Hello. I'd like some advice on simple Internet controls for a 16-year-old who habitually visits porn sites. I monitor him closely, but if I step out of the room even briefly, I find porn sites in the history. He gets grounded or whatever, banned from the computer, promises he won't do it again, needs the Internet for schoolwork, and the whole cycle starts again. I tried a ContentWatch trial, but it was unwieldy. I read the thread from Ambalee, about the futility of trying to control an adult partner's porn addiction. This is different, as a youngster is involved and I also have a 12-year-old who is overhearing all this. It's very disturbing and I could use some help.

Thank you.

Can't beat it join it... No i'm just kidding...
the best bet isn't so much with a technical resolution but rather disciplinary resolution.

surely if you were to find a means of blocking out certain sites, the disobediancy of the child is still there and will cary it out in other ways other than just surfing porn sites.


be strict and firm and take away the PC from the child. In some cultures beating up the kid would be not only acceptable but very well promoted. unfortunetly here in the U.S. and it's infinite wisdom of child protection and foreign policy (off the subject) it's illegal.

Ok.. ok.. tech talk..
try using a shoot I forgot the application name.. .. Panera Bread uses it so people won't surf on certain sites...

ok till i think of it.. one of the things you can do is when after your child has visisted the sites, you can go to history and copy and past the sites. then add them to the restricted sites. To do this :

go to this site:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/.../settings.mspx

good luck with your kid, and just tell 'em to get *** Nah just kidding**..

thanks for your help, but pasting those web sites into the restricted zone under security settings does not work on my computer. I've tried that time and again, then I type in the address on yahoo or google, and the sites come right back up. Yuck! What am I doing wrong?

If you are using IE, I believe there is a content manager. It won't keep out of all porn sites, but it will certainly cut off a good portion of them.... the point being, it will require a lot more work to get to them.... you could consider using something like cybernanny, or another content manager....

I have a problem of getting porn sites I don't want while searching for benign items I want - and I can't tell the difference on many of them until I open the page. So part of the problem is that there are evil programmers out there trying to make you see porn whether you want to or not. These scumquats either worship porn and want to spread their beliefs to everyone, or want to lure people to their lucrative pay sites.

What I want is slapstick comedy (e.g. The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Abott and Costello, and similar items). When I search for generic pages of this type, the browser always finds more porn sites than genuine slapstick comedy sites. But any attempts to filter out the porn sites also seems to filter out the genuine slapstick sites.

I have also had websites posing as something else entirely redirect my browser to porn sites, or send hundreds of porn popups. One was a site purported to be selling old phonograph records.

Then, once you hit one of those sites site, whether you wanted to or not, it starts spamming you with deals selling porn, "vigara", and sex aids.

Hollywodd is also a great inciter in this mess, because it promotes the view that sex is for entertainment, rather than for marriage.

thanks for your reply, but the content manager on IE doesn't work for me. I set all the controls to zero tolerance, hit apply, and still, when I check, all sites are allowed.

Hello,

Technology won't be able to stop social problems. I don't want to get into how to raise your child, that is your scope, and for you as the parent (s) to work with. I do not have any kids yet, so I cannot speak from experience either. Perhaps this is a call from him to want to find out more about adult activities. Might be time for parents and son to sit down and discuss the birds and the bees.

I think the argument of needing the internet is bogus from him concerning schoolwork. Not every child in America has access to the internet, so he can/should be able to do his homework the old fashioned way -- the library, at school, whatever.

If you want to get technical, you could try altering the DNS addresses of some of his common sites, but you are going to be continually chasing that duck as it waddles around your pond. You might also try various pieces of software to block him.

But in the end, I think it is going to take strong parenting to curb this. Talk to a doctor / psychologist. Call the school, and be active in his life, and see if you can convince him that he does not need porn in his life. There might be something social going on.

Christian

Good comments in this topic already. Removing his privileges to use the PC is the obvious answer.

But be sure that he's actually viewing porn. Just because there are porn links in internet history doesn't guarantee that porn sites have been visited and viewed. Those links in history can also come from advertising. Hell, I've picked them up browsing for CD cover art and such, and ended up in heated debate with my wife over it until I showed her just how innocently the links can get there!

thanks to all for advice. Believe me, my husband and I are active, involved parents. Forgoing the computer for homework would be a problem--we have only one, and even if he's on it for word processing, how can I keep him off the Internet? And there is no doubt that he visits the sites. I am also puzzled at why the Content Manager doesn't work. When I tried to put sites in restricted zones, got a message that said the sites were already in other zones. But I couldn't find them. If I were to use a software program, any recommendations?

Hello dfederman,

Given the fsct that I've been through these issues with many of my "real life" clients, I have to agree with Christian and Catweazle.

Basically: there is no technology-oriented solution that will solve your problem. While the Internet is an absolutely essential tool for doing schoolwork, there is really no foolproof way to limit your child's use of any given computer to only that sort of work.

Here's what I would suggest:

Get him his own computer; base models that will serve his needs education-wise are fairly cheap. The computer doesn't need to be capable of doing anything more than the basics needed for his work. Complaints about things like the graphics card not being able to support the games he wants to play and the like should obviously be ignored.

This one I've unfortunately been through with one of my clients, even after she did get a dedicated computer for one of her kids:

The teenager ignored all of my recommendations, and also refused to use any of the protective programs I installed. Being "his" computer, he also had convinced his parents that his user account had to have administrative rights, which obviously meant that he could undo/uninstall/disable any of the utilities I installed.

I eventually told the parents that it wasn't in their best interest to keep paying me to come over and clean up this computer, and that I would no longer do so; they agreed.

The upshot of that was that the child in question did, of course, screw up his computer once again (to the point that it wouldn't even boot), and had to resort to going to the local library to use their computers for his homework.

He was barred by the library shotly after that for doing the same things to their computers that he had done to his home computer...