@basadeskaiser parents don't want to believe that their kids have sexual feelings so they completely neglect to foster healthy sexual growth. that mixes with the rising accessibility of technology and the internet and how parents are totally fine with just throwing a smartphone with complete access to everything to their child and saying "have fun" without monitoring it whatsoever. then you have a recipe for complete and total disaster. not just with sexuality stuff (including LGBT shit) but also with other brain rots like low self esteem, low sympathy, and ultimately just becoming one with the hivemind.

i consider myself a victim of this kind of neglect because my parents just really never did anything about my internet usage. i got caught with porn so many times and really all that happened was i got grounded for a week and had to talk to the bishop. it just makes me feel like they didn't really care about my emotional wellbeing. there were never any internet blocks, no chats about sexuality beyond the initial birds and bees (which came way too late), and no attempts to bring it up with my pediatrician because they would probably feel like failures or something if they did. i had to completely unfuck years and years of damage to my brain by myself and these kids are only going to have it worse.

it sucks to see this happening, not just because of children getting fucked over (which is really bad don't get me wrong), but also because it fucks over ADULTS who are trying to use the internet for ADULT things that any parent who actually watched their child's internet activity would absolutely prevent them from participating in. the amount of adult entertainment getting absolutely neutered in the name of protecting children is absurd, and australia is actually a perfect example of that since they ban hentai specifically to "protect children!"

@Corfiot @basadeskaiser as a kid I knew I wasn't supposed to be looking at it. I expected my parents to just get mad at me and need to go to confess and repent then be grounded for a week. We're not just talking like this happened once or twice though, it was pretty often and it wasn't just looking at porn either but sexting girls and stuff, all through middle and high school. But yeah that's all that ever happened, parents never talked to me about it, pretty much just scolded me for it temporarily. Never got anything beyond that it was bad to look at and the religious answer of it not being chaste and such. Wasn't ever told WHY, just that it was.

Come to find out later that I have a type of bipolar disorder than includes hypersexuality and manifests itself as such in children and I start thinking about how I was like that even as a young child. If my parents would have just admitted that I had some issues it could have prevented a lot more shit. Of course I didn't get what was going on because I was a kid, so I couldn't really have expectations of them. I knew they (and the rest of my family) had certain expectations of me, but without getting any help and with a lot of them being not exactly aligned with who I was that broke me down quite a lot.

As an adult now, my expectation for a parent is that they A) try to limit and monitor their child's internet access and also educate themselves on their child's interests B) take necessary steps to inform and educate them about naughty things they might or have come across, especially with the onset of puberty, and C) notice patterns in their child's behavior and address them before they get worse instead of pretending they don't exist or that using the same punishment over and over will do anything more than it did before, because if a child has behavioral issues it isn't like they're going to magically change when you get mad at them. In a lot of cases that just makes it worse.

Of course it is impossible to be perfect as a parent and your kid will inevitably see or do something bad but that's why it is important to mitigate stuff as best as you can too instead of just throwing caution to the wind.

There is a lot of toxic parenting out there. People who live vicariously through their kids, people who actually can't stand being around their own kids (saw a lot of that during lock down), people who are so hellbent on their kids not being "failures" that they skim over their issues, people using their kids for heightened social status, etc. There are plenty of types of child abuse/neglect which are totally societally acceptable, even being commercialized and treated jovially. It always makes me really sad to see.