I read an article yesterday that gave the opinions of several mom bloggers on parental controls. It was obvious that many of them didn’t really think they were necessary or considered parental controls to be more for spying on their children or alerting to cyber bullying etc. The harmful and addictive nature of pornography should make it the number one reason for parental controls (filtering). The extra benefit to filtering controls is that those same products will often minimize exposure to other dangers as well – cat phishing, malware, identity theft. More extensive monitoring products can always be used if there is a particular concern, but content filtering really is a must. Parents would never leave heroin or a gun on the coffee table but many will leave their kids’ devices wide open to pornography or other extreme content that might not damage the body but can certainly damage their mind and lead to lifelong problems.
See how pornography harms the brain from Fight The New Drug.
Related: Pamela Anderson’s Open Letter about the dangers of pornography