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‘The secret life of boys’

May 16, 2005 By Anne Leave a Comment

That’s the headline of a thoughtful, thorough Boston Globe article about US boys’ increasing exposure to pornography. “Hard-core [online] porn has apparently gone mainstream,” the Globe reports, citing the views of both young people and adults on this development. What worries psychologists quoted in the article is what happens to a normal biological curiosity about “what girls look like” when it’s met with material that’s a lot more hard-core than they could’ve ever expected. One psychologist is concerned about the impact on boys’ relationships with girls and later women, because they’re “beginning to think that this kind of human behavior and relationship is average and acceptable.” Another psychologist told the Globe that viewing porn sites on a daily basis, as have patients of his as young as 10, changes boys’ expectations of girls, which “by default changes the reality for girls.” And it bothers him that girls aren’t outraged because of it (the Globe quotes one 8th-grade girl as saying matter-of-factly that “all the boys” surf porn). At the end of this 5-page article there’s good advice for parents who find a child’s downloading porn regularly. [On this subject, see also the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s “Is childhood becoming oversexed?”]

But there’s no advice about what to do about the technologies that make it so available (not just the Internet). Probably rightly so, since the solutions are as individual as the families. For one family it might suffice to limit kids’ Web searches to the search engines that have filtering (see “Kid-friendly search engines”). For another it might be computer time controls that allow online time only when parents are home. Still another family might choose to install filtering or monitoring software. It depends on age, communication, and trust levels in a family, with solutions that keep getting adjusted to fit those levels – sometimes a different solution for each child. For info on parental-controls software, see GetNetWise.org, Software4Parents.com, or Consumer Reports’ latest review of 11 filters. (I’d like to hear from you if you wish there was an online forum for discussing tough issues like this on the tech-parenting front – email me or post just below.)

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Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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