I’ve been doing a lot of coloring lately. With my 4-year-old son, Henry, that is.
A couple months ago, I discovered that there are coloring-book-style pages online for almost everything he might be interested in. Recently, for instance, we’ve printed out coloring pages for all manner of animals (manatees, cheetahs, peregrine falcons), sharks (hammerheads and especially great whites) and dinosaurs (a list far too long to catalog here, but it’s safe to say T-Rex is his fave), among many other things.
So far, so good, right? Nice, but hardly blog material.
Here’s where things take an unexpectedly nasty turn. Because even though you’d think coloring-book pages would be a safe haven on the Internet, well, you’d be wrong.
A couple nights ago, Henry decided he wanted to color some Christmas-themed pictures. So we found some angel images. And candy canes. And smack in the middle of that process, I had quite a shock.
Generally, I just enter the term I’m looking for in Google plus “coloring pages,” and it brings up the images available—removed from their context on their respective web pages. I’d clicked on one particular picture and wasn’t paying too much attention until I looked up and saw that the page I’d downloaded had the Christmas image we wanted to print … surrounded by images of hard-core pornography.
Now, I’ve been surfing the web for a long time. I know there’s bad stuff out there. That said, it never occurred to me that something as innocent as a Christmas coloring page might take me straight to a porn site. I’ve heard about people having these kinds of experiences online before, but it was the first time it had ever happened to me.
Thankfully, Henry didn’t see the images. But he easily could have.
After processing a whole range of emotions—shock, anger, embarrassment, disbelief, disgust—I realized that this unwanted experienced served as a good reminder of the need for caution and intentionality when it comes to this powerful medium we call the Internet.
It also reminded me of why Internet safety is so important when it comes to our families, especially our children. Henry isn’t yet surfing the Web (something I hope to stave off for a while yet). But by the time he does, I will have installed Internet security software to prevent exactly this sort of unexpected encounter. In the interim, I’m going to turn on Google’s SafeSearch feature, which I should have done before now anyway.
Henry and I have done some more coloring since that experience. Last night we both worked on spectacular technicolor polar bears. I’m not going to stop using the Internet for all the good things that it can provide. But it’s safe to say I’m going to do so with a renewed sense of the real dangers that lurk in cyberspace, even where I least expect them to pop up.
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