Putting the computer on a nice desk in a common area of the house is a must. They would be too embarrassed being caught looking up porn to bother searching for it. A computer schedule of allowed times will prevent them from spending their entire youth inside. Never let them play online games that require a monthly fee and take up a lot time usually reserved for school work. Kids need to socialize or else they will turn into hermits in their teens. Another possibility is waiting till their older before letting them roam free on the Internet. Filling up their schedule with after-school sports, school clubs and study groups will leave them too tired to stay up at all hours unsupervised on a computer.
can only speak for myself but my main interests were learning HTML (LOL), hacking higih score tables on old dos games so my sister would never get the high score and playing said games. Also upgrading my mighty 120MHz 586 franken PC. I spent the rest of the time reading and running around like an energiser bunny on crack. Porn I knew existed and how to find but never bothered with due to fear of been caught and the lack of actual interest beyond mild curiosity. But I had had already seen a few magazines that some of my freinds at the time were obsesed with attmpting to read in the newsagents. To me if the kid is a pervert (presumably why the mum is worried) then there is nothing she can do but let him veiw the stuff and hope he gets bored. Forbiding it will just make the serch more risky and therfore more fun.
Do NOT get him a firewall. My dad has one and it completely cripples the internet while at the same time making me resent him and tend to be more rebellious than I would be with full access. The worst thing you can do to a person while trying to keep them "safe" is have a machine tell them what they can and cannot do/access. It pisses me off when you're given something that has the capability do do all sorts of cool stuff but then cripple it in the name of safety. Supervision is the farthest internet censorship should be taken.
