If the children want to look for porn, they’ll find it. Curiosity and the natural drive will kick in, and they WILL find ways around restrictions, because that’s what children do as they grow into their various teenage years. I personally think we shelter kids too much and mistify the whole thing too much.
Having said that, the two hugely real issues are:
a) children don’t have the ability (neither do an alarming number of adults) of using the internet safely and with the proper knowledge of what it is exactly they are looking at and how that will affect them.
b) predators will exploit the above to groom and abuse them.
b) is certainly a problem, and working on a) may alleviate it but never solve it. Then again, it might help a LOT.
The real issue is internet education, and possibly monitoring the child’s usage of internet. In this ever-more-demanding world, many parents will say they have no time to do that… having no children I won’t comment, but if children aren’t educated to use a tool properly, maybe best they are not allowed to use the tool at all. Which is ridiculous because it’s ubiquitous. Therefore they must be educated, and internet for them must be child-proofed like you’d child-proof the corners of your tables and your power sockets…
…but it’b be silly to expect every single place you take your child to to have the same child-proofing.
Anyway, these are just my thoughts on the matter. Children are curious, and they will start to have a sex drive, and by the time they do, if their curiosity prompted them to learn a bit more about it that’s a plus. The problem is not access, is education. But that’s much harder to fix, so they just restrict.
Accourse, I’m fixating on sex (you can quote me, just maybe not out of context. Oh well, what the hell). There are other things. But sex is usually the big one.
Side-story, I grew up with many adventure games, including some AIF and the Leisure Suit Larry series (though I remember explaining to my mother that in the Naked Gun, in the sex scene, they used condoms so they wouldn’t have babies. The joke of the condom being entire-person size was lost on me at the time. My point was, I was curious even way before). In LSL6 Larry finds a rather beautiful dark-skinned lady who then, at the time of action, turns out to have more equipment downstairs than he’d have preferred. Larry himself has a huge overreaction, puking and brushing his teeth compulsively the next day for having kissed them (the joke didn’t age well, but I’d argue that it still mocks people like Larry without being necessarily on their side, so it works).
And I was like, “huh. This is interesting. She doesn’t look any less beautiful. Maybe… even more so?”
A little seed of a notion that was planted in me early on, that helped me broaden horizons (which I wouldn’t know what to do with for a long time), and which I am glad to have experienced.
Knowledge is good. Exposure is good. Knowledge of what you’re being exposed to - and whether you want to be exposed to it - is the key, and children don’t have that, but they have to be taught it at some point…