For those of you who don’t know, COX is a cable and internet provider that is popular in the US (I would assume). Not only does it have an obvious travesty of a name , but COX often displays commercials telling parents how to block their children from certain “harmful” web sites:

“With Cox high speed Internet services, you get parental controls for free that will allow you to customize the level of filtering you want on your computer.  You have the option of blocking your children from visiting certain Web sites and setting up passwords so only you can access the parental control settings.  It can be so simple to protect your children from the dangers of the Internet.” (source)

So far so good. But I really, really want to know what they have to say about the half-naked “Girls Gone Wild” videos that start playing at night on the basic channels that they provide with their service? Isn’t it dangerous to get drunk and show your naked body for money.  You bet it is. And If they are so concerned with protecting your child, why do they allow drunk, half-naked, semi-idiotic females to enter your kiddie’s world late at night?

There is always one venomed full-gorged measle who would say, “Ocean, you moron, kids aren’t supposed to be awake that late at night anyways, what do you have to say about that, you alien citizen?”.

To this honorable gentleman, I would say that, contrary to popular belief, your kids aren’t robotic minions who can be designed like a fake myspace page (ok, maybe they are to some extent, but still).  They tend to have weird super powers like waking up and being curious, especially when you are at a party late at night, drinking your own body weight’s worth of cheap Aristocrat vodka. So, even if it’s late at night, the chances are that your kids will see an undressed, underage lady, who despite her sexy looks, is also very, very confused and fails at life. Maybe they are watching her right now, go check.

So, you have two options and one important decision that will affect your child for decades to come.  Either block channels and web-sites, install a camera in their room, and turn their childhood into a bite-size torture chamber …or give them the freedom to experience everything on their own.

“On their own! Have you gone mad?!? I must protect them in every way possible, what about the dangers of the internet that COX warned me about?!?” - said the venomed full-gorged measle again and leaped back into its cave.

I will counter that argument with my usual flawless logic.  If you have given your credit card number to your child, you are either incredibly rich and don’t care about the repercussions, or you are not smart enough to have children in the first places. If you want to prevent your child from giving your home address to a stranger online, you can either use the Count from Sesame Street (deeply recommend it) to scare them and then explain more thoroughly why strangers are bad.

That leaves us with porn.  I don’t have any suggestions about this one, mostly because we cannot do anything about it. I cannot even protect myself from being constantly bombarded with billboards, innuendos, posters, movies, commercials that all hint to that and as I’ve said on my previous posts, your kids might not be as innocent as you think. We were all kids once, so if we really think about our childhood memories, most will notice that nothing can prevent us from being exposed to sex. It’s worse nowadays: male enhancement pills, Viagra, alcohol, deodorants, acne removers, clothes.  We are ready to do anything to be more appealing to the opposite sex. Words like sexy, attractive and cute are here to stay.

So why not sit your kid down and explain what kind of materialistic, self-indulging animals we are, instead of blocking it all and keeping them in the dark?  If you don’t do that, one day it is going to backfire on them and their little multicolored world will be destroyed…forever.

COX doesn’t care about your children. Their name is COX for god’s sake. In fact, they could even do without your children because your kids are not the one paying for COX’s crappy service.  All that matters to COX is advertising space. Parental-control is just another word that some three legged creatures made up to target their audiences and give you a reason to believe in their crap. We could do without those kind of words, don’t you think?

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