There are many sites where one can go to read manga for free. The way it works is this: someone in Japan gets the weekly serialized manga installment and translates it. Someone else whites out the Japanese text and puts in the translation in English (or French or Italian or Spanish or...). Then the effort is posted online somewhere and is available, usually for free, by direct download, bit torrent or IRC. The process and its product are called scanlation or scanslation.
Scanslation efforts are almost always amateur operations done for the love of the manga. Since there is often years worth of delay in getting some manga in a translated form, scanslations are actually quite popular. Seeing that some manga and anime have taken, in some extreme cases, decades to cross the ocean, it is not difficult to see why scanslation thrives. People, mostly young folks, form scanslation groups on their own to translate their favorite manga. Now I can't say that the phenomenon of scanslation is exclusively an effort by "kids" since my middle aged spousal unit has been active in such an effort himself not too long ago.
The best of the scanslation manga sites will post a warning before you open up any manga issue or anime episode, to tell you to go buy the English translation version as soon as it's available - which is only fair, after all since scanslation sites don't actually own the copyrighted material. Now I'm not sure how they get away with this but I assume it's due to a loophole somewhere in copyright law - otherwise the media jerks would have shut them down long ago (this should give you an idea of just what I think of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, also known as the Digital Protect-Mickey-Mouse-For-Disney-and-its-Lobbyists Act).
What the scanslation sites do give you is a place to preview a manga that you may want to eyeball because your kids may or want to read it. Also, your kids may be using a scanslation site to read manga online. There are good scanslation sites and less good ones. The "free" ones are mostly supported by ads - and that leads me to a not-happy subject. One of the formerly best scanslation sites, iNaruto.com, recently started to include ads for porn. Now I've read "adult content" and put up with the soft-porn garbage that gets sold as romance novel these days, but it doesn't mean I have to like. And the crap the iNaruto now has on their website as ads is offensive and it shouldn't be seen by kids. As an adult, I'm offended and I find the ads repulsive too. If you have blocking software, block this website.
I'm really quite ticked off by iNaruto. It used to be a good place to read and sample manga otherwise unavailable in English. Now they have trash porn ads on their website. Another site I will not use and don't recommend is the stoptazmo site. The guy who runs that site has a nasty habit of swiping other peoples' scanslations, stripping the credits off and then trying to collect a fee from the unwary to read the scanslations he's swiped. And the sagans and sagans of ads you have to wade through to read for free on the stoptazmo site make it a huge chore and an incentive to go elsewhere. The stoptazmo site want to get you to register anyway and I don't like the practice of net registration since it can lead to increased spam and possible id theft.
So: check out the scanslation sites you kids use and block those with bad ads and those that require registration.
Where do I read currently? At onemanga.com, a site with clean ads, not very many ads, no registration and a nice selection of manga for all ages. If they ever change, no doubt I'll go looking for a new site to use. Ads I can put up with - but porno ads are way beyond what I'll tolerate.
There's a nice web page on the Wikipedia about scanlation, talks about the uses and abuses of the scanlsation movement with good balance.
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