he searches for this topic again.

It’s nothing remotely illegal or adult or sexual or dangerous, just really really odd and definitely indicative of something very odd on his mind. Nothing to do with sexuality or gender either.

I’ve raised it with him before and asked (very calmly and non judgementally) why he looked that up so often and would he like to talk about it more. I said he wasn’t in any trouble at all but it was an unusual thing to be looking up. He was embarrassed and said no reason at all and refused to talk about it any further.

It stopped for a while but I’ve found a load more searches from the last few days.

As I say, it’s nothing ‘bad’ at all. It’s certainly within the parental controls I have on his iPad. If he’d only looked it up once or twice it wouldn’t be a concern at all, but he’s looking it up over and over again.

While I realise it’s hard to give advice when I’m not giving specifics, my question is more around how I talk to him about it again.

If he were a friend I’d want to say “dude this is really bloody weird. Why the F are you looking this up so much?” But I can’t say that to my child!

I’m a single parent so I can’t ask his dad to talk to him (it’s not a man related thing anyway).

Could he have been bullied? Is he scared that a bully may amputate his limb? (Or equivalent). I have adhd so obsess about some pretty weird stuff but only vi's the library when i was a kid. I would have been mortified if my mum had asked me about it.

@PlatinumBrunette loads of girls at my school used to do weird things to get attention. Putting a n invent paper clip in your mouth and pretending it was a brace was a popular one. Also buying a cheap ring from Argos and pretending to be engaged. Some claimed to be engaged to some mystery boy from another school and others would say they were engaged to one of the boys at school a couple of years older. The boy in question usually didn't know the girl at all. I remember begging my mum to let me buy a pair of crutches so I could pretend I'd broken my ankle. All because of you were in crutches you could choose a friend to go in the lift with you.

I was just going to say that my son and his mates are a lot more normal than we were but my son has just shown me a photo of his best friend with his beard half shaved off. He is asking DS if he should go to college looking like that tomorrow .

I came here to say OCD too. I do the same thing when my mental health takes a nosedive, I’ll get a bad thought in my head such as cancer and then spend hours at a time obsessively searching up risk factors, mortality rates, symptoms, treatments, endless photos. I feel like it will ease the anxiety by looking into it but it never does, I can stay up all night rereading the same webpages and old forum posts again and again because I feel like the bad thing will happen if I’m not armed with enough information to stop it.

Back when Russia first invaded Ukraine I couldn’t stop reading about nuclear bombs and at what distance it would kill you, what distance it would just melt your skin off, how to finish the job yourself if that happened, what is it like to die from radiation poisoning.

That’s my only visible symptom of OCD too, it’s hard to spot when people are led to believe that it’s just checking the locks three times and waging war on germs.

I wonder if it’s something he’s heard about/been on the edge of, and is wondering how it would affect him. Maybe like a developing health anxiety?

if this is so I would probably make some generalised comments about it and see if anything comes of it;

for example my dd is blind in one eye so if he was friends with her he might search “what it’s like to be blind, how do you go blind, can you drive if you are blind, what does it feel like to not see’ etc etc etc.

so if you have noticed any friends or anything you could say, oh i just discovered girlwholived’s daughter is partially blind!? Can you imagine how that is… then the discussion might evolve.

alternatively it could be something he’s heard about (Covid or some such) and he could be searching “will catching Covid make me miss school, does Covid make you stop eating, getting thin after covid, getting spots with Covid” I think then the conversation would need to be more personal and deeper

In the spirit of your example, if it’s something along the lines of obesity and he’s obsessively searching about what it’s like to be obese and looking at pictures of people that are severely obese, then yes I’d be concerned about him developing either an eating disorder or a fetish (such as being a “feeder”). If it’s more like searching about severe acne, or vitiligo, or missing an eye or something I would be less concerned. You’ll simply have to use your judgement on to what degree you need to address it, if any.

@WhichEllie eating disorders, bad skin and missing an eye; we’re practically the same person 😄

Yes, I’ve raised it with him once before (very gently) and he was really upset that I’d asked.

maybe it is the the subject that he was looking at but the fact he thought his privacy was invaded which made him upset.

it is easy to get obsessed with topics on the internet as there is so much information out there. Has he had any guidance on how to handle all this and use the internet & all its nuances safely & with perspective?

Apologies if this has been mentioned. Embalming was a deep interest of a teen I knew. It's a thought provoking career choice.

I am a little bit obsessive like this, and my DD is as well to an unusual extent. I am also wondering if it's bordering into OCD but as my worry around her obsession peaks - my DDs obsession wanes. At the moment she's fairly chilled and not obsessed about her current interest (She's ASD)

For myself and my daughter - more knowledge is never too much knowledge. Leaning in to the special interest has always been good (She's 10 and I was worried I'd advised her to spend too much time on her last special interest) but sort of swimming around in it helps her.

For me - if it's something I don't have but need to click to find out about, eg when I'm worried about a breast lump, I will keep going back and searching more. Doing something else and going back. Only when I've deep dived so much I feel like I know as much as I possibly can do I feel any peace.

It's hard to know as I can't know what your son is obsessing about but perhaps some of your adult insight might help as your son can't really do a "deep dive" - he doesn't know how. Help him find the right wiki links, get a good youtube documentary for him, a couple of posters from his room. Maybe he wants to touch it, experience it.

Going along the amputation theme I would get a youtube vides (pre-screened by you!) about how to fit prosthetic limbs. Another about what phantom limb syndrome feels like. Make it positive - you could be an engineer one day helping people create solutions to missing an arm leg! Maybe you could make orthotics. You have such a deep interest in this - when you're older this will suit you really well as you'll be so knowledgeable about whatever you're interested in/working on. I'd get a book on an amputee Paralympian, a biography of sorts. Let him read it at his own pace. Ask him if he has a question he really needs to know and you can ask on mumsnet.

Maybe his interest is in drowning or something morbid. Try and do the same as above but for people who have survived drownings - an autobiography of someone who's swam the channel or sailed the world etc. Maybe he can't phrase quite what it is he needs to ask - but the more he can be comfortable that you're totally safe he could ask. Maybe ask when he thinks about it does it make his heart beat fast, or his tummy feel sick - get an indication about whether he's stressed and anxious or excited by it.

If it continues past another couple of months maybe consider an educational psychologist.

I'm not sure there's much you can do at this stage. I'd keep closely monitoring his Internet use, to try to get more insight. Depending on what it is, search his room as well. People can have weird obsessions without acting on them. I'm not sure what you can do other than be there for him and ensure opportunities where he can open up to you about what he's thinking/feeling if he wants to...

If you think that this is something he could be persuaded to spend less time on, would it help if he were able to join something where he mixed more with others of his age and which was more active than staring at a screen?

I'm thinking of something like the Scouts.

https://www.scouts.org.uk/scouts/

PS All of the good comments above hold true, of course. If you are seriously concerned, a discussion with someone such as his Class Teacher or, if appropriate, your GP, will be the way to go.

I would explain to him in detail what anxiety is & how it’s treated. I had bad anxiety as a child but didn’t know what it was until I was an adult. It feels scary to have that feeling without knowing why. So that way if he identifies with those feelings he’ll know how to verbalize it. Otherwise, it’s probably just curiosity and maybe non-harmful fixation. Keep your eyes and ears open but don’t worry too much. Kids do tend to get obsessed with all kinds of weird things at that age. I’ve thought “what the hell?” to myself many times lol

I think this is a little invasive of you. Did you never get fixated on anything as a kid? Your parents wouldn't have known because they couldn't track what you were thinking about or even reading about in encyclopedias or whatever... but now days we can look at thoughts our children have by looking at what they search for. Imo unless it's dangerous you shouldn't really think too much about it.
Lots of people go down rabbit oles of information about things.. just out of curiosity. It doesn't mean a sexual fetish is developing!!!
We have this access to our children's thoughts basically but we need to be careful how we interpret that info. He may just be fascinated by this particular thing for a while then get fascinated by something else. That is so so common.
Especially in people with adhd. I personally get obsessed with certain subjects and need to have every bit of info on them. If you looked at my Internet history you'd probably be very confused. It doesn't always mean something. Just natural human curiosity. And even without adhd many kids get intense about subjects from time to time.. sometimes stuff that seems odd. It's not odd tho it's normal human behaviour

I started a thread on embalment as a career a while ago but no one answered 🤷🏻

No embalmers using MN then 😂

I was considering it as a possible career choice as I have seen a lot of dead bodies years ago due to a previous occupation. It wouldn't phase me.

This is the first generation to have unfiltered access to mass information and inaccuracies posted for others agendas the type of information is much more detailed and accessible than any encyclopaedia or once a week library visit. There is a reason why 1 in 2 will suffer mental health issues around social media all professionals will tell you to monitor and restrict children's internet activity.

Considering OCD as a possibility (my DD has OCD with intrusive thoughts hence my suggestion) he probably is going to react with embarrassment when you ask what's happening here.
But - my advice is firstly to get up to speed yourself with what OCD actually looks like and the causes/triggers and then have a series of gentle conversations where you unpick this a bit.
In a nutshell, it's driven by anxiety and is essentially a perfectly normal behaviour that has got a bit out of hand. We are meant to be alert to risks but with OCD the ability to manage and rationalise the things that scare us has gone wrong and the repetition of behaviours or thoughts is a way to try and create safety and order.
It's a manageable condition with the right support and I suspect a lot more common in children than we realise.

Very sensible advice. My ds OCD started at that age but because we had to wait so long for help it became very severe. My ds is now 16 and has had 5 months of ERP therapy through camhs and he's so much better.
OP must definitely not make her son feel ashamed of this, it would be good to probe the reasons. It may just be a specialist interest with no anxiety around it.

My DD first went to CAHMS aged 8. She's a teen now and it's not gone away completely, but with support she deals with it pretty well - how we react as parents is key too.

Is it dead bodies or something? I remember being really obsessed with them when I was a bit older than him. If I'd have had a computer there would definitely have been some weird shit on my 11-yr-old search history

@WuTangGran ! hahahahaha! //superb!

OP wrote ‘I think what is worrying me is the possibility that he wants to actually be an amputee (using my example), because he’d looked it up so extensively. At one point I had a nightmare that he was going to chop on of my legs off overnight (again, using the amputee example). ‘

so it must involve some form of bodily harm which makes me think it must be burns

The OP, like the others you have read on Mumsnet, are not asking for advice on a subject they are not willing or able to disclose. They are asking for perspectives on how to approach an issue sensitively and cautiously, it's a different thing entirely.

Maybe don’t emphasise the fact that you think it’s weird and a bit inappropriate and instead ask him about it in an open minded and non judgy way, as then he’s less likely to feel defensive and more likely to open up about it. You could try a curious interested approach and try to put your feelings about the thing to one side? I realise this is easy to say in an abstract way but might not work in terms of the contet of his searches iyswim