I was a tween before the word tween was invented, back in the olden days before twerking and junior misses’ g-strings. My parents owned a thick dictionary with a red linen cover, and it contained all the language. When they weren’t watching, I pored over it, looking up various body parts and four-letter words. My sister and I couldn’t get enough of reading the definition of fart (“a flatus expelled through the anus,” in case you were wondering). We’d laugh sometimes until the point of producing exactly that. Reading words like anus with mine own eyes felt subversive, which at that age meant f-u-n.

Back then, cable TV wasn’t all that sophisticated. Even if you didn’t pay for premium channels, you could still sorta kinda watch them by crooking your head the right way and doing this magic-eye thing of hyperfocusing. I assume this is how pretty much everyone in my generation got their first glimpses at porn. The reception on That Channel—I’m not sure we even knew the word porn then—wasn’t snowy, and it didn’t make white noise. It was more like a black-and-white film you had to watch through moving water. The picture was still there, though fuzzy. You could make out some of the shapes. But it undulated, and your brain had scant time to piece together images before they shifted. Sometimes the top of the screen showed up at the bottom, and vice-versa. If you were determined enough, you could occasionally catch a glimpse of some forbidden body part. And you could definitely hear the moaning.

I’m not sure, but I think That Channel and the red dictionary were the sum of all the dirty stuff my parents had to protect my sister and me from within our own home. And as you can gather, they failed miserably—as all of my friends’ parents did. It is, of course, natural for kids to be curious about these things. Unfortunately, today there is so much more than one fuzzy channel and an unabridged dictionary to fend off. So, I have low tolerance for people who think it’s easy to preserve children’s innocence, if only we lazy parents would try. As one would expect, pretty much 100 percent of people touting this view aren’t presently raising small children. And pretty much 100 percent of them are wrong. Folks, shielding kids from NSFW material is like trying to keep all your hair in a ponytail during a typhoon.

I try very hard to protect my kids from stumbling into the dark parts of the adult world. Very hard. But I feel outgunned. Even networks like ABC Family—talk about a misnomer—advertise provocative programming at times when little eyes and ears are obviously in the audience. Don’t even get me started on Charter’s On Demand. Nearly every time I’ve gone to that menu, there’s a zombie, shooting, exorcism, steamy sex scene, or other R-rated thing happening in the picture-in-picture box that I can’t for the love of Mike hide fast enough while we quick try to choose a kids’ movie. I stopped using On Demand for that reason, but guess what? My parents still use it. And since they raised children during a time of red-linen dictionaries and That Channel, they don’t have the 24/7 media-vigilance mentality it takes for child-rearing in these times.

I keep my radio tuned to XM Kids. If I don’t—and I know this from experience—when we start up the car, the first thing we’ll hear is some song about sticking this stuff in her stuff while he does that stuff to your stuff, or some horrible news story about death, rape, or destruction.

I can’t even let the kids stand near me when I’m looking up things on the Internet. Sure, I turn on Safe Search and lock it. No, it doesn’t stay locked, because you know, sometimes a grown lady’s got to look up things that have the word vagina in them. If I forget to re-do the settings, or if I log out and log back into Google, all bets are off. Yes, I’ve tried apps and software designed to keep the ‘net and iPad G-rated when in use by the kids. Not a one of them have ben foolproof. Close but not perfect.

My son heard me using Google Voice on the iPad recently. We had fun looking up the solar system and cheetahs. But yesterday as he was playing a game app, I heard his little voice say, “Okay, Google,” and I reflexively snagged that iPad faster than you can say, “CRAZY MOM.” After I turned on Safe Search AGAIN and locked it AGAIN, he said, “Okay, Google. ROAR VIDEO.” He loves the song “Roar” by Katy Perry. Know what Google thought he said? Whore video.

Right next to us, my daughter was waiting to download a song from iTunes on my laptop. I told her to wait for me, and she did, but geez, I’m not trying to raise her Amish. I let her do the search while I watched over her shoulder. She wanted to find “Brave” by Sara Bareilles, which says, “I want to see you be brave” in the refrain. Not knowing the name of the song, she just started typing, “I want to se…” Google quickly suggested the auto-fill “I want to sex you up.” Super close, Google. Thanks.

A few weeks ago, we were at a party with family friends. I didn’t realize my daughter’s friend had an old iPhone with Internet access until my daughter ran out of a room saying, “We have to show you this funny song we just saw. I think it’s on a site called Beaver Fever.” I stopped her before she could finish typing in the words. Ummm, yeah. I don’t think so. Her friend’s parents didn’t realize safe search wasn’t on. (And believe me you, they don’t want their kids seeing search results related to beaver fevers either.)

This isn’t half the story. I can’t even tell you all the measures I’ve taken. My point is, those who think it’s easy for parents to keep their kids away from porn and violence, try this for a day: Try going about everyday tasks of life and noticing how many times you see or hear sexual or violent material. Our society is fooling itself if we continue to believe a parent has the power to keep children innocent of the sex and violence that lurk in every dark corner. We don’t, not with the Internet. Especially not with the Internet. Want to know what the fourth most popular search term is on my blog? It’s “toddler’s penis.” The fifth is “little kids private parts.” (Mommy bloggers, if you haven’t done so already, take stock of pictures you’ve posted of your kids on your blog, and of the search terms people are using to find you. Might be time to clean house.)

I know I’m not the first parent to yearn for the innocence of a time gone by. But I do believe I’m in a generation of parents who might need to do more than yearn for it. I’ve kind of had enough of this crap. Parents are outgunned. Kids need to be kids. I just don’t know what to do about it.

Any ideas?

[Note to parents: Here’s Google’s quick 411 on how to set up Safe Search on your browser.]

The flag pole in the front yard has no flag. It’s just a pole with a metal cleat and halyard. We’ve been having heavy winds, and tonight they whip the halyard against the pole in a steady beat. Under the full moon on this winter-bare street a block from our house, with no streetlights, the effect is spooky. Kind of sounds like a dead Jacob Marley on the move.

“Can’t…get…it,” my daughter says as she struggles with the key. It’s an old brass thing losing its patina, probably dating back as many decades as the house. “You try,” she sighs in resignation. After the lock turns, we share a half-second hesitation and serious nod. It’s the look buddy cops give each other right before they kick in the door to a crack house.

Welcome to the Worst Pet-Sitting Gig Ever.

Three months ago, my daughter walked the neighborhood with homemade pet-sitting fliers, still high on the joy of caring for her first charge—a fat teddy-bear cat shaved to look like a lion. She gleefully imagined days filled with fuzzy hamsters, round-bellied dogs, chinchillas soft as alpacas. She did get a two-day job caring for a blind Cocker Spaniel named after a Vegas casino, but now? She’s got two pissed-off cats in this gloomy house. It’s full of what feels like bad juju, dark and dreary and cold, sparsely furnished and covered in lint. The joylessness I felt from the woman who hired my daughter, well, it’s reflected in the home itself. One of the cats bites. The other hides under the bed and glares at us. I’ve owned cats like these myself. They’re no fun for visitors.

My daughter heads down to the basement on stairs carpeted in old, scratchy, multicolored carpet that smells like the underside of an old wig. Rainbow never looked so depressing. Bright orange thread is everywhere, crisscrossing up and down the stairs and scribbled around the basement. This is the third day one of the cats has disturbed a shoebox full of thread that rests under a card table.

As I help my daughter wind up the thread, I wonder if it’s okay for us to be touching the spools. They’re so bright and cheery, the only sign of life in this house of gloom. Even the toddler toys upstairs look lifeless, even the riding ones, all of them piled haphazardly on a built-in bookshelf. Maybe the spools are sacred to the homeowner? Maybe they’re the last remnant of her once-happy self, or the hope for a future happy self, or both.

The rest of the giant basement is empty, save for a shallow litter box with one sad turd that the cat barely covered. From my coat pocket, I pull out a balled-up plastic grocery bag for collecting such treasures. A similar bag was left for us by the owner, but it was just one, for a six-day stretch. There was a hole in the bottom of that bag anyway. I can almost picture the young and hollow-eyed mom hanging it there on the doorknob, her mind on other things or her heart just not in it. Sad sack, I think. Now, THAT’S a sad sack.

My daughter opens a hollow-core door to get to the litter box scooper. In the fluorescent light, her skin seems gray-green, likes she’s nauseated. Still, she goes about the scooping as if her life depended on it. Thorough doesn’t begin to describe it. The box has a rancid layer of cemented litter on the bottom, but she works at it good. By the time she’s done, there’s not so much as a nano-pebble of poo left behind. First real job, I think. Picking up other people’s shit. “This is actually like most first jobs,” I tell her, without elaborating.

Afterward, we go upstairs so she can put food and water in the cats’ bowls. The social cat—if you can call glowering social—comes out to quietly judge us. Looking at the bite-mark on my daughter’s hand, I tell her she doesn’t have to try to pet or play with the cat this time. But my daughter’s insistent, saying, “I’m supposed to do it. I’ll do it.” Then she reaches with a heavy heart for the cat brush.

From day one, the cat has treated this brush with disdain, more like it’s a stick of deodorant we’re trying to rub on her. Something tells me that the brush was left out in the same numb spirit the sad sack was hung on the doorknob, like a decorative-fruit centerpiece in a hoarder’s house. It’s a gesture. The cat hisses at it. Her tail is bent all funny, so that it naturally rests on her back and points toward her head. It was a birth defect, according to the owner. “She doesn’t seem to mind if you touch it,” she’d said in a monotone, making no effort to demonstrate the point.

Unable to break down barriers with the glowering cat, we head to the back room to make sure the other one is still alive. We walk past an old comforter crumpled in a laundry basket. It has a fur-filled depression in it, the approximate size and shape of a cat. My daughter offers to look under the bed to if see Angry Cat is there, but I beg her to let me do it. The floor hasn’t been vacuumed in…ever. I manage to look under the bed without making face contact with the carpet. The cat is there, and she looks violated when she sees me. We try to get her to come out by shaking a toy. No dice. So we take the toy back out to the first cat and drag it around under her nose. She is not amused. She just stares at it. Can a cat be suicidal?

“This is the worst pet-sitting job ever,” my daughter says as we walk around turning off the lights we’ve used. The house is completely dark when we’re done, just as it was when we arrived. “I mean it, Mom. Worst. Job. Ever.” Hearing her say this makes me laugh, which makes her start to giggle, too. I pat her on her curly head and ask her if she’s ever heard of first-world problems. “What’s that?” she asks.

“I’ll tell you some other day,” I say. “Right now I’m proud of you.”

As I look around the room waiting for my daughter to zip her coat, I can’t help but think of some gray days I had when she was a baby, some really depressing, gray days that felt like they’d never end. Days that made me want to vacuum the carpet never and let the litter box fill until it caked. Days without color. Days where I wanted to hide. Now we slip back into our winter boots together, her foot nearly as big as mine. When she stands back up, she puts an arm around my waist and leans into me gently. Then we step back out into the wind.