Parents Are Kidding Themselves If They Think They Can Stop Their Kids From Being Curious About Sex

girl-tween-on-ipadA mother is gripping her pearls very tightly in Oregon because her daughter was caught looking at some poorly written erotica on renowned bastion of craptastic writing Wattpad with a school-issued iPad.

According to KATU in Oregon, Sarah, who doesn’t want anyone to know who her daughter is but doesn’t mind being on television or giving out the name of the Middle School her kid attends, has a 12-year-old child who was looking at stories about sexy sex on the iPad her school gave her to use for technology based education.

Apparently there were security measures in place to keep children from learning about throbbing members and heaving bosoms, but the kids surpassed them pretty quickly because OF COURSE THEY DID.

Now, I can see her being upset about what happened later on in the school year: her daughter used the iPad to make an email account and have “relations” with another student online which included “racy pics”. No word on how far that went, but you can’t help but cringe a little at the mom’s reaction.

Sarah took away her daughter’s iPad and forced her daughter to go “electronics-free” for the rest of the school year – about seven months. Sarah said that presented its own array of difficulties in a classroom environment where the iPad was used for virtually all learning.

She said she alerted the district again.

“I think it was a mess,” Sarah said. “I think it was a complete and total mess. I think (the school) could have found other ways to handle this.”

Um. Like what? I don’t mean to sound dismissive of this person’s concerns, but as long as there has been an internet on whence boobs and butts reside, there has also been enterprising middle schoolers finding ways around the “security measures” that stand between themselves and said jiggly bits.

We did it all the time. Back in the days of eMacs and NetScape, there was Bess, a filtering system that was so easy to circumnavigate that it was laughable. And yes, even at the tender age of 12, budding perverts like me were reading all of the shitty erotica we could find.

All that our teachers and houseparents could do was discipline us for breaking the rules and keep finding more stringent network security measures for us to work around. It’s the circle of puberty.

You can not shelter your child from everything. It’s impossible. Making something forbidden, like racy fanfic and social networks, just makes it look about a billion percent more desirable. I’m not saying that you should accept that your children are going to look at unspeakable things all over the internet, I’m saying that by appearing on TV to humiliate them (how long do you think it will be before this girl’s classmates figure out who Sarah’s daughter is?) and making them virtual hermits isn’t the answer either. It’s more likely to exacerbate it.

I mean, I was a horrible child so I could see myself finding a way to look at soft-core porn on the library computers just to spite the person who told me I couldn’t.

In any event, technology in the classroom is not going away. There is going to be a need to address things like cyber bullying and perhaps even sexy sex. To me, though, this entire situation looks like something a mother and a daughter need to talk about. The kid is clearly curious about her sexuality, and right now the biggest message she’s getting from her mom is that it is SHOCKING and A MESS and HORRIBLE.

The reaction she got from her mother won’t answer any additional questions she has about what goes where and what is normal and how stuff feels, so she’ll probably have to go find out somewhere else.

Like the internet.

(Image: Yeko Photo Studio/Shutterstock)

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