> 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.