I Found Porn on My Teen’s Phone and Handled it All Wrong
I Found Porn on my Teen’s Phone and Handled it All Wrong I made a deal with my 13-year-old son. He could have Instagram but ONLY if it was also attached to my phone so I could see what he was sending and receiving. Yes, his account was private, but having his profile on my phone also allowed me to keep tabs on randos trying to add him or inappropriate accounts sending him messages. At times, having his account on my phone was overwhelming. Do you know how many messages teens send per day?! But, still, having access to the messages-by-the-minute gave me peace of mind that he was being safe online and acting appropriately with his friends online. One day, in one of his group chats with three other boys in his class, in the middle of their conversation about basketball and the Playstation game du jour, there it was. A screenshot from PornHub! One of his buddies had sent it in between “Do we have pool tomorrow?” and “Want to play basketball after school?” I’m pretty sure when I saw the picture, I gasped out loud. I was shocked and disgusted. Who was this punk sending naked pictures of women in, may I add, unattainable positions? My knee-jerk reaction was to shut the whole thing down. That’s it. I was going to delete his social media account, take away his iPad, buy him a fleecy onesie and force him to watch the Disney Channel with me 24/7. And then I noticed something else a bit disturbing. A seemingly non-reaction from my son. Had he seen this stuff before? Why wasn’t he as shocked as I was that his friend had sent this image over. He didn’t even acknowledge the image, which I saw as maybe good and bad. Good that he didn’t want to bring focus to it in their conversation and bad because…. why wasn’t he surprised?! So, I handed the message over to my husband because I just thought ‘he’s a guy and he could give me a penis-centric POV.’ Was this just a case of boys being boys? My husband tried to reassure me that it was just a normal part of boyhood and told tales of him sneaking Playboys under his mattress or something similar in his teenage years. So, for the next couple of days, I decided to bury my head in the sand and pretend like nothing happened as I