Keeping Your Kids Safe Online is Your Job

Summer is finally here, in spirit if not in environmental fact. That means kids are out of school with plenty of downtime. And you know what they say about idle hands, right? Well, it applies double to keyboards and touchscreens.

It’s not even funny the amount of trouble I was able to get into as a kid with just a bike, an ardent sense of curiosity, and a wide-open summer day.

But that was nothing compared to the damage kids can do online these days.

The internet threatens way more dangers than a secondhand bike and a lost afternoon in the sun ever could — helmet or no helmet.

Maybe Porn Is Better for Your Kid After All

Wolverine races through the jungle towards a group of dark-skinned thugs.

With that distinctive SNIKT sound, his adamantium claws slice out of the skin between his knuckles.

Wolverine leaps onto the nearest figure, a man in a wife beater holding a chainsaw. He sinks his claws into the man’s back and a thick geyser of blood spurts into the air and sprays a nearby tree.

With another swipe, Wolverine opens the man’s belly and innards erupt.

Then with an upward swipe Wolverine removes the man’s jaw along with a portion of his face.

This is just one violent scene of dozens from an M-rated game. In fact, there are five more guys Wolverine will disembowel in this scene alone.

I often wonder how an 8-year-old I know processes scenes like this as he plays them alone in his bedroom.

Adults have no problem interpreting this material as so-called “cartoon violence”.

(Truth be told, I love it.)

But to a young boy who hasn’t yet even been introduced to basic biology, this immersion into the macabre world of bodily mutilation must be at least very confusing, if not perverting.

Why do so many parents let this happen? We know better, after all.