

More: How to create a cellphone contract for kids I printed and highlighted two copies, and told my son to call the girl and tell her to come over to our house. I decided to do some research, looking up the laws for child pornography in our state. I had to find a way to scare them enough to keep them apart, but keep the upper hand so that they would maintain their distance. It’s what I did as a kid and what many teenagers do. They might nod and agree, then secretly continue to meet and exchange messages. I knew telling my son and the young lady to stay away from one another wouldn’t work. But we also didn’t want our son to communicate with that girl any longer.

We didn’t want to create a bigger problem by disclosing what had been found. It was a unique, delicate situation that required discretion.

The girl’s father was one of my husband’s bosses - a really mean one, too. I knew it would be near impossible to keep them from one another, especially since they saw each other every day at school and rode the same (and only) bus. When we finally confronted my son, we could see he was horrified, but he also felt very attached to this girl, swearing he was “in love with her.” It turned out that after school, the two would often walk home together, stopping in the park to make out passionately before parting ways. I read my husband the texts and felt Mama Bear kick in full-force. She played the needy, clingy sex-nymph character as if it were a script, written just for her. This girl was apparently stringing along a steady boyfriend in her own grade while promising my son, a freshman in high school, that she loved him the most. My son, who at the time was barely 13, didn’t seem to know what to do with the pictures and messages, because his usual reply to her was “Wow” or “Nice,” with the occasional “Mmmm.” It turned out this young lady, who was a few months shy of turning 18, was the only one sending pictures. More: My kids are definitely going to sext, and that’s OK But that didn’t stop me from searching through my son’s phone to see what had been going on between them. It didn’t seem appropriate to show him a picture of a minor’s genitalia. I explained what I saw but told him not to look. My husband was sitting nearby but didn’t see what I had. On the top of his phone, there was a flash of vulva followed by the words “I’m wet.” I was looking through his cellphone in an attempt to figure out why he wasn’t receiving group texts when a text message came in from a young lady that included a picture.
