B’s birthday just around the corner. My present for him, an iPod, is questionable in my mind. I wonder if he’ll really appreciate it. He probably would not appreciate anything other than a plane ticket home. My ho-hum feeling about the iPod stems from the number of iPods that he has burned through in the past year. I am hoping that, with the drugs behind him (I pray they are), that he will be better equipped to hold onto one now.
Along with the iPod, I wanted to send him some of his music. I fired up the mac and logged onto his account. I began sampling his music to find the songs that I might also listen to. I began with the momma playlist that he had been creating for me at one point. Two of the six songs were ones that I would consider mom-friendly. The remaining songs were drug and sex reinforcers.
From the momma playlist, I moved to his full set of iTunes files. Here there was more unplayable music, mixed with a generous smattering of pornography videos. *Crap* I realize that boys will be boys, but we’d already gone down this path. My previous discovery was the stimulus for my creating an account for each child on the computer, and instituting full control by having to approve every site before it could be visited. I could now kick myself for approving the installation of Limewire. The site must allow him to download these files even though my parental controls are set to forbid it.
Yes, boys will be boys. It’s not the first time that one of the boys has exposed their naked eyes to the stuff. I need only think back to when D was a teen for another such experience. His father once found a porn video in his room. I don’t know the entirety of his response (I never did with D). I only know what he told me, and that was that he discussed pornography in terms of it’s exploitation of women. The issue seemed to be resolved with only that.
Back then, I believe, it was harder to come by without showing ID. Now, the Internet is littered with it and, apparently, it is easy to come by even with a failing mom’s sorry parental controls.