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While I agree that parents should ALWAYS monitor what their children are reading/watching/doing, as a parent of 4, that is easier said than done.
As my children have slowly been given access to the internet and technology I have had to spend HOURS researching the best ways to allow them to experience and use new things in a safe and responsible environment. For the internet and wifi connection in the house there are modems with parental controls or OpenDNS, for the iphone there is restrictions and shared itunes apple ID's. However for the Kindle I feel there is nearly nothing!
As a new Kindle HD owner, purchased this month for my 13 yo son, I am VERY disappointed in the options Amazon has for parental controls. It isn't intuitive at all. Just take a stroll through the countless Amazon forum threads on the subject and you'll see I'm not the only one to feel this way. You will find hundreds of stories just like the one above where children have been exposed to things they should have been protected from and the majority of parents are saying they thought they had locked the device down.
I have a number of complaints. If I don't want my own ebook purchases scrolling across my 13 yr old's screen I have to set him at the younger age restriction, 9 yo, which makes the device too baby-ish for him. Not only that but when it is set to his appropriate age restriction level the suggestions for ebooks are all based from my past purchases, which are not appropriate for him. The age restriction you set doesn't take into account the content that you have in your 'cloud' and filter it appropriately. If I really wanted his experience to be tailored just for him I would probably need to make him his own amazon account. That is cumbersome and impractical not to mention has us running into double-triple+ purchases for the family. We have an amazon prime account, there is no way I'm going to pay for that twice let alone 6 times over. If we've purchased several Kindles for our family we should be able to customize each one based on the family member using it.
Apple has worked this out!! A family can share an Apple ID for itunes, with the auto download feature turned off, and then each have individual apple ID's for contacts, email, imessage, etc. Plus the apple devices have the restriction settings, which include content ratings.
If amazon wants to compete with Apple they need to fine tune their parental controls, content ratings, and move towards a family type account infrastructure. Until they do we are going to continue to hear of children who have been harmed by their devices because of the lack of parental over-site options.
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