A situation came up recently that had me questioning my parenting. I'm pretty much an intuitive based parent, always have been, and tend to base my parenting on what my child needs, not what others think but in this case I'm really not sure what is appropriate.
My 14 yo ds accessed a couple of websites about 6 months ago that were extremely questionable (he googled boobs when a friend was over). I found it in the history and my DH and I talked to him. We explained that we don't like the p*rn industry and we think stuff like that oversexualizes kids, sometimes exploits women, yada yada yada, but that it is normal to be curious. We also explained it was not okay to google stuff like that or visit websites as they could be infected and could potentially ruin our computer. We had quite a few conversations about it (which my poor ds was pretty embarrassed about) but were matter of fact about it. Our approach is that most kids are pretty curious and we didn't want our ds to feel ashamed.
My DH left it that if ds wanted, my DH would get him some appropriate magazine. My ds would never, in a million years, take my DH up on this. We know this but want to keep the lines of communication open and have him feel okay with talking about this type of stuff with us. Anyway, I talked to local friend about this and she was absolutely aghast. She sent me all sorts of links about children and p*rn and how terrible it was.
I live in a very mainstream community and usually don't talk with locals about my parenting choices as some of them would be viewed as very outside of the norm (co-sleeping, bf, not spanking, etc.). I forgot who I was talking to when I spoke and now I'm regretting it. The way we handled it felt right for our family but now I'm second guessing us.
Were we way out of line? I'm not talking about providing hardcore anything, more like a Victoria Secret's catalog or something. We just thought that wanting to look at half-nekkid women (or men, depending on their preference) is normal for kids and we wanted to provide some guidance on it. Our parents never talked to us about anything so we're in the dark on all this kind of stuff. In addition, none of our friends have children as old as my oldest ds so we're forging our way through on our own.
Should we have told him that it was bad and not ever to do it????? What is the norm in this situation?
My 14 yo ds accessed a couple of websites about 6 months ago that were extremely questionable (he googled boobs when a friend was over). I found it in the history and my DH and I talked to him. We explained that we don't like the p*rn industry and we think stuff like that oversexualizes kids, sometimes exploits women, yada yada yada, but that it is normal to be curious. We also explained it was not okay to google stuff like that or visit websites as they could be infected and could potentially ruin our computer. We had quite a few conversations about it (which my poor ds was pretty embarrassed about) but were matter of fact about it. Our approach is that most kids are pretty curious and we didn't want our ds to feel ashamed.
My DH left it that if ds wanted, my DH would get him some appropriate magazine. My ds would never, in a million years, take my DH up on this. We know this but want to keep the lines of communication open and have him feel okay with talking about this type of stuff with us. Anyway, I talked to local friend about this and she was absolutely aghast. She sent me all sorts of links about children and p*rn and how terrible it was.
I live in a very mainstream community and usually don't talk with locals about my parenting choices as some of them would be viewed as very outside of the norm (co-sleeping, bf, not spanking, etc.). I forgot who I was talking to when I spoke and now I'm regretting it. The way we handled it felt right for our family but now I'm second guessing us.
Were we way out of line? I'm not talking about providing hardcore anything, more like a Victoria Secret's catalog or something. We just thought that wanting to look at half-nekkid women (or men, depending on their preference) is normal for kids and we wanted to provide some guidance on it. Our parents never talked to us about anything so we're in the dark on all this kind of stuff. In addition, none of our friends have children as old as my oldest ds so we're forging our way through on our own.
Should we have told him that it was bad and not ever to do it????? What is the norm in this situation?
