Good Pictures, Bad Pictures

My oldest son was 9 years old the first time he clicked on a pop-up ad that took him to a thinly veiled p*rn site that was disguised as a video game.  His dad saw what he had stumbled upon and told me he put protections in place so that couldn’t happen again. 

Later that year, when he was ten, a kid on the bus home from summer school showed him how to type in the word b**bs on google search, hit “images,” and see anything your mind could imagine.  He didn’t tell anyone that he had discovered this and continued using an old iphone we had given him to play games on.  Unsupervised.  I naively thought my then-husband (who is a computer programmer) had secured our internet- because he told me he had- that anything there was to worry about would be filtered out.  But I also thought it wasn’t even close to time for me to worry about any of my boys looking at p**nopgraphy. That would come later, at ages 15 or 16, right?

I was so wrong.

I will probably type that phrase 1000 times through the course of this blog.

Adam was obsessed with screens. Video games, tv, tablets, whatever he could find.  I limited screen time in our house very severely- but John did not agree with it and thought (I believe still thinks) that all those things were/are harmless.  No matter what research I shared with him, what educators and counselors said, and what other parents told him- he knew better.  So many times, when I was not at home, the kids were left to play on screens unsupervised by John, and for as long as they wanted. I had stopped arguing with him about it. Any discussion was met with attacks on me, so I had stopped fighting with him about many things.

And now, “bad pictures” was the combined screen/p*rn addiction that Adam would pursue relentlessly. The bad pictures were so accessible, and they weren’t just “pictures.” Even on Google images, the pics were “moving” pictures. He kept sneaking off with the iphone, so a friend half-jokingly suggested I should look at his browser history. I expected to find all things related to cars (his obsession) and Legos. By the time I found out what he was actually doing with the iphone, he had learned to type in much more than random female parts. He had used the captions from those images to then search for more and more detailed and complicated imagery. As I, horrified, scrolled through the browser history, I found terms and phrases that I didn’t even know. Actions I had never seen/done. His 10-year-old brain was now full of every s*exual image you could dream of.

When I alerted John, he was a little alarmed, but more surprised because he thought the blockers that were in place would’ve stopped the images. They didn’t stop anything because Adam wasn’t clicking through to any actual sites. It was just google images and the search results were all he saw. And it gave me whiplash how quickly John went to the “All boys do it. It’s normal” argument. I have only since thought that John’s easy dismissal of Adam’s new hobby was possibly due to his own addiction to similar things.

I flew into motion- buying a book to read to Adam, finding another new counselor, having long talks with him, citing all the reasons it was negative for him to be seeing images like that. I thought he surely was just confused and would now stop, since we explained it all.

He didn’t.

He pursued the images in every way possible- sneaking around on the computer and iphone (which we had taken away and hid, but he always found), using his family/friends devices to search, and something searching for “soft” images like “girls in leotards” and “bras”, etc. His counselor, upon once again dismissing him from treatment, cautioned me that his curiosity about s*x would not go away. I hoped he was wrong.

He wasn’t.

Point of order: our divorce happened around this time- that is another story I will tell one day, but rest-assured that its cause was complete detachment from my husband and his own narcissistic actions.

The drive to find access to these images has never stopped for Adam, even to this day. I was convinced from very early on that this was an addiction for him. John rejected this idea and chastised me for even thinking it. John’s favorite way to deal with problems is to ignore them till they “go away,” which usually meant leaving me to deal with them. In his family, focusing on a problem meant it was real. If you blow it off, it isn’t really there.

The dialogue around adult use of p*rn runs the gambit these days, but it’s worth relating that this isn’t the same stuff that we faced as teenagers. This isn’t the “my friend’s dad has a Playboy” kind of sneaking around to see a few n*ked pictures. This is 24-hour a day, readily accessible, zoom-in-able, moving pictures of millions of different images. And no matter the rhetoric around adult use of p*rn, I think we should all agree that children being exposed to such things and such young ages is extremely damaging and only has negative effects.

Regardless, Adam’s problem became something I had to think about non-stop, to monitor constantly, to try and stay one step ahead of his technological abilities, and to educate myself relentlessly on.

Due to the fact that the kids now had “two houses,” I was also fighting the battle that John had unending screens/devices/computers/video games at his house and he was in denial about the problem. You can imagine what that meant. And despite what the experts advised, John had taken the stance that “what happens at MY house is NOT YOUR business.” He had become angry and bitter and had no desire to “work with” me on anything. He had decided that he was the good parent, and I was evil. But most of all, he loved the power trip he was on due to me not being around to hassle him about being a responsible parent.

This storyline continues to much darker places, but always with that theme present: I am the villain, he is the victim, and he knows better than me how to parent.

I want to end this Good Pictures/Bad Pictures entry with this: If you have children with any access to the internet, please understand and believe that if they haven’t found *bad pictures* yet, the bad pictures will find them. You might think they don’t know about it and wouldn’t ever search for it. You might think they are too young. You may tell yourself that they would come to you if they saw something suspicious. But whatever you think, if you haven’t both discussed it with them and put appropriate software and supervision in place, you are on a collision course.

Don’t let your baby child become addicted to something because you are in denial.

If your child has access to technology that you yourself cannot operate, investigate, monitor, and block, you MUST educate yourself.

Don’t put a ticking time bomb in their hands and hope THEY know how to stop it from exploding.

Resources to help: 

Safe Smart Phones for Kids | Troomi

The Bark Phone: A Safer Phone for Kids | Bark

The Best Parental Control App Services of 2024 (top10.com)

Should We Teach Kids about Porn's Harms? Yes, and Here's How. (catholiceducation.org)