Millennial parents, don’t give up protecting your kids against porn
Twenty years ago, the funny, filthy puppet musical “Avenue Q” made its off-Broadway debut and declared, “The internet is for porn.” Two decades on, it’s clear just how much this is true for everybody — including young children.
The average age of first encounter? Just 12, according to a new report from the watchdog group Common Sense Media. The report, which surveyed more than 1,300 teens ages 13 to 17, also said 58 percent of teenagers had run into pornography without looking for it. But only 43 percent said they’d discussed porn with an adult they felt they could trust.
Porn is not all the internet is for, of course. It’s also for political radicalization and craft project ideas, for recipe blogs and blockchains, for “a little bit of everything all of the time,” as the comedian Bo Burnham put it in his 2021 comedy special, “Inside.”
But porn reveals the strangely submissive approach many American parents take to the internet. Especially millennials, who got hooked on the internet at formative ages and are now parents themselves.
People of my generation have, largely, given in to the idea that kids will spend a lot of time online. And we accept that this means we must frantically try to keep adult content out of kids’ feeds, armed only with feeble tools offered by social media companies and other services.
This surrender is a mistake. It’s equivalent to outsourcing the decision of which faith we should adopt to door-knocking evangelists, or of whether to keep guns at home to arms manufacturers.
Parents and prospective parents need to start asking themselves a better question: Given a clear-eyed assessment of what the internet is, how online do we, as a family, want to be?
Millennial parents got online the way one goes bankrupt, and much to the same effect: slowly, then all at once. At first, we were lucky enough to have our high school idiocies vanish down the memory hole of AOL Instant Messenger, and we barely had the opportunity to document our college years on MySpace or Facebook.
But once services such as YouTube, Twitter and Instagram came for us, we were goners. According to a 2021 report from the Pew Research Center, 42 percent of adults between ages 30 and 49 described themselves as “almost constantly” online. No wonder millennial parents presume their “digital native” kids will be even more obsessed.
The only thing a savvy parent can do, this thinking goes, is fight a rearguard action, practicing diligent supervision: Better to give a kid a phone and have a conversation about how to use it than to risk a preteen tracking down a burner. Better to sign up for TikTok together than to let kids wander alone into the internet’s stranger corners.
Certainly, this is how social media services would like parents to think, lest families abandon ship and take their kids’ priceless data with them. Instagram rolled out its Family Center program in 2022, in an effort to give parents more insight into what their children were doing on the platform — or at least on the accounts the parents knew about. As part of its own charm offensive regarding online safety, TikTok has touted a report from the Family Online Safety Institute saying safety is best achieved as a partnership between parents and tech companies.
But again, this all assumes that families must be Very Online. Instead, why not back up and ask a fundamental question: Is the internet where we want to be spending our time? Do we like what social media has done to us, and are we comfortable with its influence on our kids?
No matter what balance families decide is right for them, simply having the conversation can be clarifying, says Lauren Buitta, the founder and chief executive of Girl Security, an organization that aims to get more women and girls working in national security. Families, Buitta told me, should articulate, “Here are our priorities for going online — access to research, friends, that sort of thing.” And balancing those goals against other risks can help parents and kids craft an internet-use policy that works for everyone.
I do mean everyone. The internet poses different risks to children than to adults. But plenty of grown-ups scroll to self-soothe, get addicted to rage machines such as Twitter, or drive themselves insane trying to emulate Pinterest-perfect holidays. Maybe parents avoid real talk about internet use because those conversations would implicate the adults as much as they do the children.
Avoidance is not the answer. This day and age, anyone raising kids needs to be frank with themselves about what kind of parent and person they want to be, and what kind of example they want to set — online and off.