A topic came up on Slashdot today that happeneds to be something I feel strongly about, and evidently is the same for a lot of people, garnering 69 posts moderated up to +5—the average "active" topic gets about 25. In this case, the topic was Rules for Teenage Internet Access. Surprisingly, Slashdot readers are not all as liberal as I had thought, and plenty of people came down on the side of generous filtering, logging, and oversight. A few kids chimed in, some very mature, and others a little less so but when interpreted correctly, still fitting into the big picture. My own stance might be labelled as pretty liberal. I think that kids have the potential to mature a lot earlier than they do these days; it's just a matter of what the parents expect of their children. I place a high value on open, honest, and critical discussion of "unpleasant" subject like gender and racial discrimination, homosexuality, drugs, &c. The post that most resembles my stance (and I think deserves a read) gives an example:

Let me use a personal example: My son, at the time was age 9, went to spend the night at a friends house. While there they watched an austin powers movie. This came out in conversation a couple of days later. My wife and I were horrified that this happened, but we didn;t yell and hoot and holler. We asked about the movie and he told us about it (We had seen this movie a couple of years before at a friends house (Strange how things work out)) During this conversation we talked about attitudes toward women and sexuality. And we talked about whe we found certain things objectionable. But it wasn't a lecture. we were having a conversation and he understood why it was inapproriate when we had finished.

In fact, reading this post changed my mind about filtering. The key is that the poster discussed it with his kids, and uses it to protect them and not to monitor them. Also, in the last example where he discusses the webcam invite, parent and children are using the computer together: that's something important that I think nobody got exactly right, that actions speak louder than words and that your example will have a great influence on the values formed by your kids.