Worried

Ruby31

Please can someone advise me on this & hopefully alleviate my fears.

My 8 (almost 9) year old daughter has a D.S. She has access to YouTube on it. Any time I looked at it, she'd always been viewing innocent stuff like videos on insects which are her obsession! I was horrified last night when my husband showed me the last video she'd watched which was a couple having sex. She'd keyed 'view live sex' into the search engine. We'd taken the D.S. off her months ago as she was playing games on it too often and she didn't make a fuss at all. We gave it back to her at the start of the holidays Friday 26th as its very hard to fill the time. So I'm worried now that she's possibly been viewing that cr*p since then.

I was literally going to give her the birds & bees chat this weekend as she's asked a couple of questions recently about how her brother got into my tummy! What's the point in trying to give her an age-appropriate explanation after she's viewed videos of people having sex??

On a side-note, I'm so unbelievably angry at my husband. I didn't want to get the D.S. last Christmas, but he assured me that they were fine & most kids have them. I assumed the parental controls were in place. Little did I know my daughter could just go in and disable them with one tap of a button. I've told him he has to deal with this now, so he's going to have a chat with her this evening.

I feel so low today. I don't know or care if I come across as melodramatic, but I feel like her innocence is gone. It's not helped by the fact that I've been finding her so difficult to deal with for the passed year. She's excellent in school and an absolute terror at home.

Help!

freshpopcorn

Did you actually watch the videos she viewed off Youtube?

eviltwin

I understand your concern but I think you're overreacting a little bit. Kids, even at 8, may be curious about sex. Give them access to the internet and they may well decide to do a bit of research. She's seen the clip now so you have to address it, that means both of you not just your husband.

Keep your cool, ask your daughter what she was curious about, what she wants to know. Answer her questions as honestly as possible in an age appropriate way.
Don't make it embarrassing or shameful, explain to her that she's not ready to see material like that, that you've trusted her to use her DS for gaming and that while her curiosity is normal she needs to be protected.

It is possible to put parental controls on a DS and even disable it afaik. Your husband should have done this but I wouldn't hang him over it either. I wouldn't let her use a personal device for internet access, restrict it to a computer in a public area where you can see what she is doing.

It's not the end of the world, keep cool, keep perspective. Seeing a couple having sex isn't going to scar an 8 yr old but how you handle it might.

Chemical Byrne

Well the fact that you assumed there were bullet proof controls in place is a failing on you and your husband's part. Ye should not have assumed and should have made sure there were some password or other secure filtering in place.

Unless she was told in advance that looking at what we'd consider dodgy material was prohibited, it may be the case that although it may have been dodgy, she didn't see that it was a huge infraction of the rules because there was no rule if you didn't state it.

I'd be putting proper filter on and give a stern warning that she's not to search for stuff like that again and if she does the DS will be confiscated for a period. I don't think punishment is justifiable at this point if there was no rule in place prohibiting viewing such material so technically no rule was broken.

Ruby31

Thanks so much for the replies and apologies for the delay replying. I don't get much chance to check the Internet with my toddler!

I don't feel as dreadful as I did when I posted. I can't get it out of my head what my daughter might have viewed though but I'm going to get a grip and just deal with it. You've both made good points and I'm taking them on board. It's good to get a reality check! This parenting lark is not easy!

Branoic

Ruby31 wrote: »

Thanks so much for the replies and apologies for the delay replying. I don't get much chance to check the Internet with my toddler!

I don't feel as dreadful as I did when I posted. I can't get it out of my head what my daughter might have viewed though but I'm going to get a grip and just deal with it. You've both made good points and I'm taking them on board. It's good to get a reality check! This parenting lark is not easy!

Did you look at the video in question? And also, was the video accessed via YouTube?

There is definitely mature-themed video content on YouTube (even some of the ads which display prior to children's videos starting can be a bit too "adult" for my liking), but there is rarely anything explicit / hardcore. If something does happen to sneak through, it is usually found and removed very quickly.

One thing that some videos do is they show a "risque" screenshot of something like a sexy woman or couple seemingly engaged in something in the video thumbnail / description, but the actual content of the video when played does not feature anything like that.

Worth baring in mind though, that a lot of people do not know that while YouTube is run as a family-friendly environment, it actually has a minimum age policy of 13 and there are no parental controls available to filter videos for under 13s within YouTube itself.

LegacyUser

I might also suggest that you very quickly become familiar with the workings of parental controls on all your devices, and how to filter and block content. Furthermore, if you don't already know how, I'd suggest you start looking at the likes of Facebook, snapchat, instagram, tumblr, twitter etc, so you are fully conversant with the controls and risks of those aswell.

Good luck handling it, I'm not looking forward to when we hit those years in our house! But I firmly believe that knowledge is key for parents. None of these programmes are particularly difficult to use and forewarned is forearmed with that stuff.

R.D. aka MR.D

Your daughter would have had to connect to the internet and entered the password for the wifi on the DS.

You can disable this option and set a password. Check the manual or an online guide but it might be easier to just not allow her the wifi password so she can't have internet access without supervision.

She absolutely does not need internet on her DS to enjoy any of the games.

MagicMarker

I would be highly surprised if she saw anything sexually graphic on YouTube.

Diemos

Ruby31 wrote: »

On a side-note, I'm so unbelievably angry at my husband. I didn't want to get the D.S. last Christmas, but he assured me that they were fine & most kids have them. I assumed the parental controls were in place.

I think you are being unfair to your husband, he made the same assumption that you did.

Ruby31

Diemos wrote: »

I think you are being unfair to your husband, he made the same assumption that you did.

Thanks for your reply. I was annoyed because despite my protestations, he insisted on buying it for her and assured me it would be fine. He works in I.T! He knows the inner-workings of gadgets like this.

Aimead

Parental controls are nowhere near fullproof. I always tell people if they want to learn something to Google it, and my younger cousins have often done this to learn how to bypass parental controls.

Then there is the issue of YouTube. Plenty of the dodgy content isn’t marked as mature so I’m not sure parental controls will help. Unless you completely block YouTube, but I think that’s overreacting.

In my experience there is nothing more motivating to a cub than telling them ‘X isn’t allowed’. Put a parental lock on something and you might as well be waving a red flag to a bull.

This is an opportunity to educate. If you don’t demystify the subject then they’ll remain curious. If you cub’s only access to pornography is through YouTube then you don’t have that much to be worried about. The ‘talk’, rather than crippling their device, is what is needed. The bottom line is that this is a part of life, and trying to banish it rather than explain it seems completely counterproductive to me.

When I got the internet for the first time I doubt either of my parents had any idea what sorts of stuff was on it, and I seemed to have turned out alright. Not necessarily recommending that, just trying to put it into perspective. You know how in many movies there is the gag or motif about the teenager that has pornography hidden in their room? This is kind of the modern incarnation of that. Demystify and educate, because cubs are going to learn that such stuff exists at some stage.