The other evening, we presented our workshop session, Shining Armor: Your Son’s Battle for Purity in a small church in a rural area. Parents came up afterward to ask how to install some kind of accountability or protection on their computers, phones and devices. We told them about the service we use ourselves, Covenant Eyes, but I marveled that parents with children in their teens would be just now thinking about this. It’s like the mother who contacted us recently whose elementary age son threatened to kill himself if she took his iPod away. They had been very careful with the family’s computers, but allowed their young son to have free access to an iPod Touch with no protection at all – although it will go anywhere online their computers will. These are good parents! They just don’t understand what’s going on in the world, though, and it has left their children vulnerable to extreme danger.

This morning I read an article in The Daily Mail written by Martin Daubney, a former soft-core pornographer, whose experience talking in a school to a group of eighth graders shook him to his core. Every single one of these children in an upper-class area had not only seen porn online, but had seen extreme kinds of perversion. They knew sexual terms that the pornographer and the sex ed expert speaking with him didn’t know!

This revelation led him to recruit a famous neuroscientist and addiction expert at Cambridge University to do brain scans on people addicted to porn. The results astounded even the pornographer and skeptical scientist: it looked a lot like addiction to hard drugs or alcohol. Daubney said,

If porn does have the insidious power to be addictive, then letting our children consume it freely via the internet is like leaving heroin lying around the house, or handing out vodka at the school gates. And this toxic effect is filtering down directly into young girls’ lives.

Before it gets to the girls, it’s affecting the boys. The really sad thing is that good boys are getting drawn into this sin. They don’t have to even look for it, it comes looking for them. Moms, did you know the ads you see when you surf online aren’t the same ones your husband and sons see? Once the search engines figure out they are male, the temptations start coming. This isn’t a matter of not trusting your kids, it’s a matter of not dropping them off alone in a red light district. Only, it’s in your living room now.

Please, please, please get some accountability on your computers, tablets, smartphones, and iPods. We use Covenant Eyes. They will support our ministry if you click through to them through us, but we recommended them for years before they offered to do that. Here’s a post that explains how their service works.

To read the original article, click here, but then click to resize the window – the sidebars on The Daily Mail are egregious. To read a summary of the article on a site you don’t have to adjust, click here.

Hal & Melanie Young

For more about how to teach your sons about sexuality in a Biblical context, get our workshop, Shining Armor: Your Son’s Battle for Purity, order our book, Raising Real Men, or sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know about our upcoming book about purity.