A stack of photos taken by the author at the party.

“Ugh, P. Diddy is such a creep,” my 11-year-old daughter said one evening as we sat down to dinner as a family.

My heart sank. Federal authorities had just raided his house, and the items they found suggested activities I hoped went over my daughter’s head.

“Oh, what have you heard about that?” I asked, trying not to reveal more than she already knew – likely from social media or her friends.

Over the past five years of global crises, I’ve learned to approach her exposure to mature topics with curiosity, followed by an age-appropriate explanation and invitation to ask questions.

Today, her access to the news through a range of voices, credible or not, researched or hot takes, abounds across social media.

In 2022, “nearly half of U.S. teens say they are online ‘almost constantly,’ a significant jump from 24% in 2015,” the Pew Research Center reported. And yet, social media companies are reversing content moderation practices aimed at protecting teens and young adults, making it even more difficult to know what she is seeing.

Even if I institute social media limitations, I can’t control what her friends and classmates have access to, and shocking or salacious news gets around, particularly when celebrities are involved.

I’m grateful that whatever her father and I have done as parents, she’s still telling us the things she hears and asking questions.

When I was her age, I was infinitely more naive and had far less exposure to adult topics for my parents to explain — partly because my parents were reserved immigrants, but also because the what I consumed across TV, radio and print came from media organisations with guidelines around editorial integrity and content warnings.

In 1999, 64% of children said “they’d rather watch TV than engage in any other activity.” But, also in 1999, television, radio, music and print media all had practices related to editorial integrity and independence, and they used content warnings to support parents and kids.

In the ’90s, my knowledge of cases with adult content like O.J. Simpson or Monica Lewinsky was limited to broad strokes of scandal, guilt and ethics. Today, my daughter – younger than I was when those cases hit the news – is hearing explicit details about the trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs.

“I don’t know,” my daughter responded to my question at dinner, “just people at school talking about what they saw on TikTok, that he’s into kids, built tunnels in his mansion, which is giving creep. And people saying Beyoncé and Jay-Z were involved.”

“It’s awful,” I said to the dinner table.

“Are you really surprised?” my husband asked.

I guess I wasn’t.........

© HuffPost