This young writer discovered Pornhub at age 10. Here's what her cautionary tale means for parents.

Tuesday, 16-year-old writer Isabel Hogben published for The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s media company, a startling indictment of twenty-first century, sex-saturated culture.

Her prose is quite excellent; her message, stunning. Her title gives it all away: “I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway.”

“I was ten years old when I watched porn for the first time,” she wrote. “I found myself on Pornhub, which I stumbled across by accident and returned to out of curiosity. The website has no age verification, no ID requirement, not even a prompt asking me if I was over 18. The site is easy to find, impossible to avoid, and has become a frequent rite of passage for kids my age."

“Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily. She was attentive, nearly a helicopter parent, but I found online porn anyway. So did my friends.”

Hogben’s article is a must-read. Seriously. Stop now and read the whole piece. Her indictment of us stings, doesn’t it? It stings because we know it’s true. And if we’re honest, it’s somewhat embarrassing to know we’ve been so protective of our kids in some ways, only to hand them open access to porn and a thousand other internet woes.

O.K., it’s more than just embarrassing—it’s shameful.

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“Youth these days tend to be overprotected in the real world,” I wrote in “Gen Z is in crisis.” “Then, they are abruptly handed access to the internet, where they will be severely underprotected. They go from being shielded from ‘rude’ words, never climbing trees, and wearing bike helmets on trampolines to navigating the most vitriolic and menacing place on earth. We [send] them from the nursery to a minefield. That Gen Z has both safe spaces and social media is an oxymoron straight from hell. Suddenly, the red light district becomes obsolete, Playboy passé. The bullies of yesteryear exist en masse online with enlarged audacity. Everything a good parent would shield their child from now exists in an unrestricted portal at their fingertips. We let them use that portal for hours on end. And yet we want ‘Congress to act.’”

Hogben admits that her and her friends’ moms did “everything they could to protect us.” These parents are not negligent. Generally, they are very good parents. With all sincerity, they want what’s best for their kids.

Yet, somehow, Hogben found herself watching “simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism, and unthinkable physical violence.”

In the fourth grade.

What happened? What went wrong? How is it that a generation of “helicopter parents” let their kids—albeit not intentionally—become so addicted to porn? Today, 85% of teen boys and 57% of teen girls report having watched pornography. According to one survey, all teens who have seen porn were exposed by age 12. “Another 15% said they saw it for the first time when they were 10 years old or younger.” A shocking 30% of teens report seeing pornography in school.

As Hogben pointed out, kids can’t purchase vodka or cigarettes. They can’t buy lottery tickets. We bar them from R-rated movies—and yet, to date, their ability to consume internet porn is virtually unregulated.

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To answer the question, “What went wrong?”, we must first realize that parents who shield their kids from every offensive word and potentially “distressing” circumstance probably do not realize that they are exposing them to incalculably more harm by providing them with phones and the internet. Most parents, I believe, would be shocked to learn just how pervasive and accessible porn is these days. It’s not that they don’t care—as I already said, they want to protect their kids. They just do not realize that the greatest threat comes arguably from the supercomputer in their kids’ pockets.

My point in “Gen Z is in crisis” was that, when confronted with the huge problem of teen porn consumption, our lazy go-to tends to be to expect the government to step in and intervene. And yes, this is necessary.

To a degree.

Government has a role to play in protecting our kids from the vicious predator of porn. But what a dereliction of duty for parents to pass the all-important task of protecting their offspring off to some bureaucrat or government regulator! Until the government acts—and it maybe never will—the family is the first line of defense against internet porn.

Actually, the family is always the first and best line of defense.

And while Isabel Hogben, a courageous and needed voice, calls upon the government to regulate pornography (she argues, compellingly, that access to porn is not a free speech issue), her cautionary tale ultimately entreats parents to adjust their kid-rearing strategies not to accommodate but to combat our sex-saturated society. 

It’s not up to Congress to do that—parents, it’s up to you.