Occasionally, even with Safe Search turned on, images that I don't want my children seeing will pop up under oddly innocuous searches. And it's easy to accidentally stumble upon it, especially to untrained searchers.
Now I know people will have varying opinions about the subject, but I for one (and I know I'm not alone) don't want to view pornography, and certainly don't want my children viewing it, so a filtering service like OpenDNS is awesome. Beyond pornography, there's a lot of other good stuff that you can restrict as well, like hate/discrimination sites, dating sites, etc.--stuff that I don't need and don't need my kids getting involved with an online dating site right now.
Oddly enough, my only experience with OpenDNS is from me convincing my parents to let me try to set it up on the family router because I broke the other control (which makes no sense from a protection / censorship perspective).
If your kids are going on dating sites and dating unacceptable people or whatever - well how is that different than real life? Or as another poster wrote, about viewing beheadings. If my kids decide they want to watch such things, I suppose they'll find a way. I'd be more concerned why they wanted to watch it; isn't that the real problem, not the technical means on how they accomplish it? (Well I suppose beyond once out of curiosity.) I'd be just as upset to find them torturing small animals, but I'm not gonna hide scissors and knives.
It doesn't seem plausible that any kids are going to decide "Hey I wanna hook up with people online, but I got an error. Oh well. I'll play with LEGO instead."
And hell, if my kids read Stormfront or RedPill and decide "hey, that makes sense", then I've failed so hard at teaching them how to evaluate probabilities. At that point, DNS would be the last problem on my mind.
Accidental viewing, eh, I'm not too concerned. When my daughter was learning to spell, she was searching for monsters. Unfortunately, her phonetic attempt came out "man store", which was some bondage or leather thing. We had a good laugh and moved on. Maybe I'm wrong and something will trouble them for life, but it just doesn't seem likely to the point of spending any effort or worry on it.
Do you really think accidentally viewing something unsavory is gonna be a big deal?
Not really. As a parent its a good first line of defence. i.e. A transparent solution catches the worst/obvious stuff & the good old parenting talk covers the rest.
i.e. It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.
Seriously, you need to get back to us in a dozen, dozen and a half years, before you can speak with any authority about your approach to your kids and today's Internet.
10 year olds goaded on by friends shouldn't be looking at the kinds of materials that are 18+ on the net today. Heck, most of Reddit isn't appropriate for growing minds.
What specific issues do you have with the poster's approach to his kids' internet access?
(If auto updates are on, that pretty much eliminates exploits installing malware. (Assuming no one's gonna waste a 0day to install some spam/ad junk.))
1: The only filtering is client side, an ad blocker so they don't grow up accustomed to adverts. And just for general sanity - the web's rather obnoxious otherwise.