Originally Posted by
Apple
i have a ten year old son and i would NOT want him coming here.
I totally understand where you're coming from on that, and I wouldn't want a 10-year-old I was responsible for coming on here either. But I also have to assume that you wouldn't
let him come on here. The fact is, if you give him unsupervised Internet use, he could just as easily look up porn sites if he wanted to, or even come across them by accident, and see far more graphic content that he'd find on RYL. And the kids who are coming on here probably haven't been nearly as sheltered as your son probably has been considering that their parents either don't moniter their Internet use or have deemed this site appropriate.
I may well be wrong, but I doubt there are many kids who have at the age of 11 recognized that they are engaging in self harm or that they have an eating disorder, are getting help for that issue, and choose to come to a support site like RYL on their own, and don't have enough parental supervision to prevent them doing so, who doesn't either already know a fair amount about "the facts of life" or choose to avoid adult posts on their own.
To a significant extent, it's up to parents to shelter their kids from "adult" content as they see fit, and it's neither practical nor possible for websites targetted at a wide range of ages to act as parents for unsupervised children. People need to be able to discuss sexual issues on the site as they're very often closely related to the main purpose of the site, and so regardless of what's done about "adult" jokes and chatter, I don't think it would be practical or productive to make the site strickly "appropriate" for young children. I also think that young people may have questions or concerns about "adult" topics that they should be able to have addressed, and for kids who, for whatever reason, can't or won't talk to their parents about it, RYL seems like a relatively safe place for them to ask about it.