Another topic people have commented a lot about is the pornography. Helen writes that we didn’t want to control his Internet pornography, but this decision came after years of trying to do just that. We fought to stop it all day, often every day, for years. But there is WiFi in every neighborhood and at every university. Finally we came to the conclusion that this was a battle we could not win and that the energy we were spending on it could be better used in other places. The original draft of this story had some explanation in it, and some description of how this battle unfolded, but it was taken out because Alex found it embarrassing. And this is his story, not a defense of our actions.

A story like this goes to show that mercy, and never giving up on your child does pay off in the long run.

You can, however, prevent your kid from having a computer in his room where he can use it unmonitored for all hours of the night.

That is good parenting, teaching your child to make good decisions, you can't guard them forever especially from themselves.

I didn't. I was an incredibly difficult child. I was pretty much born with a complete contempt for authority in any form; it's been around for as long as anyone can remember.

That doesn't mean my parents did a worse job than any other parents. Believe me, there was plenty of reinforcement. In my case, however, the reinforcement simply led to further rebellion and deviousness.

So, howzabout we decide we don't know enough about their situation and quit judging them, OK?

I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and by the sounds of it he has grown into a highly functional, and successful individual. This bears out a hypothesis that they were not systemically bad parents, rather they were dealing with a rather screwed up child/situation and were making the best of it.

All I'm saying is that maybe we're too quick to judge how these parents handled the situation.

Looking back, I realize I knew nothing about boys and pornography. I’d never seen online porn and assumed that Alex was viewing still pictures similar to print magazines.

Which is them putting their hands up and saying we made a mistake. So they were naive when it came to internet pornography, not unusual when it comes to baby boomers/older gen-xers. The last thing I would accuse them of is lack of caring. Have you read the comment from the father?

http://goodmenproject.com/2010/06/02/out-of-sync/comment-pag...

Giving their son unrestricted access to pornography was a smart thing to do, especially considering, as explained in the article, he could get it either way.

If your child is smart and educated about the potential dangers associated with online sex chatrooms and the like, there are only benefits to reap.

Pornography does the world a load of good. In countries that are sexually liberal, and where sex is not as taboo as it is in other countries, the population has less sexual crime. The opposite is true of sexually repressive countries. Why this is so shouldn't be difficult to understand.

Pornography gives sexually charged males an outlet, one that does not involve raping and abusing women.

What matters most with respect to porn, is not whether someone has access to it, or even the sort of porn they watch, but their own character, which determines how they react to it.

Or would you have preferred that they block his internet access (a futile endeavor as explained in the article), made him resent and rebel against his parents more, and forced him at the age of 9 to turn his sexual drive and impulses toward the underage girls around him? Turning off the porn doesn't turn off natural sexual urges, if anything, it ensures they're at the forefront of his consciousness. Any honest person with a penis can tell you that.

For a child in his position, he turned out remarkably well. This should not be surprising considering the excellent parenting he received. They didn't give up on him, they home-schooled him and taught him well, and they gave him freedom to learn from his own mistakes:

Alex took the therapist at his word and walked out of the office to go live with his girlfriend. He was 15. I reported the incident and the therapist to the Department of Human Services and called the police, who monitored Alex from the distance. Two-and-a-half difficult days passed before Alex returned home, his body language meek and his words—to me, at least—repentant. He barely spoke to his father.

Down the road, Alex realized how blessed he was to have such great parents:

A strict vegan, Alex had just apprised me of new research on latent carcinogens in poultry as well as the news that he was to receive the award for the university’s Outstanding Computer Science Student of 2010. Holding a corn chip midway to his mouth, he said, “I appreciate all that you do for me. I know I couldn’t have come this far without you.”

I just don't think a NINE year old should be implicitly given free rein to browse hardcore pornography and to have sexual discussions in adult sex chatrooms with strangers. Straight up softcore porn is no enemy, but it's easy to go way beyond that. A 9 year old is emotionally and mentally streets away from a teenager, whether they're hitting puberty or not.

I've tended to think of myself as a mostly liberal guy, but seriously, if people think that letting 9 year olds check out pornography and talk on adult chat rooms is OK (judging by all the upboats you're getting), then today is the day I've finally become sexually conservative - at least compared to some of you(!)

I started being sexually curious in the second grade. Not like, "you show me yours, I'll show you mine", but far more serious. By the time I was nine -- this was before there was much of such a thing as an internet -- I had seen hardcore porn videos that I wasn't supposed to, and I had an appetite for many more.

In my family, this sort of behavior was strictly taboo. Nobody talked about it, nobody wanted to be involved. This resulted in my sneaking about and figuring out most of it on my own; it didn't at all slow down my curiosity.

Restrictions? Oh, that was tried. My parents went so far as to install a fire control box over the power strip to the computer. I quickly discovered that I could toggle the switch by slipping a bicycle spoke down the gap in the top. I got very good at this.

I swore to myself, while growing up, that I'd never forget what it was like to be young, and for the most part I've kept that oath. When I was little, I had concluded that all the trouble between kids and adults was the result of adults forgetting what it's like to be a kid. I still, mostly, hold to that.

A 9 year can be smart. They're not likely to use the same judgement as an adult, but that's only because they lack experience, not intelligence. They can think things through, they can reason, they can figure things out. They can be sharper and even more creative than adults.

So when parents think that they're "disciplining" their child by restricting the child's access to something, all they're really doing is, a: indicating to the child that they don't trust them; b: indicating to the child that it's not a matter open to discussion; and c: leaving the child to go elsewhere, unsupervised, to do the same damn thing anyway.

Kids have to be raised on a case-by-case basis. The parents in this article had a tough decision to make in this case: do they create an opportunity for him to explore his sexuality in the relative safety of their home, with their occasional guidance; or do they try to prevent those activities, and in the end only encourage him to sneak off and do it anyway without their observation and guidance?

That's not a false dichotomy, either. Those really are their only options.

I think they made the right decision, not because I'm a parent (I'm not), but because I was a kid.

People with pleasant childhoods can turn out bad. People with get beaten every day as kids can turn out good. That's as much not an argument to beat children as yours is to give them free access to adult, sexual situations.

It's sillier still to apply those generalizations to a "9-year old" with a beard and who made other 9-year olds cry to their mothers saying he made them feel stupid.

I know plenty of examples of 9-year olds who are more mature than many 20 year-olds I know.

Plus, 9 years isn't all that young to be watching or talking about porn. Perhaps just one standard-deviation from the norm (just a guess, based on my personal experience).

I'm also not sure what exactly the alternative to "free rein" is with regards to porn (other than blocking it completely). I don't know about you, but I'd rather not have anyone watch me as I jerk off to porn, much less my parents. I'm sure they would want to be there either (at least I hope so).

BTW, did you know it was only a few centuries ago that 15 year olds were wed and started families?

The great thing about this story though is we know how it ends. The boy who jerked off to hardcore pornography at the age of 9 (or younger) is all grown up and he's not a murderer or a rapist. Instead, he's won recognition for his intellect, and seems to be an all-around OK guy.

Sorry, I'm out of my depth. It's beyond my rhetorical capabilities to have a serious discussion about it being OK for even a "mature" 9 year old to be having unrestricted access to cybersex chat rooms and hardcore porn.

That said, I thank you for opening my eyes. I think I understand how many conservative, Christian folks feel when confronted with things like gay marriage. Perhaps they're not evil - they just can't shift their worldview up by 10 orders of liberality. My own sexually liberal views are as alien to them as yours are to me. So sorry, and good luck, but I can't engage with this.

That said, if you allow your own mature 9 year old daughter or so to have laissez-faire, unmonitored sexual relationships and write an article about it, I'd love to read it.

That's unfortunate. :-\

It's a bit disappointing to me that you're able to come to an understanding with the perspective of conservative Christians who want to ban gay marriage, yet aren't able to see my point of view.

That said, if you allow your own mature 9 year old daughter or so to have laissez-faire, unmonitored sexual relationships and write an article about it, I'd love to read it.

I'll be sure to if I ever get that opportunity. What I can say is that my sister does fit that description, and she alright, recently graduated at the top of her class, and has been accepted to an ivy league. No cybersex horror stories to speak of. Perhaps my parents did something right, besides giving her unrestricted internet access.

It's not about the content that's online, it's about the person who's viewing it. If they're intelligent and know what to watch out for, they'll be just fine, and love you the more for letting them masturbate in peace.

What I can say is that my sister does fit that description, and she alright

If that's true, you might want to be careful with sharing that online. Whatever I think, the law is a different matter entirely and social services look grimly on parents who are allowing underage children to have sexual relationships.

Again, good luck.

I never said she had underage sexual relationships, I've always been referring to online porn and unrestricted internet access. Sorry if there was confusion.

Although on the other hand, I don't think 16 or 18 are magic numbers, but as you correctly point out, there are legal concerns to watch out for.

And letting the lice-infested homeless craigslist woman come live with them? I can't see any way to spin that as a good idea.

"He's going to do it anyway" is a common rationalization among weak-willed parents who don't have the backbone to lay down the law.

The kid was home-schooled, so he doesn’t have regular exposure (ahem) to female classmates; he did something with his babysitter, but the parents had no idea what; they initiated conversations with him about what women are really like only after he had been educated by porn and, like any person in the full flush of puberty, was entirely convinced that his parents knew nothing.

They should write a book it would be most informative to parents/prospective parents and would likely show they made mistakes, but the CONTEXT of those mistakes could be explored and would likely show them up as rational normal human beings.

I can't say I blame them. The mother also admits she knew nothing about porn at all, and thought that he was looking at still pictures. This is not surprising considering his parents most likely grew up with exactly that, still pictures and perhaps VHS tapes, not the stuff we have today.

Sure, they could have done a better job, but I maintain the route they took was better than killing off his access (which they actually tried to do, see the comment made by the dad after the story, they eventually realized it was futile, and I think they would have saved themselves a lot of heartache had they approached it intelligently from the start).

And letting the lice-infested homeless craigslist woman come live with them? I can't see any way to spin that as a good idea.

Well, another thing to consider is that a lot was left out from the story. It may very well be they didn't know how he found here.

Again, from the comment made by the father:

  And then there is the matter of the homeless woman. Again, we did not simply let
  this happen. For months the police, the courts, and an entire team of medical
  professionals who were not mentioned in the story were involved. We all agreed,
  after months of agony, that the approach we finally took was the least of a
  multitude of evils. Everything that happened over this period of time, and with
  all of these people, is left out of the story, again, to save Alex
  embarrassment.

I don't think it's a distinction between photo and video. A person who doesn't watch porn imagines it is unusually large breasted women having sex on camera. They assume "extreme porn" refers to maybe the piledriver position or women dressed up as schoolgirls.

They have no idea that the kind of sex you learned about in sex ed is actually a niche category.

Judging from many of the comments here, leaving out a lot of that stuff makes Alex and his parents come off looking worse than they probably were. The full details might be unnecessary, but mentioning the involvement of "police, courts, and medical professionals" in making the decision would have drastically improved my perception of the parents and the kid.

The parents could have done a better job, but that's true of all parents. It's a difficult job involving a lot of judgment calls and a lot of mistakes. IMO the article would be greatly improved if they were more direct about those mistakes and about the struggles they went through in making those decisions.

To put it another way: if my kid had that condition, I wouldn't ask for advice for the pushover-parents and out-of-control kid as described in the article, but I would ask for it from the hard-decision parents and struggling-but-eventually-grew-up kid as described in the comments.

As for a 9 year old looking at porn, I think there's a difference at looking at nude art vs. porn and porn really should be cut off until the kid at least his puberty.

But I do agree with @petercooper's response as well.

Citation needed.