I tried to protect my children from exposure to inappropriate material. Tried for years. And failed.
I first tried to protect them from the Internet. They're 17 and 19 now, but around 10 years ago and we were using AOL, I used the child settings to control their Internet access. Even the lowest setting was so constraining as to be useless. I can't count the number of times I would go out on the Internet on my own computer and find websites I thought they'd be interested in, only to find that AOL wouldn't permit them access. They weren't happy and I wasn't happy. We quickly abandoned AOL's solution to the problem.
So I researched the area and tried a couple other approaches. These didn't work either. In order to be absolutely certain of allowing no PG-13 or worse content through when the level is set to PG, the only sites allowed through are things like
http://www.pbskids.com. CNN, NY Times, etc, were all off-limits, which kind of puts a crimp on your 10-year old's current events research for class.
I quickly abandoned these tools and went with VNC. This is a very simple program that allows you to interactively view the screen of other computers on your home network. With this I could periodically check what my kids were up to. This was not a good thing, either, because it created an environment of distrust.
So I don't know what the answer is for the Internet.
Concerning TV, it's not just the commercials you have to worry about - have you ever watched MTV?
Or how about radio? I forget what age the kids were when they began changing the car radio station to stations they liked, and I was shocked at what I heard. I had no idea that such explicitness was permitted. The snippet of sound that was cut out for certain words was so short as to leave absolutely nothing to the imagination about what the words were. I assume it's the same way today - my kids have their own cars now and so my car radio stays tuned to my stations.
Then there's CDs, which usually have no censoring at all. You can monitor which CD's your children buy, but some kids will have the "good" CD's that fascinate your kids, and they'll loan them and make copies of them. Trying to protect kids from bad language and sexually explicit expression is dumb anyway once they're past 12 or 13, just listen to kids talk among themselves sometime.
What I'm getting at is that in most of America and Canada today, it really isn't practical to protect your kids from exposure to inappropriate material. The only way to do it is either to be with them every second while they're watching TV or using the Internet or listening to CDs, or to not allow them to watch TV, use the Internet or listen to CDs. Those are your choices, and they're both ridiculous.
So the question, "How do I protect my kids from exposure to inappropriate materials?" is actually the wrong question. The right question is, "Given that it is inevitable that my kids will be exposed to inappropriate material, what am I going to tell them to help them make sense of it and place it in a context appropriate for their age?"
--Percy