'The secret life of boys'

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.)