The Internet is a wonderful and exciting environment for children to learn, play, and explore but on the other hand, it is a completely dark and dangerous world, full of harmful content and materials. Unfortunately, your babies – children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to those types of harmful content.
This article will help you make it clear what inappropriate content on the Internet is hunting your kids and making your kids worsen everyday!
3 negatively online inappropriate contents on the Internet
Pornographic materials
Research shows that most pornography and sex addiction begin in adolescence. However, most parents do not act to prevent this problem any sooner. Partly because they are subjective that their kids will never do it, partly because many parents don’t take seriously negative effects of watching pornography on kids.
Early exposure to pornography can cause detrimental effects:
There is a part in the brain called vmPFC that has been extensively studied in the literature and is believed to be involved in human decision-making. When your child watches pornography, vmPFC’s gray matter decreases, resulting in a decrease in self-control.
Addiction to pornography affects vmPFC, leading to thought impairment, where the brain is stimulated by the thought of watching porn and not having it. The pornography increases this thought until your child can realize they have to watch continuously sex in response to a stimulus.
This causes undesirable emotions when viewers experience a stressful situation where the conditional response to viewing pornography is to ease the stress.
Many teenagers in qualitative research claim that pornography actually negatively impacts the way they perceive their bodies. For boys, this mostly revolves around penis size, although some also report feeling anxious about not having the attractively muscular strength to attract other girls.
Meanwhile, girls worry about not having big breasts, big butt or sexy curves to be attractive in the eyes of their boyfriends.
The aggression and violence against women found in most popular pornography can teach your children (especially boys) that aggression towards women is socially tolerated and accepted to be hostile towards women.
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Since then, pornography causes your child to lose their sensitivity and empathy for women and instead your child will see women as a sexual tool. This is evident in porn films where male actors exhibit such a lack of empathy towards women that sexual abuse in these films is completely normal.
- How watching porn makes your child become a porn addict:
One negative impact of a child’s brain on porn is that children who regularly access pornography are more likely to become porn addicts. They will find they want and need more pornography, even though they don’t like it. This disconnect between desire and like is a prominent feature of dysfunction in the reward system.
Your child is motivated to watch more sex movies or to watch more weird and violent pornography to regain the same stimulus as the first time.
Horrifying content
Horrifying content includes:
- Unreal horror movies like ghosts, violence (Valak, The Conjuring, Saw, etc.)
Source: pinterest.com
Source: Youtuebe
- Pictures/videos of accidents, murder and stabbing scenes, etc. in real life.
Source: dailystar.co.uk
The second form of horrifying content often appears on social networks or online newspapers and forums, this horror content are often ignored by parents. You have no idea how those things make your children severely suffer. The dynamic is much more powerful and negative.
Inappropriate content on the Internet like horrifying content arouses certain emotions such as stress, fear, and shock. They can cause the release of hormones in the body such as norepinephrine, cortisol and adrenaline from the autonomic nervous system.
By the age of 6-14, your child becomes sensitive and susceptible to external influences, so he may experience more intense fear when faced with more horrifying images such as blood and gore, accident, murder on news and social networks. Your child is influenced and absorbed by negative emotions easily as the impact of positive images from fairy tales.
After being exposed to these horrifying content, your child is more likely to experience negative effects such as difficulty sleeping, experiencing nightmares, fear of the dark, anxiety, increased feelings of vulnerability and increased concerned about the possibility.
Self-harm and Suicide
According to research, most people believe that about 10% of adolescents harm themselves, but this rate can be as high as 20%. Besides, most young people report that they start hurting themselves around 12 years old.
Some of the factors that may put your kids more at risk are:
- Have a mental health disorder. This can include depression, anxiety, multiple personality disorders, and eating disorders.
- Not cared for by parents, or are often scolded and beaten by parents.
- More importantly, exposure to harmful content on the Internet:
A prime example is the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who had approached a horrible number of Instagram posts related to anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide before she took her own life in November 2017.
Many people assume that the algorithm used by social networks, like in this case Instagram, pushes similar content towards users based on what the user has seen before. And when Molly saw a few related photos, these contents continued to show up, causing her to fall into a dark rabbit hole filled with the content of self-harm, leading to depressive behavior, then suicide. Investigators show that she might encounter extremely graphic self-harm materials.
Source: Family/PA
Drugs and stimulants
Marijuana, Crack Cocaine, ecstasy, bath salts, etc. are the most addictive substances used by young people these days, and they can be accessed by your child over the Internet.
For example, when your child feels bored or has a certain negative emotion but cannot release it, or he or she may be pressured by friends and try these drugs and stimulants with the aim of being releasing negative emotions as well as desiring a “high” feeling like their friends.
Don’t forget that your child is at a vulnerable age and external influences so when your child sees pictures/videos/documents about drug users feeling high, your child will be able to mimic these behaviors, learn more about drugs.
What parents should do to protect kids from harmful content?
You need to regularly educate your children about what is appropriate and inappropriate content on the Internet for them such as pornography, horror, drugs, and self-harm and suicide content mentioned above. You can also teach them how to become a responsible user on the Internet by teaching them digital skills.
Having regular conversations with your child about the Internet dangers they will face on the Internet will help them become aware of the situation and protect themselves from its harm.
However, that is not enough! We recommend you take advantage of using one of the best parental control software which is used by many parents. To ensure your child’s online environment is safe and healthier, you should consider using an additional online content filtering tool to hide 15 types of harmful content on the Internet (not just a free porn blocker), including:
- Pornography
- Horrifying content like gore, accidents, ghosts, violence, murder, terrorism, etc
- Content about stimulants, addictive substances such as alcohol, beer, marijuana, drugs, etc
- Content with aggressive elements, hurting others like Hate speech
The special thing is that this extension is completely free, helps to minimize your child’s access to harmful content, ensuring a healthy online environment for your child but at the same time, not invading their privacy rights.
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