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We’re adults. We surf porn for entertainment and education perhaps. Hopefully adults have the life experience and sense to put what we see in the right proportion; To realize that it is fantasy depicted and not real life, even in so called “reality sites”; to tell the difference between calling a woman a “slut” and a “whore” as part of a sexual fantasy and demeaning women in real life.

Kids and underage teens, however, almost by definition, do not have those tools. Premature exposure to porn, especially among younger kids, and especially to hardcore and extreme porn, can be confusing at best. It is likely to be down right traumatizing. Whatever you think of that assessment, it is down right illegal.

The Internet brought porn into our homes and made it much more accessible. This is nice and fun if you’re adults, but can be hazardous to your kids. If you have anyone under 18 years of age, or perhaps 21 years of age, depending on where you live, it is your responsibility to make sure they are not accidentally exposed to online porn.

So how do you go about this? I will be reviewing some technical solutions in this article, but let me start from the bottom line. Ultimately it is up to you to monitor your kid’s surfing. You know your kid best, and if you think they might try to find porn online, do not let them surf by themselves. That’s right, limit Internet access and make sure whatever access they have to the net is directly supervised by an adult. That is the only real solution to the problem. It may sound drastic, but as a mom, who is only too aware of what’s out there on the net (and I don’t mean just porn either), this is exactly what I do.

There are, however some software solutions that you may want to look into. While these may not replace direct parental supervision, they can be very useful in preventing porn sites and even images from popping up unexpectedly in your child’s face. Check out these links, most of these applications let you download a trial version for free.

Cyber Patrol, for example, allows you to set profiles, so that you can enjoy an adult surfing experience by identifying yourself to the system, while your child surfs under stricter filtering settings. If you’re not computer savvy, you can just use one of the pre-sets filter sets. It will also monitor chat conversation to make sure your kid doesn’t blurb out details such as her real name, location or phone number.

Cyber Sieve is another powerful application that lets you filter harmful websites and newsgroups as well as limit the amount and type of data that can be sent from your computer. Cyber Sieve also allows you to choose what to display when your kid attempts to access a blocked site. You can make it appear as if the surfer has reached a regular “page not found” message, so a nosy teenager might not be able to tell that a porn filter is in place. For the younger ones, Cyber Sieve offers a super safe surfing mod, where they can only access sites that you have reviewed and pre-approved for them.

Safe Eyes is a feature rich filter, offering not only detailed content control, but also the option to time it. For example, you can set the software to block out porn only during the hours when your kids are alone at home, or perhaps until the time they go to bed. Check out their website for a quick movie showing you what this application can do.

Remember, at the end of the day, it is up to you to closely monitor your child’s surfing. The Internet is very unsafe, and porn isn’t the only danger to kids out there either. Bad influences, some worse than porn, abide, and what’s worse, dangerous people are indeed out there lurking for young victims. My best advice would be, to use a parental control filter such as the ones described above, to do the initial filtering for you, but then to be there with your child as she of he surfs the net.