My Son’s Introduction to Porn came from my Email
The explicit content filters work, but not well enough to stop a curious 9-year-old.
It was a perfectly unremarkable Sunday morning and I was minding my own business cleaning up the kitchen. If you’re a parent, you probably already know what comes next: that calm was about to be disrupted.
My 9-year-old son came downstairs and something was immediately off. He seemed to want to talk to me but he was fidgeting nervously and wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Mom,” he finally said, “you have some weird stuff in your Inbox.” I did a quick mental inventory of my current crop of emails, from appointment reminders to online sale notifications to the flood of requests for my time, money, and attention that never seems to shut off. Nothing new or “weird” there, in my opinion.
My son wouldn’t elaborate, but he was clearly spooked. Fortunately, he’s the world’s worst spy and leaves a trail of evidence everywhere he goes, so the answer wasn’t too hard to track down. I went upstairs and saw my desktop computer screen still lit up, with my Gmail window open. Except it wasn’t my regular Inbox, it was the Spam folder and there was one item marked “read” — and not by me.
I wish I could tell you it was an “Urgent!” email warning me my car warranty was about to expire. But no, my son had spotted a subject line filled with a strange combination of emoji and very descriptive language about body parts and had inadvertently discovered the world of online pornography. Fortunately, his single click didn’t take him all the way down the rabbit hole, but he was understandably confused and disturbed, and I was shoved into crisis-management mode.
I had the initial sex talk with my son earlier this year, after some comments he made about how babies are conceived proved shockingly off the mark. At the time, he didn’t want anything more than the most basic of basic explanations, and it was awkward but still relatively painless. Then I got to coast and forget that harder, messier conversations were looming on the horizon. Now here we were at explicit porn. Sometimes parenting is just too fun for words.
It’s been my experience as a mom that the moments when we most want to bury our heads and avoid a subject, the more urgently that subject actually needs to be addressed. So I wasted very little time that day sitting my son down (far away from his two blissfully unaware younger sisters) and explaining the concept of Spam and what kinds of things spammers use to get our attention.
“If you read a subject line offering you unlimited credits to play Roblox,” I asked him, “you’d probably be curious, right?” He agreed he would definitely want to open that email. Well, I explained, using lots of emoji and talking about private parts of the body makes a lot of people curious, too. And that’s what spammers want: to turn our natural curiosity into clicks. I also explained to him that most grownups never see what goes into our Spam folder; it happens automatically, and every few weeks or so the folder is magically emptied.
I apologized to my son that he had seen something that made him feel strange, and told him to please ask me in the future if he ever discovers something online that raises questions like that. He seemed satisfied for the time being, and the rest of our day proceeded without incident.
Part of me was relieved, but another part of me was sad. This was just the latest example of how my oldest child is growing up and becoming acquainted with parts of our world that I wish I could protect him from for a little while longer. Just like with our introductory sex talk, the conversation about online pornography is far from over, and I hope in the future those talks are more organic, as opposed to damage control. Either way, the train toward adolescence and adulthood is steadily moving forward. I promise to stay on board with all my kids, even when the ride gets bumpy and the scenery makes me want to cover my eyes.
