Curiosity?

[speaker]

My 9 year old dd is having a sleepover tonight with a friend of hers (9 too). Both normally sensible, fun girls. I don't normally let my daughter have her laptop in her room but she had it in there this afternoon - apart from looking up images of puppies and cute animals I've noticed they have googled 'sexy looking girls' and 'sex'. We've not had the full sex talk although we have talked about what she looks at or shouldn't online and I've put on the google setting to not show explicit material. The images they've seen are mostly kissing etc with not too much details although some are too close for my liking - fortunately the restrictions I had have helped.

A couple of things:

• do I talk to them both tonight? How should I approach it? I've not had the birds and the bees talk with my daughter. Do I mention it to my friend's mum?

• can I put in place more restrictions?

Thanks for any advice.

Well my first piece of advice is never allow your DD to be alone with a laptop again!

Too many parents allow this and then complain when their child is targeted by a weirdo...or their child sees disturbing images of pornography and worse.

I would mention it to the friend's Mum yes...mainly because if she were my DD I would be annoyed she'd been left alone with a laptop and internet access.

You simply can't leave them alone...you must keep internet access in a family area.

I have an 8 year old DD ...going on 9 with friends who are going on 10. None of them are allowed lone access to the net.

I would gently mention it & explain that it's ok to be curious & you understand why she done it but say its for older girls.I think 9 is just a tad too young for the 'full talk'
Bless her I remember doing things like that & feeling really embarrassed about it :-)

As you know she's curious, and acting on that curiosity, then I think you need to get a move on both with sex education (which will be happening in school soon anyhow) and in stepping up education about online activity.

And definitely keep computers in family areas only.

And yes, it's probably better for you to give an accurate and apologetic pre-emptive explanation to the other parents. Else they might hear a partial and far more worrying version from their DD and that could easily cause trouble.

Netnanny is a great filter I've found. Having compared searches on a laptop with netnanny and an unprotected one (i think with google safe search) the results were very different. Netnanny is brilliant IMHO.