Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Time To Wean The 'Tween

The lay of the land has shifted when it comes to learning about the birds and bees. Gone are the days of stealing away to the garage with your dad's dog eared issues of Playboy. The G rated National Geographic always a giggle inducing page turner for the 4th grade and under crowd has been long over shadowed by the Internet.

When it comes to parental controls Apple has done a fine job, Thank-You Steve Jobs. Even the itouch gives you the ability to play stalag 13 quite literally as a parent. Initially I was against the lock-down And while I waved my ACLU card my tween aged consumers consumed media as if the itunes store were a colossal brain candy store.  I felt bad limiting my childrens' web exposure to pedestrian sites, knowing full well that curiosity can strike and the magic wand in reality is google.

Yesterday my rose colored glasses were smashed by a pair of size 5 Vans' as the reality took shape, it was just as I had been warned. Guess it takes one to know one, but when my uber IT muffin lectured the evils of unlimited bandwidth I could not would not listen. The beauty of the FireFox history is a savant like memory for key words. I was reading an Ipad history cache that reminded me of a Penthouse Forum column or a shopping list for a pervert (or in my case, a ten year old boy.)

Boobs, Pussy, Sex, Fuck, Fucking and the list goes on in that narrow vein of genre. As one can only imagine thousands of pages came back. Maybe this is where the idea of Santa and Magic cross over to reward the resourceful elementary school aged. Yes Virginia there Is a Santa and he likes to be spanked by a red-head sporting thigh high boots.

My parental tumble into the sexual abyss came long before I expected. I figured I had a few more years to parse the inevitable.. The stumble comes with the ipad. No flash ability means no club penguin, but no parental controls means that club penguin is no longer the fave stay for the after school elementary crowd. Think boobs.  Really big boobs.

Innocence is fleeting or in our case it's flown the coop, along with unlimited bandwidth.