> What minors are exposed to, and educated about, is the parents primary responsibility to deal with.

Yes and no. We're sharing this responsibility in half with the government, due to public education requirement.

The moment a kid starts attending an educational institution - which can be as early as 1yo (daycare) or 3 yo(kindergarten), and usually no later than 7yo (where mandatory education usually kicks in), the parents lose control over what their kids "are exposed to, and educated about". But the problem isn't the educational institutions either (though they sometimes contribute).

The problem is other kids.

Minors will get access to porn and nudes in their teenage years, and there's fuck parents and teachers can do about it. There's always going to be a kid that somehow gets their hand on this stuff and bring it to the school. It takes just one for it to spread like wildfire.

To those who think a good parent should be able to protect their teens from exposure to porn: first demonstrate how one can stop a preschooler from contracting acute Paw Patrol or Frozen infection within first two weeks of kindergarten, and then we can talk.

I don't disagree but let me go one step further and say perhaps it is no one's responsibility. A parent cannot possibly monitor what teens are getting into at all times. When teens do 'bad' things it doesn't mean the parent or society is somehow at fault.

> A parent cannot possibly monitor what teens are getting into at all times.

This is alarmingly incorrect. Extra curricular activities, clubs, sports, and music work exceptionally well at keeping kids too busy to indulge in pornography or other unacceptable habits like drugs.

Idle hands are the devil’s workshop and all that. Busy hands find little trouble.

Lol those are the places we did drugs when I was kid.

> This is alarmingly incorrect. Extra curricular activities, clubs, sports, and music work exceptionally well at keeping kids too busy to indulge in pornography or other unacceptable habits like drugs.

Ha ha, if only.

You're forgetting the liminal space - the transition periods. Unless you're going to personally hand your kid off to a teacher and then pick them up afterwards, exactly on the minute the activities start and end, leaving exactly zero time for them to interact with other kids with little supervision, kids will find a way.

And if you actually manage to do that, you'll be severely damaging their social development, hindering their ability to function in society as independent adult, possibly for life. This is arguably much, much worse than them smoking a few cigarettes and watching some porn.

The amount of exposure matters here. It's one thing for a teenager to manage to occasionally access clandestine pornography (as was kind of the norm growing up in the 1980's). It's a much worse thing to spend many hours per week looking at porn. The former is probably not a terrible thing, the latter is not healthy for emotional or social development.

Plus, there are other positive aspects to keeping kids busy and involved with healthy social activities.

But there's probably downsides too. Just anecdotally, I know lot's of locked-down home school type kids who quickly fell into alcoholism and drug-abuse because of their lifestyle. When you get nothing, and then get a lot of access, some people go crazy.

Yes, it would be nice if every little kid can be a nice altar boy who plays football and reads under the tree. But let's be realistic - making mistakes is part of life, and it's really the part of life that allows us to figure out who we are.

You're forgetting that even if you somehow managed to keep your kid on a leash so short that they never had a chance of coming in contact with porn, they'll probably grow up with life-long psychological and relationship problems that will be many orders of magnitude worse than any hypothetical harm you protected them from.

I'm sure teens of all times have had access to porn. I got it from a home built pay TV decoder in the 90s (sound didn't work but I didn't care so much lol)

And yes extreme types were already thing then too. Bukkake, gangbangs, all my friends in school saw these things. I'm pretty sure most of them have never done those practices in their lives. They're all pretty boring family men now. And they are respectful to women. Society is doing fine.

I’m not convinced. Illicit content is more accessible to everyone than ever before. I question the efficacy of mounting ever increasing pressure on parents to police their kids. At some points we need to help shoulder the burden as a society and I think this is one of those points.

I see similar arguments for food, drugs, safety, social media, etc. Patents aren’t super heros with infinite time to purify across all these dimensions.

Do you feel the same about other guardrails typically aimed at protecting children? Tobacco control, driving licenses, gambling restrictions?

Good parenting combined with societal guardrails lead to the best chance outcomes.

IMO these are already controlled on the same level as web access.

The ISP verifies your age when you buy internet access. The clerk verifies your age when you buy wine.

The clerk doesn't follow you home and make sure you don't give your kid wine. And, symmetrically, the ISP doesn't make sure you don't allow your kids access to porn. Once the transaction is done, it's in the parent's hands.

The difference is that parent's aren't very keen to give their kids alcohol... usually. Although it is explicitly legal in a lot of places. But for the internet, they are very keen so it's normalized and nobody cares.