Internet access for older children

As your child gets older and learns more about computers, they'll find ways to get around access filtering and inevitably they'll come across unsupervised computers where they can satisfy their curiosity.

When they reach sexual maturity, they'll discover that the Internet is a free treasure-trove of sexual imagery. It will become one of the main sources of their sex education. This is completely different to the way the world worked five years ago.

How you deal with this is up to you. I am not a parent, so you may feel my advice is irrelevant, but my personal view is that's far more important than ever before to be fully involved in your child's sex education. They will definitely see pornography. Our job as adults in this newly-networked world is to prepare them for this inevitability, to help them recognize that it's sexual stimulation isolated from partnership and emotion and therefore incomplete. In other words, help them see it in perspective.

Your only choice is whether you help them to interpret pornography or you don't. The Internet has pretty much removed the option of keeping them away from it.

Internet access for children

Abuse of children's trust