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We recently got the Internet to help my children with their homework.
We haven’t set up any parental controls, but we have the computer in the family room.
I was checking through the browser history last night, and found that one of the recent sites listed, was a porn site.
I feel very strongly that I don’t want them to see porn… they’re only children.

What should I do?

Maybe I shouldn’t trust them with the computer…?
Perhaps I should always supervise them…?
Should I tell them they’re banned from the computer if I see any more porn sites?

Sometimes searches can bring up unexpected results. I used a search engine with my 8-year-old son when we were trying to find his favourite pop groups website, and ended up on a porn site!
And if you misspell a web address you could end up with porn too!
Our son showed us his favourite sites and we agreed on which ones we thought were good to visit, and we book marked them in the browser. It’s easier to find the sites this way and it avoids him mistyping the address or using a search engine to find them. We now use a more child friendly search engine to find sites, which is more reliable than just guessing the web address.

My twins were quite young when they first saw some sexually explicit pictures on the Internet when searching for a toy. They were frightened at first and I had to explain to them when they used the Internet sometimes nasty pictures would come up, but it wasn’t their fault. I taught them to turn off the screen immediately and come and tell me. Now they know what to do and aren’t afraid
But when they get older, I’ll need to teach them more strategies for coping with all sorts of information they might come across, so that they stay confident and prepared and know what to do. The important thing is to talk to your children about what they might see…

We had a similar view to yours about pornography. Not just because we object to it morally, but also because porn companies seem to be more and more aggressive marketeers, with pop up adverts and Spam offering porn.
We installed filtering software but we found it didn’t block everything
The porn companies always seem to be 1 step ahead, even when our filtering updates itself automatically.
When our children were younger they used a ward guardian, which just means that all the content is hand picked for our children and safe.
But as they got older this was too restrictive
We also have a family email address, just for signing up or registering on websites.
This way, I get so see any junk mail before my children, and I can act as a human filter.

Pornography on the net is problem, especially when you’ve got young kids. I think it’s inevitable that my 15-year-old son is going to explore that kind of thing. But we’ve talked about the difference between pornography and real relationships.
He found out the hard way that he must be careful when using those peer to peer networks… places where people share music and movies, because he got bombarded with pornography after signing up to one of those ones. And ended up having to change his email address.

The only reason that we have Internet access at home is so that the children can do their homework assignments, and I can communicate with family abroad.
We installed filtering to block pornography, but we also wrote a family code in which we all agreed what was and what wasn’t acceptable use of the Internet.
It includes what to do if we come across pornography by accident. It also applies to our children’s friends who might want to use the Internet in our home, and to the children’s online activities outside our home.
The children follow it because they had to write it. And they know that it means that they can have relative freedom as long as they follow it.