Out of Sync: Puberty at age 9 | Hacker News Reader

Out of Sync: Puberty at age 9

goodmenproject.com

142 pointsghurlman86 comments

Why are people upset at the article?

I look at it and I see a boy who had a medical disorder, but managed to grow up, is finishing college at 19, has developed useful skills, and has developed good decision making skills. Along the way there were some emotional problems and unfortunate incidents. But guess what, nobody learns to make good decisions without making some bad ones along the way.

Furthermore everything I know about parenting says that the people who would have tried laying down the law from day one would have been extremely likely to end up with lots more conflict and a worse outcome. Admittedly I'm far from an expert, but as a parent I consider it my duty to read and think enough to have a reasonably well informed opinion.

(I'm curious how many of the people who are offering blanket advice are parents. As one friend told me, "It is amazing how much more I knew about being a parent before I had kids.")

Since I came out and flatly said I see this as a serious case of a lack of good parenting, I'll satisfy your curiosity one step: I'm a parent.

There is a wide gamut of parenting behavior between "laying down the law" and just letting your kid do whatever they like without any monitoring or guidance. Neither approach is good - you need to work out a middle way that gives your child a wide scope for autonomy but with defined boundaries that allow you to notice and correct/repair/talk about unreasonable behavior.

Letting a 9 year old have unfettered access to hardcore porn and late night text room conversations is severely towards one end of that gamut.

Letting a 9 year old have unfettered access to hardcore porn and late night text room conversations is severely towards one end of that gamut.

If you think that he was granted that access at 9, or that he was granted access lightly, you didn't read the story very carefully. Go back and search for the comment near the end from Alex' father for some more context.

Now refresh your mind as to the effects of testosterone. It is the chemical that makes previously complacent boys seek out sexual behavior, assert their own identity, challenge authority, and attempt to establish themselves higher in whatever dominance hierarchies they find themselves in.

Sure, chronologically he might have been 11. But biologically he was more like 16. With all the conflicts and behaviors that go with that. (How many of us would like to be reminded of the stupid things we did at 16? I sure wouldn't...) How big a set of fights do you want? Because his brain chemistry is prepping him to give them to you.

My attitude is that childhood is where we do our best to lay a foundation. Puberty is where we have to cross our fingers and hope that we did a good enough job. And adulthood is where we hope to find validation that we did OK.

I don't expect to face those challenges that young or that severely with my children. But in this case their son's accelerated pace has already got him to adulthood. And the results seem pretty good. It seems likely that my standard for parenting is different than yours. But by my standards if the kid winds up capable, high functioning, healthy, and thankful for his parents, then you succeeded.

"My attitude is that childhood is where we do our best to lay a foundation. Puberty is where we have to cross our fingers and hope that we did a good enough job."

That is precisely the problem with early puberty. You lose multiple years of the childhood necessary to lay the foundation for the onset of puberty.

I think every decision the parents made, considered in isolation, could be justified. But the impression they make, as a whole, is one of parents who failed to set limits for their child, either because the weirdness of his syndrome (and possibly guilt) made them afraid to intervene, or because they were so taken by his hormonal and intellectual maturity that they didn’t recognize that he had the social skills of, well, a nine-year-old.

Yeah, limits can be negotiated, and testing limits is a normal part of adolescence, but the parents have a right and a duty to negotiate from the other side, not just surrender.

(I have three sons, aged seven, five, and three, who don’t know how lucky they are to be cute.)

This is just your regular puberty story, displaced a few years. I fail to understand the alarmist responses of the medical professionals. Why would they worry about pregnancy with someone age 9, but not age 11? The parents seem to suffer from a 'we are so special; our problems were so different' syndrome. Why would allowing someone aged 11 to watch porn be a larger issue than allowing your child aged 14 to watch porn? Since when is a child hitting his dad at 15 different from one hitting his dad at 17?

"Why would they worry about pregnancy with someone age 9, but not age 11?"

Uh, 11 is still early to experience puberty. And why do you think pediatricians are not worried about an 11 year old getting a girl pregnant?

The problem is that a 9 year old has even less experience and maturity than a 13 year old to deal with the challenges of puberty. And no peers to share the experience with. Society is set up to deal with children going through puberty at a specific age. The problem is that a 9 year old going through puberty is still a 9 year old in many respects, even a particularly bright 9 year old.

The worst thing about it is that they wanted to put him on severe medication with nasty side effects, some of which they can't even quantify. A lesser parent would have gone for that without consulting their child. The arrogance of the medical profession to just 'throw drugs at the problem' astounds me.

As for the 'we're so different' aspect of it, I disagree with you there. It does seem to present a major challenge, and it's a personal story, very well written, and one which I for one really enjoyed reading.

The nasty side effects of the drug have to be weighed against the nasty side effects of the condition that the drug is meant to treat, and from the article, the parents didn’t do that. The kid hated needles and didn’t want his balls to shrink (when oversized testicles was one of the symptoms of his condition) and that was the end of it.

I’m sure that lots of people with juvenile diabetes, when they were first diagnosed, hated the idea of injecting themselves with insulin every day, but they learned to cope. This child could have learned to cope.

ETA: According to a comment by the father toward the end, the endocrinologist agreed with the decision not to give drugs.

So, if he agreed with the decision not to give the drugs, why were they recommended in the first place?

Also, I don't think regulating someone's blood/sugar levels can be equated to altering the course of their puberty and shrinking their testicles. The damage could be untold and irreversible.

I don't share your faith in the medical system, and it's infallability (although many do a great job under difficult circumstances), and I'm definitely not alone there. Many respected cellular biologists are claiming that the medical profession has got it wrong in relation to treatment of many conditions.

>The arrogance of the medical profession to just 'throw drugs at the problem' astounds me.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this very arrogance (in the medical industry and outside of it) are what caused the issue in the first place.

I wouldn't call this a "regular" puberty story. The problems here aren't particularly unique in type, but they're extreme in severity, probably in large part because of the few years' displacement.

Comparing groups I taught, the gifted 9-year-olds were typically quite a bit less mature than even the remedial 12-year-olds. A few years more of experience and brain development does wonders for one's ability to make good decisions.

Moving into the basement, watching porn, clashing with your dad, making bad decisions about relationships and staying up late are all pretty standard male adolescent behaviors. The fact that he stayed up all night coding and went to college, and got through all of that shit early in life, are actually pretty encouraging.

Poor Alex. For the rest of his life anyone who googles his history will be reading about how he threatened his mother, attacked his father, and loved hardcore porn at 12 years old.

...and if anyone makes a decision about his worth as a human being because of his actions as an adolescent, while ignoring his accomplishments -- both earlier and greater than many young adults -- well, then it's their loss, not his.

That may be true, but unfortunately a good portion of society is screwed up like that.

I think it will be outweighed by the respect and understanding he will gain from it. I for one would be more likely to want to hire him given I have walked a mile in his shoes.

Whether it's folly or not, could you imagine if he tried to run for President? Last I heard they kick you out of the running if you ever got detention.

That's silly. Bush 2.0 was able to get elected (twice), regardless of various blots on his earlier public record. So did Clinton. (I'm not interested in any ideological wars. Please spare us. Point is, both men served two terms as President no matter how many detentions they served once upon a time.)

But he was rich enough for his national guard records to be destroyed.

People still knew about plenty of questionable stuff, such as his drinking problems, and doing lines of coke off of the butts of prostitutes.

I am well aware of that, I am simply forever amused the way they dig ancient skeletons out of the closet during the running.

Actually, no: the article doesn't currently show up until page 8 of a Google search for alex peppe. I would imagine that in a couple of years it will be even further down the search space.

I imagine that in a few years, the search engines will be inferring that an article written by a "Mary Doe" that refers to "my son John" should rank highly in searches for "John Doe".

Especially if you search with quotes, the article won't show up, since his last name only shows up in the context of his mother's name (since she's the author). But now that you've typed it here, it'll show up ;/

The HN comments are on page 2, though.

It wouldn't surprise me if that dude found this discussion, actually.

I'm a little confused. I haven't read the article word for word, so I may have missed something but

The article paints it like the problems are because the boy has multiple times normal levels of testosterone (not for his age, but for men at all), but I didn't see any mention of tests or levels. So, if the testosterone levels were a problem but didn't exceed natural levels (at any age), why were there problems?

Yes, you could have problems with a child with high testosterone levels, but the article also seems to be claiming everything else about the boy was developing at the same rate- that is to say, while chronologically he was one age, his body AND mind AND everything else were some other age, but all the same age. Why would this be a problem? There's plenty of normal teenage boys out there of equivalent biological age, and the number of candles on their cake doesn't determine how unhinged they may be.

I've phrased all this poorly as I can't quite work out how to put it, and maybe I've missed something, but I didn't find any evidence that he wasn't anything other than just pretty much a regular boy with a somewhat accelerated clock.

He had a rather highly accelerated pubescence which increased the alienation that teenagers often feel from their peers. Combined with an emotional immaturity (this you will note was is not accelerated as it is learnt rather than grown) lead to some serious difficulties for him and his parents.

Alienation I buy, but it seems unlikely it would be the most important factor.

Emotional maturity (or lack thereof) is what I'd normally attribute it to, but I'm not quite sure how that develops. Is it truly purely a learned trait? If so, I'd agree with you that would be the biggest stumbling block. I thought of it myself, but discounted it.

Have a full read of the article, his actions bear all the hallmarks of emotional immaturity combined with heightened hormone levels. And don't discount alienation, we're social animals and puberty is where this need for strong interaction with peers is initiated and grows to form our adult emotional and social intelligence.

And no emotional maturity/intelligence isn't purely a learnt trait, rather there parts of the brains that function to provide us with a place to learn these behaviours which is why physiological disorders can affect it. There a number of documented cases where a child has been deprived of social stimuli (such as a case where a child was brought up living in with her parents dogs), these children's brains are underdeveloped in the parts of the brain that deal with social skills (and language).

A particularly horrific example of the argument of nature vs nurture.

That's interesting to think about. The natural solution that first pops into my mind is to teach them emotional maturity, or in other words 'make them grow up', at an early age. Responsibility or 'rise to the challenge' type trauma. (of course, it's really not something that can be easily 'taught' in a structured way)

Today, that doesn't happen much, but centuries ago I'm sure it did, which makes me wonder if people like David Farragut were humanity's Alexes of the past.

Good point, though do you develop a well balanced individual that way?

This online mag is amazing. The writers are actually good essayists, and the themes are more elevated that what you'd expect from a more typical "lad mag" like Esquire.

Eric and I agreed that Internet pornography would allow Alex a sexual outlet that was the safest of all the alternatives. [..] Looking back, I realize I knew nothing about boys and pornography. I’d never seen online porn and assumed that Alex was viewing still pictures similar to print magazines. It wasn’t until Alex was 12 that we learned that he’d been downloading video clips and visiting adult chat rooms.

This article lost its legitimacy when I discovered that this poor lad merely suffered from a lack of good, disciplined parenting.

Not everyone turns into a secretive, manipulative sex addict a few years after puberty whether it happens at 9, 11 or 13. Letting a 9 year old browse porn and interact on "adult chat rooms" shows, to me, a lack of care that could (did?) cause serious psychological trauma in someone so young.

You didn't get the whole story. Read the last comment:

Another topic people have commented a lot about is the pornography. Helen writes that we didn’t want to control his Internet pornography, but this decision came after years of trying to do just that. We fought to stop it all day, often every day, for years. But there is WiFi in every neighborhood and at every university. Finally we came to the conclusion that this was a battle we could not win and that the energy we were spending on it could be better used in other places. The original draft of this story had some explanation in it, and some description of how this battle unfolded, but it was taken out because Alex found it embarrassing. And this is his story, not a defense of our actions.

Wow, just read that comment, and suddenly it's a completely different story. Maybe they should have kept it more anonymous and left in important details like that. I left the story thinking the same as the poster you replied to, "wow, those were some serious push-over parents." Kind of explains Alex's violent reactions too, if the parents really were attempting more serious interventions than the original story lets on.

A story like this goes to show that mercy, and never giving up on your child does pay off in the long run.

True, you can’t completely prevent your kid from looking at pornography.

You can, however, prevent your kid from having a computer in his room where he can use it unmonitored for all hours of the night.

My parents couldn't control my use of the Internet but that doesn't indicate bad parenting. My parents were able to teach me the values that enabled me to differentiate fantasy from reality, right from wrong.

That is good parenting, teaching your child to make good decisions, you can't guard them forever especially from themselves.

My parents did the same thing in the mid 1990s and were ready to reinforce or correct errant behavior if I didn't follow the rules (which, I did). That is good parenting. In this story, however, that didn't seem to occur - neither the education or the reinforcement.

Different kids are different. You followed the rules, that's great.

I didn't. I was an incredibly difficult child. I was pretty much born with a complete contempt for authority in any form; it's been around for as long as anyone can remember.

That doesn't mean my parents did a worse job than any other parents. Believe me, there was plenty of reinforcement. In my case, however, the reinforcement simply led to further rebellion and deviousness.

So, howzabout we decide we don't know enough about their situation and quit judging them, OK?

As I have pointed out in other comments, this article is a very short snippet of something they must have devoted a great part of their daily lives to for over a decade, you can hardly expect it to explore every avenue they took. They point out as much in the comments, talking about how they consulted with a vast array of people on the problem of their son's homeless girlfriend.

I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and by the sounds of it he has grown into a highly functional, and successful individual. This bears out a hypothesis that they were not systemically bad parents, rather they were dealing with a rather screwed up child/situation and were making the best of it.

The ends justify the means? That's rarely a good argument.

There are people who are beaten, raped, and abused on a frequent basis as children who turn out to be fine, upstanding adults, but that gives no reason to support such behavior. People can thrive despite bad circumstances, not because of it.

No rather I am saying that there aren't enough facts to make fair judgements but given the limited facts I get the impression they aren't bad parents, instead they are normal rational caring people who were dealing with a very difficult child.

While not a parent myself, this is my take on it: Parenting is hard. You can tout heavy discipline, not letting the child watch pornography, or giving him internet access, but the fact is that every situation is different. I wonder what might have happened if they hadn't given him access to the internet? Maybe he wouldn't have fostered a love for programming, or maybe he wouldn't have graduated college at 19.

All I'm saying is that maybe we're too quick to judge how these parents handled the situation.

There is this:

Looking back, I realize I knew nothing about boys and pornography. I’d never seen online porn and assumed that Alex was viewing still pictures similar to print magazines.

Which is them putting their hands up and saying we made a mistake. So they were naive when it came to internet pornography, not unusual when it comes to baby boomers/older gen-xers. The last thing I would accuse them of is lack of caring. Have you read the comment from the father?

http://goodmenproject.com/2010/06/02/out-of-sync/comment-pag...

Having just finished the article, I have to strongly disagree with you, I think they did a great job parenting.

Giving their son unrestricted access to pornography was a smart thing to do, especially considering, as explained in the article, he could get it either way.

If your child is smart and educated about the potential dangers associated with online sex chatrooms and the like, there are only benefits to reap.

Pornography does the world a load of good. In countries that are sexually liberal, and where sex is not as taboo as it is in other countries, the population has less sexual crime. The opposite is true of sexually repressive countries. Why this is so shouldn't be difficult to understand.

Pornography gives sexually charged males an outlet, one that does not involve raping and abusing women.

What matters most with respect to porn, is not whether someone has access to it, or even the sort of porn they watch, but their own character, which determines how they react to it.

Or would you have preferred that they block his internet access (a futile endeavor as explained in the article), made him resent and rebel against his parents more, and forced him at the age of 9 to turn his sexual drive and impulses toward the underage girls around him? Turning off the porn doesn't turn off natural sexual urges, if anything, it ensures they're at the forefront of his consciousness. Any honest person with a penis can tell you that.

For a child in his position, he turned out remarkably well. This should not be surprising considering the excellent parenting he received. They didn't give up on him, they home-schooled him and taught him well, and they gave him freedom to learn from his own mistakes:

Alex took the therapist at his word and walked out of the office to go live with his girlfriend. He was 15. I reported the incident and the therapist to the Department of Human Services and called the police, who monitored Alex from the distance. Two-and-a-half difficult days passed before Alex returned home, his body language meek and his words—to me, at least—repentant. He barely spoke to his father.

Down the road, Alex realized how blessed he was to have such great parents:

A strict vegan, Alex had just apprised me of new research on latent carcinogens in poultry as well as the news that he was to receive the award for the university’s Outstanding Computer Science Student of 2010. Holding a corn chip midway to his mouth, he said, “I appreciate all that you do for me. I know I couldn’t have come this far without you.”

Thanks for the pro-pornography manifesto, but you're falsely assuming I'm against it. Quite the opposite - I'm pro pornography and a fully paid up pro-sex disciple of Dan Savage :-) No-one's ever going to be seriously injured by seeing a few genitals.

I just don't think a NINE year old should be implicitly given free rein to browse hardcore pornography and to have sexual discussions in adult sex chatrooms with strangers. Straight up softcore porn is no enemy, but it's easy to go way beyond that. A 9 year old is emotionally and mentally streets away from a teenager, whether they're hitting puberty or not.

I've tended to think of myself as a mostly liberal guy, but seriously, if people think that letting 9 year olds check out pornography and talk on adult chat rooms is OK (judging by all the upboats you're getting), then today is the day I've finally become sexually conservative - at least compared to some of you(!)

OK, I'll 'fess up here, only because there might be a chance that doing so might actually accomplish something constructive.

I started being sexually curious in the second grade. Not like, "you show me yours, I'll show you mine", but far more serious. By the time I was nine -- this was before there was much of such a thing as an internet -- I had seen hardcore porn videos that I wasn't supposed to, and I had an appetite for many more.

In my family, this sort of behavior was strictly taboo. Nobody talked about it, nobody wanted to be involved. This resulted in my sneaking about and figuring out most of it on my own; it didn't at all slow down my curiosity.

Restrictions? Oh, that was tried. My parents went so far as to install a fire control box over the power strip to the computer. I quickly discovered that I could toggle the switch by slipping a bicycle spoke down the gap in the top. I got very good at this.

I swore to myself, while growing up, that I'd never forget what it was like to be young, and for the most part I've kept that oath. When I was little, I had concluded that all the trouble between kids and adults was the result of adults forgetting what it's like to be a kid. I still, mostly, hold to that.

A 9 year can be smart. They're not likely to use the same judgement as an adult, but that's only because they lack experience, not intelligence. They can think things through, they can reason, they can figure things out. They can be sharper and even more creative than adults.

So when parents think that they're "disciplining" their child by restricting the child's access to something, all they're really doing is, a: indicating to the child that they don't trust them; b: indicating to the child that it's not a matter open to discussion; and c: leaving the child to go elsewhere, unsupervised, to do the same damn thing anyway.

Kids have to be raised on a case-by-case basis. The parents in this article had a tough decision to make in this case: do they create an opportunity for him to explore his sexuality in the relative safety of their home, with their occasional guidance; or do they try to prevent those activities, and in the end only encourage him to sneak off and do it anyway without their observation and guidance?

That's not a false dichotomy, either. Those really are their only options.

I think they made the right decision, not because I'm a parent (I'm not), but because I was a kid.

i don't know. your argument feel intuitive, but itistoday has concrete examples of why the situation was actually positive. that "A 9 year old is emotionally and mentally streets away from a teenager" is an abstract concern to me - what exactly is the problem here? compounded by the fact that things turned out fine for the kid in the story.

People frequently have positive adulthoods after suffering abuse earlier in life. That's mere correlation, not causation, and doesn't mean the abuse is good.

People with pleasant childhoods can turn out bad. People with get beaten every day as kids can turn out good. That's as much not an argument to beat children as yours is to give them free access to adult, sexual situations.

So are you arguing that the porn was unpleasant to him? Because if it wasn't unpleasant to him at the time (like physical abuse would be), nor did it hinder his development, then where is the harm?

It's silly to generalize on the mental capabilities of all 9 year olds.

It's sillier still to apply those generalizations to a "9-year old" with a beard and who made other 9-year olds cry to their mothers saying he made them feel stupid.

I know plenty of examples of 9-year olds who are more mature than many 20 year-olds I know.

Plus, 9 years isn't all that young to be watching or talking about porn. Perhaps just one standard-deviation from the norm (just a guess, based on my personal experience).

I'm also not sure what exactly the alternative to "free rein" is with regards to porn (other than blocking it completely). I don't know about you, but I'd rather not have anyone watch me as I jerk off to porn, much less my parents. I'm sure they would want to be there either (at least I hope so).

BTW, did you know it was only a few centuries ago that 15 year olds were wed and started families?

The great thing about this story though is we know how it ends. The boy who jerked off to hardcore pornography at the age of 9 (or younger) is all grown up and he's not a murderer or a rapist. Instead, he's won recognition for his intellect, and seems to be an all-around OK guy.

It's silly to generalize on the mental capabilities of all 9 year olds. [..] I know of many examples of 9-year olds who are more mature than many 20 year-olds I know.

Sorry, I'm out of my depth. It's beyond my rhetorical capabilities to have a serious discussion about it being OK for even a "mature" 9 year old to be having unrestricted access to cybersex chat rooms and hardcore porn.

That said, I thank you for opening my eyes. I think I understand how many conservative, Christian folks feel when confronted with things like gay marriage. Perhaps they're not evil - they just can't shift their worldview up by 10 orders of liberality. My own sexually liberal views are as alien to them as yours are to me. So sorry, and good luck, but I can't engage with this.

That said, if you allow your own mature 9 year old daughter or so to have laissez-faire, unmonitored sexual relationships and write an article about it, I'd love to read it.

I can't engage with this.

That's unfortunate. :-\

It's a bit disappointing to me that you're able to come to an understanding with the perspective of conservative Christians who want to ban gay marriage, yet aren't able to see my point of view.

That said, if you allow your own mature 9 year old daughter or so to have laissez-faire, unmonitored sexual relationships and write an article about it, I'd love to read it.

I'll be sure to if I ever get that opportunity. What I can say is that my sister does fit that description, and she alright, recently graduated at the top of her class, and has been accepted to an ivy league. No cybersex horror stories to speak of. Perhaps my parents did something right, besides giving her unrestricted internet access.

It's not about the content that's online, it's about the person who's viewing it. If they're intelligent and know what to watch out for, they'll be just fine, and love you the more for letting them masturbate in peace.

You can always find cases that are exceptions to the general rule, where someone does something that ends up being very destructive for the vast majority of people who try it but comes out just fine. Especially on the internet. That in no way justifies or makes safe such behavior for the rest of the us.

> That said, if you allow your own mature 9 year old daughter or so to have laissez-faire, unmonitored sexual relationships [..]

What I can say is that my sister does fit that description, and she alright

If that's true, you might want to be careful with sharing that online. Whatever I think, the law is a different matter entirely and social services look grimly on parents who are allowing underage children to have sexual relationships.

Again, good luck.

allowing underage children to have sexual relationships.

I never said she had underage sexual relationships, I've always been referring to online porn and unrestricted internet access. Sorry if there was confusion.

Although on the other hand, I don't think 16 or 18 are magic numbers, but as you correctly point out, there are legal concerns to watch out for.

Well said, sir.

I agree with Peter Cooper. That is all.

Letting a kid learn from his mistakes is one thing. But they did not educate him on the dangers of online chat rooms: they admit they had no idea what he was doing or looking at in his basement isolation.

And letting the lice-infested homeless craigslist woman come live with them? I can't see any way to spin that as a good idea.

"He's going to do it anyway" is a common rationalization among weak-willed parents who don't have the backbone to lay down the law.

...and it seems like they didn’t do much to educate him about females in general, or, for that matter, about not believing everything you see on the frigging Internet, in general.

The kid was home-schooled, so he doesn’t have regular exposure (ahem) to female classmates; he did something with his babysitter, but the parents had no idea what; they initiated conversations with him about what women are really like only after he had been educated by porn and, like any person in the full flush of puberty, was entirely convinced that his parents knew nothing.

Hmmm I think you (and others) are a little quick to judge without knowing what avenues were tired and what discussions they had before arriving at the course/s of action they embarked on. It is a short article with the scope of a book and judgements with a tiny subset of facts doesn't make sense.

They should write a book it would be most informative to parents/prospective parents and would likely show they made mistakes, but the CONTEXT of those mistakes could be explored and would likely show them up as rational normal human beings.

they admit they had no idea what he was doing or looking at in his basement isolation.

I can't say I blame them. The mother also admits she knew nothing about porn at all, and thought that he was looking at still pictures. This is not surprising considering his parents most likely grew up with exactly that, still pictures and perhaps VHS tapes, not the stuff we have today.

Sure, they could have done a better job, but I maintain the route they took was better than killing off his access (which they actually tried to do, see the comment made by the dad after the story, they eventually realized it was futile, and I think they would have saved themselves a lot of heartache had they approached it intelligently from the start).

And letting the lice-infested homeless craigslist woman come live with them? I can't see any way to spin that as a good idea.

Well, another thing to consider is that a lot was left out from the story. It may very well be they didn't know how he found here.

Again, from the comment made by the father:

  And then there is the matter of the homeless woman. Again, we did not simply let
  this happen. For months the police, the courts, and an entire team of medical
  professionals who were not mentioned in the story were involved. We all agreed,
  after months of agony, that the approach we finally took was the least of a
  multitude of evils. Everything that happened over this period of time, and with
  all of these people, is left out of the story, again, to save Alex
  embarrassment.

The mother also admits she knew nothing about porn at all, and thought that he was looking at still pictures.

I don't think it's a distinction between photo and video. A person who doesn't watch porn imagines it is unusually large breasted women having sex on camera. They assume "extreme porn" refers to maybe the piledriver position or women dressed up as schoolgirls.

They have no idea that the kind of sex you learned about in sex ed is actually a niche category.

> "[stuff] is left out of the story, again, to save Alex embarrassment."

Judging from many of the comments here, leaving out a lot of that stuff makes Alex and his parents come off looking worse than they probably were. The full details might be unnecessary, but mentioning the involvement of "police, courts, and medical professionals" in making the decision would have drastically improved my perception of the parents and the kid.

The parents could have done a better job, but that's true of all parents. It's a difficult job involving a lot of judgment calls and a lot of mistakes. IMO the article would be greatly improved if they were more direct about those mistakes and about the struggles they went through in making those decisions.

To put it another way: if my kid had that condition, I wouldn't ask for advice for the pushover-parents and out-of-control kid as described in the article, but I would ask for it from the hard-decision parents and struggling-but-eventually-grew-up kid as described in the comments.

Sure - porn may be a 'good' outlet but there have been studies that show that the more a guy watches porn, the more unrealistic his views are about sex. Just saying.

As for a 9 year old looking at porn, I think there's a difference at looking at nude art vs. porn and porn really should be cut off until the kid at least his puberty.

But I do agree with @petercooper's response as well.

"Pornography does the world a load of good. In countries that are sexually liberal, and where sex is not as taboo as it is in other countries, the population has less sexual crime. The opposite is true of sexually repressive countries."

Citation needed.

TL;DR: Hysterical parents and doctors freak out over son who is perfectly fine and even abnormally intelligent, publicizing lots of incredibly personal information in the process.

Well, it was more interesting than I expected.

A colleague of mine has a daughter who went into full-blown puberty at the age of 7. Bodily changes, emotional lability - everything that usually happens at 13. The doctors recommended they cut out the use of plastics and household cleaners... so, off to read the article.

At one point the mom says she asked him whether he wants to take the medication ("it is his life"). I wonder whether she asked his permission to publicize the intimate details of his growing up.

If you have read the comments, than you would have realize that her son was looking over at the whole things and deciding what to include and not to include.

Terrifying. But it doesn't sound that far removed from any other mal-adjusted kid who was obsessed with computers and porn.

I'd forgotten how miserable puberty was. Ahhhh kill me now.

I just got done reading this article and don't blame the parents at all. It is always easier to criticize another parent's decisions but you are in their shoes, the whole perspective is different and you will end up doing whatever you think is best for your kid.

btw. This is his website. http://www.alexanderpeppe.com/

Huh? Seems to me not testosterone, but hysterical parents are the problem here. Quote from the doctor: "He can get a girl pregnant. He will not hesitate if given the opportunity." WTF??? What a bunch of nonsense.

On what data are you basing your opinion?

The doctor accurately describes what testosterone does to boys. Once a boy starts producing testosterone in large amounts he matures sexually, becomes capable of getting women pregnant, and develops a strong interest in doing so. The result is called puberty.

This is as true at 9 as it is at 16. It is much rarer for boys to start producing testosterone at 9, but if it happens, the results are perfectly predictable. (Ditto for girls. There is no known lower age limit at which the body responds to sex hormones. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Medina for an extreme example.)

But even with Testosterone, boys don't try to impregnate every girl they are alone with. Maybe they'd want to, but they are not completely brainless.

This boy had higher than normal levels of testosterone, and was facing it with unusually little maturity due to his young age. Both factors bode poorly for self-control.

opposite of my family: 3 boys, puberty at 16, 17, and 18 (almost 19). That last one they were about to inject with all sorts of ugly drugs, when ole puberty came shuffling in late but otherwise normal

Parenting is a tough job, especially with your first child when you have no experience to fall back on. But OMG do I think they made a bunch of bad decisions with this kid.

Agreed, the parents asked the child's permission too frequently rather than simply taking control.

I don't ask my dog permission when I take him outside, but I see many owners that do and they have dogs that quite frankly I would be scared to let small children be near. And I truly believe the same principles apply to children as animals, the nature of the relationship is vastly more complex but authority isn't. You're the boss or you aren't.

These parents were not the bosses of the household, Alex was. My father was the boss, it was an undebatable fact and I experienced very little drama in my childhood. I never got grounded, and I rarely got disciplined because if I ever did something wrong I simply had to be told not to do it again.

> I don't ask my dog permission when I take him outside,

I hope that you don't feel the dog-to-child comparison is 100% accurate. Running your house like a pack of dogs (or frankly a boot camp) might not be the best way to raise children. You don't want to raise children that: 1) can't think for their own b/c they only know how to memorize/regurgitate or 2) will instantly rebel and 'go wild' when control is released (i.e. university/college).

> My father was the boss, it was an undebatable fact and I experienced very little drama in my childhood. I never got grounded, and I rarely got disciplined because if I ever did something wrong I simply had to be told not to do it again.

This evidence is just as anecdotal as the people that say, "My computer runs Windows and I've never seen a BSOD so therefore anyone that experiences a BSOD must have been asking for it." Also, read the comment (currently) above this thread that refers to further information that was cut from the final draft of the article at Alex's request. It adds more context to the story.

On the other hand, there is some evidence for having a strong father figure. e.g. Ted Nugent has stated that it was his up-bringing that kept him out of drugs and alcohol even while hanging out with notorious drug users like Jimi Hendrix. (Though many people might not see the 'Motor City Madman' as a role model to aspire too; I don't share a lot of his views on politics, etc)

I said, I believe the principles apply, it's not 100% accurate because humans are infinitely more complex than even the smartest breeds of dog. However the principles do apply.

I believe in authority not in a disciplinarian as the head of the household. I've seen parents who are simply discipline 110% of the day, and you don't necessarily just get #1/#2 that you pointed out, you too frequently get #3 which is balls-out-psycho-shit teenage runaways and daily physical altercations. Incidentally, this is seen in dogs and especially in the obedient breeds who can be consistently disciplined and obey.

I don't mean treat our children like they are dogs, but treat them evenly, fairly and consistently like you would your dog. The parents in the article never acted consistently, they fully knew what behaviours they wanted out of their son but never showed the consistency in their efforts to control it. (I understand there was more in the story about him accessing pornography, however there's ways to relent on a situation without essentially saying 'fuck it, do whatever you want', they could have bought him a playboy subscription either magazine or TV rather than give him free access to the billion different fetishes available online that - allegedly - manage to screw up the marital lives of mature adults)

I mean I lost all respect for these people when they not only flat out gave up on stopping their son trying to date a homeless woman, but aided their son in doing so by moving her into their house, buying her clothes and trying to help her. (It might sound like a noble act, but they essentially bought a homeless woman as a prostitute for their 15 year old son)

It's simply ludicrous why these adults thought this was an appropriate thing for them to be doing. They gave their son free access to pornography and essentially bought him a prostitute. It's a miracle they haven't been charged with aiding and abetting child abuse by repeatedly allowing a legally responsible adult to have sex with their under-age child.

If you read the father's comments on the article, the courts were involved with trying to separate their son from the homeless lady, but apparently not even that was enough to stop it.

Different people respond differently to the same situations. It's not as simple as "lay down the law, and the child will behave". Sometimes that seems to work great, as with you, and sometimes it works out fairly badly (as with me... ;) ). It might well be that you'd have been a well-behaved child even had the parenting been completely different; twin studies suggest that quite a lot of behavior is built-in.

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