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.
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.
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.
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.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.
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.