Internet Porn for Children

My daughter was introduced to Internet porn the other day. It wasn't a voluntary thing - on her part or mine. I guess that's probably obvious. Anyway - suddenly there it was, and I had to figure out how to talk to her about it.

But first let me just say this -- it's not fair!!!

I wasn't being a bad parent on that particular day. My daughter and I were snuggled together on the sofa, using the laptop to find pictures of Scooby Doo and the Gang for a little project she was working on. The timer rang on the oven, so I left her for a moment to take some home-baked muffins out of the oven. I'm not making that up -- home-baked muffins, from scratch. I swear I was being a good mom that day!

But the problem is that sometimes people like to dress up as Scooby Doo and the Gang. Only they neglect to put on underwear. And they have to bend over for some reason. And then they get their pictures taken.  And then they post them on the Internet.

Sigh.

So, my daughter was looking at pictures of Scooby and the Gang when she saw some pictures of naked people, and she was pretty shocked. I knew something was wrong when I went back into the living room and found her sitting completely still, not moving at all.

So, here's a question - how do you talk with an 8-year-old about porn? (Just for a frame of reference - she doesn't know about sex yet, and she thinks kissing is gross.)

The answer is that there are lots of things to say to an 8-year-old about porn.  We talked for a long, long time.

At first she didn't want to say much, and just seemed to want a lot of reassurance.  So I talked in a very matter-of-fact, very calm way.

Then after a while, she wanted to make some sense out of what she saw. We had to start somewhere that she understands, so we talked about bad guys. One way to be a bad guy is to take naked pictures of people and post them on the Internet. Another is to let somebody take naked pictures of you.

But it's more complex than that, because, even though it seems bad to her, people are actually allowed to do those things. And she's old enough to understand some level of complexity. So we talked about how, weird as it might seem to her, naked pictures are actually legal, as long as it's grownups in the pictures, and grownups taking the pictures, and never, ever kids. And as long as everyone knows it's happening, and has agreed to it.

That led to questions about whether there should be a law against taking naked pictures and posting them on the Internet. Turns out 8 isn't too young to start thinking about freedom of speech, and starting to understand both sides of that issue.

And it led off on the tangent of understanding that's why you can't use a cell phone in the locker rooms at the Y. Because maybe somebody isn't talking on the phone, but is actually taking secret naked pictures of people.

Now she gets why young kids don't get to use the Internet by themselves, for exactly this reason - that sometimes they might accidentally see something on the Internet that wasn't meant for kids. She immediately vowed never, ever to use the Internet without her dad or me right there, because this really freaked her out. But that issue is more complex, and the situation has changed for us now, because she was clearly able to tell when she'd come upon something she wasn't supposed to see, and she had done the right thing, which is to do nothing until I came back and helped her. So we talked about what a good kid she is, and what good judgement she used, and how we're likely to trust her to do more alone on the Internet now that we know how responsible she is.

Much as I might have hoped we could have avoided more embarrassing territory, we really couldn't, because much as the experience shocked her, and freaked her out, she also found the pictures kind of ... interesting. She was uncomfortable admitting it, but she kind of wanted some reassurance and understanding of that too.

So I explained that pictures of naked people are pretty common on the Internet, because sometimes people enjoy looking at them. I wasn't ready to talk with her about all the fun and exciting aspects of nudity, and I really don't think she's ready to hear about them, but we did talk about curiosity, and how it's perfectly natural to have some. She can look in the mirror to see what a naked girl looks like, but she doesn't ever have an opportunity to see naked boys, and she's curious. It's not like I had a great answer for her. It's natural to be curious, but you're supposed to wait until you're an adult to indulge that curiosity by looking at naked pictures of people on the Internet. Bummer to be a kid.

And then we even talked about some of the words, so that if she wants to talk about it again sometime, she'll have the vocabulary.

It was a long talk. Afterwards it felt like somebody ought to swoop in and give me a medal, or at least a drink, but of course nobody did. Her little art project got derailed, which was too bad, but it turned out to be a pretty good day anyway. I can't help but believe that we added some points in the trust column that day, with the difficult but honest conversation, although the topic hasn't come up again.

Thank God.

Friends on Facebook

Facebook recommended a friend to me today. We have 8 mutual Facebook friends, so you'd think I'd know him. And I do. It's a guy from high school.

We were never friends in high school, despite having friends in common, and being in some classes together. We graduated and went in different directions, and then a year after high school I saw him at a party, and when I said hello to him, he said, "Oh my God! You really are flat-chested!" And after that, I thought he was an asshole.

But here's the thing. It has been 29 years. I'm not usually a grudge-holder. And 29 years is a long time to hold a grudge.

And here's another thing. If it happened today, I would burst out laughing. I've grown up a little since then.

But at the time I was pretty sensitive. And, I might argue that for some things there are no statutes of limitations. That was probably one of the most deliberately mean things anyone has ever said to me. And it successfully hurt my feelings.

Of course, when I was a teen, I said and did some pretty dumb stuff too. Who knows, maybe some of them were to him. I've forgotten most of them, I imagine, and forgiven myself for the ones I remember. And I like to think I wouldn't make most of those same mistakes now.

I don't imagine he remembers the incident. He probably remembers, like most people do, that he did some dumb stuff as a teen, but mostly he remembers himself in a good light. And he probably wouldn't make most of those same mistakes now.

So - to friend or not to friend. I hate to keep hating someone for one little thing that happened a long time ago. On the other hand, I haven't seen him since then and have nothing else by which to remember him. I don't have any pleasant memories with which to dilute the one bad one.

So I'm not going to take Facebook's recommendation and friend the guy, because we were never friends, he was an incredible asshole to me once, and I haven't thought about him for the better part of 29 years - not until he started showing up as a friend suggestion on Facebook.

Of course, this is the genius behind Google+. Instead of friending him, I could add him to a circle, like an "Assholes from High School" circle. But what would be the point? (Actually, my friend Laura says that for people in that circle, I could just do the occasional post to show them how very, very well I'm doing. I thought that was a damned funny idea.)

The situation has brought to mind a video I saw on YouTube a few months ago that had gone viral.  It's a little different than my situation - it's about an old lover who broke her heart, and now wants to be friends on Facebook. It's called "Are You F*cking Kidding Me?" But it's a good song, and it kind of represents the spirit of what I've been thinking.

Not the Best Pets

A little girl once went home from a birthday party with a goldfish in a bag. She had won it as a prize. Since then, this has been a fear lurking in the back of my mind, that somebody would thrust an undesirable pet on my daughter, and I would be stuck with it.

And then it happened.

I picked up my daughter from camp the other day, and she was so excited. Guess what was in her water bottle? It was lake clams. The campers had hiked to a lake, and an older girl had persuaded my daughter that she should scoop up some clams and take them home as pets.

The older girl knew a little bit about clams as pets. She knew they ate algae. She knew my daughter needed to keep them in water. She knew they should have stones and sand in the bowl. So here is what surprises me - that, having apparently had experience with clams as pets, she recommended them.

Here's the thing about my daughter's clams - we never knew if they were alive or dead. From the beginning of our pet experience to the end, it was never clear. It was never even clear how many clams there were, since the water was a little murky, and they may have been stuck together, and one of them may have been a stone.

Given that we weren't even very good at distinguishing clams from stones, we were certainly never going to be able to tell them apart. This was somewhat disappointing for a little girl who had hoped to name her new pet(s).

So, to be nice, let's just call them, collectively, Clammy.

Here's another thing about Clammy. They are very smelly. It may have been the algae, or it may have been the clams. It wasn't entirely clear what reeked, but it was bad enough that we had to keep them in the basement.

And here's another thing about Clammy. We really had no idea how to keep them alive, if that was even necessary, given that we weren't sure they were ever alive. No idea about water temp, or whether we needed to leave the basement light on for them, or how deep the water should be, or how rocky/sandy the bottom of their plastic bowl needed to be, or whether the chemicals in our water would be a problem, or whether they were upside-down or right-side-up, and if that mattered.

But I will say this in Clammy's favor. It took very little time for my daughter to tire of this pet. The whole down in the basement, smelly, not doing anything to indicate being alive thing meant that, when she wasn't looking, we were able to release Clammy back to the wild. And when she noticed, my daughter didn't really mind.

And so the lesson about how wild animals need to stay in the wild, that they aren't meant to be pets, was actually learned. And there weren't even tears.

Not sure if it was a happy ending, what with not knowing whether Clammy lived through it. But it might have been.