Worried that she's losing her little boy, Nightingale and her husband sit him down for talks that are predicated on false assumptions (for example, that pornography degrades women) when they aren't just plain nonsensical. (The poor kid is reminded that "he has sisters." What is he supposed to do, think of his sisters whenever he feels a sexual urge toward women in order to evaluate its propriety?) Nightingale is careful to hit all the "tolerant" notes, telling her son that masturbation is perfectly normal. But how is he supposed to find it normal after being told that his fantasies are depraved and dangerous?

None of this, though, compares, to the next step Nightingale takes: Obtaining "an anonymous e-mail address from another Internet provider, I wrote to my son, pretending to be a stranger, a male stranger. I said something like, 'Hey, wasssssup, guy? Enjoying our Web sites? How old are you, man? See you around. Write back.'" He never does, but he spends nervous hours trying to figure out who this mysterious e-mailer is. Nightingale tells us she had no other choice, because she is trying to "raise this child into a responsible and caring man in the blitz of Celebrity Sex and Free Fuck Theatre." But who seems more normal to you -- a 12-year-old boy who'd rather waste time on video games with buddies and Internet porn than do his homework, or a mother who attempts to regulate her son's sexual fantasies and assumes the guise of an Internet stalker to frighten him into obedience, all in the name of holding onto her "sweet boy" just a little bit longer?

Nightingale sounds like she has a smart kid who'll survive adolescence. She also sounds as if she's outsmarted herself. Nothing attracts kids' curiosity or spurs their resourcefulness faster than what's forbidden to them. Have a shelf of books or videos you've told your kids are for Mommy and Daddy only? I guarantee you they've perused it. And sure, as kids all of us at one time or another came across things that upset us or confused us or gave us nightmares. I had to stop watching "Rod Serling's Night Gallery" because it gave me insomnia. And I vividly remember the unsettling mixture of queasiness and thrill in the pit of my stomach in elementary school when a classmate brought in some grainy black-and-white porno photos of a woman giving a man a blow job. But do you know anyone who's been done lasting harm by looking at dirty pictures or watching a violent movie who wasn't already emotionally disturbed to begin with?

There's a big difference between wanting to screen what your kids are reading or watching -- in other words, nudging them toward good stuff to balance the mountain of available crap -- and wanting to keep them in a hermetically sealed bubble that admits nothing of the outside world. The latter approach, which is the "good parenting" at the basis of so many government attempts to restrict kids' access to information, is, at root, an insult to kids, a presumption that they are too stupid or fragile to be given information about the real world.

And of course it's a threat to the civil liberties of the rest of us. Perhaps out of an instinct for the politic, Heins doesn't address the arrogance of parents who think that in order to solve their child-rearing problems, the rest of adult society should have key freedoms curtailed. It's time to put the responsibility for deciding what is and isn't appropriate for children squarely on parents.

I know often this is a question of time. I see how hard it is for friends to balance raising kids with the financial necessity of having two working parents. But parents' convenience isn't a good enough argument for measures that narrow the free-speech rights of adults. Consider: The Communications Decency Act could have landed me or any Web journalist in jail simply because a young reader accessed an article we wrote that his or her parent didn't consider appropriate. Internet "filters" that were proposed for public libraries would have blocked access to adult users as well. Television and radio broadcasts are subject to vague "indecency" standards that, Heins points out, operate under the same principles that have been found unconstitutional for books and newspapers.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"