WHEN OUR OLDEST WAS 13...:

Let's say you find history of porn searches on your 13-year-old's computer, and let's say it's not weird or violent porn, but just run-of-the-mill, mildly off-putting porn. What should you do? I'd say nothing, but maybe I'm wrong.

There was much ado Tuesday on the Internet about one dad's rather sweet solution to this scenario. He wrote a note to his son saying that he wouldn't tell the kid's mom, and that he did the same thing as a kid, and that there were sites safer for computers, which he listed. He basically said, "I won't make a big deal or any-sized deal about it," though he did go pretty deeply and somewhat creatively into the dangers of pornography to computers.  

It is a quandary. What should you do in this garden-variety situation? The most sensible thing I have ever heard on this topic came from the internet scholar Danah Boyd. She pointed out very sanely and sensibly that this isolated moment should be part of an ongoing, larger conversation with your child. One shouldn't view this discovery as an event in itself, but more a part of the dialogue that has been going on for years about sex, body image, and all of that.

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