Being a parent is tough in today’s world – you want the best for your children and you want to protect them from the evils of the world. You want to do all this, but at the same time you don’t want to smother them and have them end up with an unrealistic view of the world. A classic example of this is with movies. There are thousands of movies released each year that I wouldn’t want my 14 year old to watch, but I know he can download Mesrine Public Enemy No 1 movie for free online whenever he wants to, and there’s not that much I can do about it if he chooses to do it secretly. Happily we seem to have developed a good balance between trust and reward.

1. Instead of saying a straight no, we are always prepared to research the movie our kids want to watch to find out what it is really like. Sometimes we discover that the movie is far less violent or scary than we had feared, other times we find that a PG movie for example is unsuitable for our children in our opinion.

2. We took the decision to discuss the rating system as a family and look at why some movies have an R rating and why some are PG. Having this conversation has really paid off for us, and we were surprised just how mature our children were about this issue.

3. We talk to our kids all the time, not just about movies but all aspects of their lives. We find that if we treat them more grown up that they are more inclined to act that way.

We can’t uninvent the Internet, and it is very difficult to restrict their access to it, so like it or not they will be able to see full free movie downloads whenever they choose. We can try to ignore the issues this causes, but that doesn’t address any of the problems, it just drives them underground.