Caught 8 y/o watching porn

[loganfuckingroy]

I've accidentally caught my son watching pretty hardcore porn while I reached over where he was sitting on the sofa to pick up a cup next to him. He tried to draw his iPad up to his chest but I pulled it down and saw a video playing. It was Pornhub and extremely graphic hetero porn.

I took his iPad and started searching through his history and this has been going on for a week. His search history started with Googling "naked people" and then he's been watching several porn hub videos every day. He's autistic and loves watching Minecraft/Roblox/robotics videos with his headphones on so I don't suspect. It turns out his dad left his Google account logged in on my son's iPad after showing him something on YouTube and that's how he's been bypassing the content restrictions I've put in place on our Apple/icloud family settings.

We've chatted about it but he's very embarrassed and thinks he's going to be arrested. Husband has taken them to bed, iPad has been removed. I'm just completely at a loss. 8 is so young and he's not neurotypical.

I think 8 is incredibly young so I’d wonder how he’s come across this- it’s not typically something an 8 year old would search without it being talked about or perhaps even shown to him.

i think you need to take a breath tonight, you’ve done the right thing taking the iPad away and putting restrictions on it. You’ve spoken to him and he’s scared so now you’ll need to have a chat about where he got the idea from to search for porn and why he was watching it.

how on earth has your EIGHT YEAR OLD got unfettered access to the internet? Porn is the least of your worries

The internet is the Wild West. Lesson learned!

Exposing an eight year old to porn is child abuse. Go read up on safeguarding. FFS it's not the child ,it's your husband who needs reporting and social care need to be involved. Utterly shocking.

Get him an age appropriate book on sex/bodies

There are some good resources from the NSPCC about how to talk to your child about online pornography here: https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/inappropriate-explicit-content/online-porn/

Sorry but no. You ensure every single protection is in place before you allow an 8 year old (Christ almighty) access to the internet.

In fact, I’m not sure I believe you.

I think any 8 year old (NT or ND) should be directly supervised with an iPad, parental controls or otherwise. It’s a little concerning it took you over a week to realise this was going on.

turns out his dad left his Google account logged in on my son's iPad after showing him something on YouTube and that's how he's been bypassing the content restrictions I've put in place on our Apple/icloud family settings

His dad was looking at non- kids YouTube and then just handed the iPad back… ok

If this baby has had unsupervised access to the internet for a week, you will be extremely lucky if watch porn is the worst thing hes done

I think you've had some really harsh replies OP. Yes of course it's not good and a lesson learned for your husband to be very careful with the ipad/Internet access... but you know that.

We have Sky shield so no-one child or adult could access porn. I did check it now and again, it held up well.

My husband didn't watch porn with my son, he was showing him a robotics/3d printing video or something but using the regular YouTube app rather than the kids version. That's why he needed his Google account to be logged in. He feels absolutely terrible that he forgot to log out.

Every time I've been sat with him and he's been using his iPad, he has been playing Roblox with his brother or using an engineering app for kids where he builds various virtual machines etc.

I'm gutted and sickened that my boy has seen these awful things, according to his search history he's been sneaking downstairs at 5am to watch his iPad. Looks like the content restrictions and everything else I had in place isn't enough. Going to look into a block on the router.

You sit down with him, and you apologise to him for letting him down and exposing him to that. And you then do a lot better with your internet security.

Having worked in a primary school where children are allowed to use ipads I can confirm that your little angels are searching for "little mermaid's titties" at the age of seven.

I wouldn’t blame your DH so much we all do mistakes and obviously you need to tighten up security but my main concern would be what’s prompted this. There was something, maybe even innocent e.g talk at school. I think it would be easier for you to deal with this if you would dig out why he started googling naked bodies and so on.

I'm gutted and sickened that my boy has seen these awful things, according to his search history he's been sneaking downstairs at 5am to watch his iPad

You need to take it to bed with you and he needs full supervision when he uses it. Clearly he doesn’t have adequate self control if he’s been sneaking down at night to use it. I doubt many 8 year olds would - these things are addictive after all.

As a PP said I’d be asking him directly where the desire to search for ‘naked people’ has come from. The main take home message of this event for him needs to be how damaging pornography is.

This isn’t your eight year old’s fault, it’s yours. How irresponsible.

I don't believe I blamed my son, sorry if that's how it came across. I feel terrible, I've always been able to trust him because like I said, he's usually on Roblox. There are all the content restrictions on his iPad that I could put on it when we first got him his iPad last year. I've been complacent I suppose, because I never thought it would enter his head to Google naked people. I am still in shock and I am planning on speaking to his teacher tomorrow to see if this curiosity has come from playground talk.

I'd probably book him some therapy to help him process what he's seen. Looking at that sort of content at 8 would be very traumatic for any child.

Poor little boy. He has been badly let down by both parents.

Agree.

Jesus Christ.

You can set parental control settings on your broadband as well, have you done this? It should stop this kind of thing getting through even on adult account.

This is not the OP’s fault! It’s an accident. I have been a school governor at a primary school and an eight year old being interested in ‘naked people’ is fairly normal curiosity. It’s very easy for kids to stumble across stuff we don’t want them to see, and very hard to supervise them every minute.

OP you can stop this happening again. The parental controls on iPads are very good indeed if you use them properly. Many broadband providers also offer filters which stop household members seeing adult content.

I can see this is really tough on you, but this is more common that other posters realise - the positive thing is that you’ve spotted it and can stop it happening again.

Where do I even go from here? I've been convinced since he was a baby that I wasn't a good parent and this confirms it.