As a therapist, parents ask me how to talk to their kids about all the tough stuff topics. My goal for this series is to address each of these topics and help you and your child navigate the more difficult areas of life. This post will address talking to your children about pornography.
Here’s a list of other tough stuff topics that I have addressed or will be in the future:
- How to talk to your kids about sex
- Talking to your child about inappropriate touching.
- Teaching your children the purpose of Dating
- Self-harming Part 1 – Understanding Why it Happens
- Self-harming Part 2 – As a parent what to do if your child engages in self-harm
- Suicide Part 1 – Understanding Why it Happens
- Suicide Part 2 – As a parent how to react if your child is suicidal
- Talking to your teens about drinking
- Talking to your teens about drugs
- How to teach your teens to follow their values – Part One
- How to teach your teens to follow their values -Part Two …And not be judgmental
Talking to Your Child about Pornography
Multiple times a week I have to discuss pornography with my clients. Whether it’s with parents, children, or married couples. And I’m currently working with multiple children under the age of 12 who are addicted to pornography.
Pornography has become an epidemic. And like a disease, pornography is deteriorating our health in the form of our relationships, and the understanding of sex as God designed.
[ctt template=”9″ link=”d5V26″ via=”yes” ]Pornography has become epidemic. And like a disease, pornography is deteriorating our health in the form of our relationships, and the understanding of sex as God designed.[/ctt]
First, let’s define pornography. It’s printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings. (Oxford Dictionary)
That is an important definition to keep in mind because the material that is intended to stimulate erotic experiences are also going to cause desensitization and a skewed understanding of sex. Those images have become quite widespread in our culture.
Teenagers with frequent exposure to sexual content on TV have a substantially greater likelihood of teenage pregnancy, and the likelihood of teen pregnancy was twice as high when the quantity of sexual content exposure within the viewing episodes was high. (Source)
Protection – Before Your Child Knows about Sex
The first goal is prevention all together!
Your child doesn’t need a smartphone (definitely not at this age), but all other electronics should be monitored with parental controls in place.
That also means monitoring the shows and movies your child is watching.
A study put forward by the Harvard School of Public Health in 2004 concluded that there had been a significant increase in the level of profanity, sex, and violence in films released between 1992 and 2003. Kimberly Thompson, director of the study, stated: “The findings demonstrate that “ratings creep” has occurred over the last decade and that today’s movies contain significantly more violence, sex, and profanity on average than movies of the same rating a decade ago.”
And that was 15 years ago! The ratings have continued to creep and what now is considered okay and appropriate are far from it in a lot of areas.
Protection – After Your Child Knows about Sex
Once your child knows about sex, the conversation about pornography should be more in depth.
First, continue to do all of the protective factors of above.
Second, it’s vital that your child’s understanding of sex is beyond what it is and “don’t do it until marriage.” It’s important to talk to your child about God’s design for sex and why it is a beautiful gift for marriage. That conversation then becomes the foundation of protecting your child against pornography.
You then can show your child the ads that are all around them – in the mall and on commercials that are showing people (usually females) in provocative and sexual manners. That can be an excellent conversation about how we are in this world but not to be of this world. To discuss their thoughts on why the ads would be using those types of images.
And then this also helps your child understand why you are not allowing them to watch certain shows and movies.
Stumbled Upon – How to discuss Pornography
A study referred to in a US Department of Health, and Human Services (source) report was a survey given to college students regarding their lifetime exposure to Internet pornography. The following youth pornography statistics were gathered:
- 93% of males reported being exposed to porn on the Internet before age 18.
- 62% of females reported online exposure to porn before the age of 18.
- The average age of first exposure was 14 for males and 15 for females.
- 42% of females report all exposure was involuntary.
The children that I am working with who are addicted to pornography each stumbled upon it through YouTube. They were watching other videos, and inappropriate ones got cued up.
Once they saw the images, it made them curious. Each one has described recognizing what they saw wasn’t appropriate but also felt “aroused.” (That was not their word choice, but everything they explained means that definition.)
Because we are all made of the flesh! And it’s physically natural that when you are viewing sexual material that you are going to get aroused. That is also true of young children, even before puberty.
If your child stumbles upon pornography and you find out about it, first remain calm. Do everything you can to not fly off the handle. It’s incredibly important that your child feels like you are a safe person for them to have this conversation with.
Taking away of electronics should not be done from the stance of punishment or disciplinary action but rather as a way of protection. And it needs to be explained to your child in that manner. (Or you can just add parental controls given the situation.)
What happens next depends upon how much or little your child already knows about sex and what they saw. Again, explaining sex from a biblical standpoint and helping them understand how completely different pornographic material is from God’s design is key.
Sought Out – How to discuss Pornography
And then there are also children/teens who are actively seeking out pornography because it has become an addiction.
Again we need to start out with what does your child actually know about sex and then have the conversation about God’s design for sex and how pornography is far from it.
Then there needs to be the conversation about what repeated viewing of pornography does:
A study by JAMA Psychiatry had researchers scan the brains of porn users and found:
- There was a correlation between time spent viewing porn and reduced grey matter in their brains’ reward circuitry (which governs motivation and appetites).
- The reward circuitry, which lights up in response to sexual stimuli, showed less activation the more porn individuals had watched (both per week and over the years) even if they weren’t addicted.
- The connection between the prefrontal cortex, the “executive control” part of the brain, and the reward circuitry was weaker the more porn the users watched — a risk for impaired decision making.
These three findings usually show up in addicts. The reduced grey matter is associated with needing greater stimulation to achieve the same effect, which was confirmed in finding no. 2. Finding no. 3 is associated with a decreased ability to control impulses.
Another significant concern of pornography for males specifically is erectile dysfunction. But there are also studies to say that prolonged viewing of pornography causes women to struggle to become sexually aroused naturally as well.
That is important for your teen to understand regarding later when in a marriage. What they are seeking now, may significantly hinder their physical ability to engage in a God-designed sexual relationship with their spouse down the road. Not to mention from an emotional and spiritual nature. Helping your teen to understand the negatives of engaging in pornography beyond “don’t do it” is imperative for understanding on why they need to stop and seek treatment if they are unable to quit on their own.
I pray this post helps you to address the tough topic of pornography with your child.
Also please let me know in the comments below of any other “tough stuff” topic you would like me to address to help you have discussions with your children.
God bless!
Melissa
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I am so thankful for this series. The sad reality is, even if your child doesn’t have a smartphone, their friends do. My son was introduced to pornography on the way home from a football game while riding the bus by some of the other guys. Thankfully, we had already talked about it, and he told us how uncomfortable it made him. But that’s the reality we live in.
Yes, unfortunately pornography is coming at our kids from all places. That’s why it’s so important that we are having these conversations early. I’m glad you had the conversation with your son and that he was willing to let you know about the situation. Good job momma! Thank you for stopping by and sharing your experience. God bless!
Thank you so much for addressing these tough topics. I don’t have kids yet, but the fear of what they will be exposed to already comes to mind from time-to-time. You have such great ways to address this issue of porn! It gives me hope for the days when my husband and I will most likely need to have these conversations with kids.
It is far too common place now and a legitimate need for all parents to address. But it’s definitely not a fun conversation. I have the benefit, if you will, of having these conversations multiple times over. So I pray this post can be helpful for parents and parents-to-be! Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts. God bless!
I want to be good at talking through the tough stuff, but I am finding that I’m just not! I didn’t have an example of that growing up except “don’t do this or that” and so I feel so ill-equipped! Articles like this help point me in a better direction. So thank you!
These are definitely not easy topics to have to discuss! The more comfortable we are as parents, the easier it is for our kids to receive the information. I’m glad that you found the post beneficial. God bless!
I’ve taught my kids to turn their heads away when they are accidentally exposed to porn online for any reason, that the images are seared on your mind forever and that it’s difficult to undo the damage. Porn teaches men to damage and harm their wives in the future, and they can never be satisfied with loving their wives the way God intended. It’s sad, the devastation that porn has caused.
It is sad and devastating. It’s so good that you have had this conversation with your kids. And it really isn’t just men who are watching and seeking porn. Each of the porn addicted children that I am working with are girls.
Really good advice here. I have ministered to son many young men and women drawn into porn. I told one young man to invite Jesus to watch it with him. He was desperate to quit. When he finally did invite Jesus in, Jesus really showed him that the girl on that screen was a person that Jesus loved and not an object. It was the beginning of recovery for him
That is such a beautiful switch and perspective change. How wonderful that he was able to see the girl as Jesus does! You are a gem to so many people! God bless, Alice!
Thank you for providing these resources and for giving us the dialog that needs to happen. Being proactive about it helps my kids know why it’s wrong and they aren’t curious about it, because they’ve been informed!
Proactive is so much easier than retroactive. With retroactive we are having to do damage control and weed out what may have been seen. I’m glad you found the post beneficial. God bless!
We are in the early stages of understanding sex – age 8 & 6. We started by talking about our body – from the beginning (menstruation and pregnancy came up early because little girls want to know about babies – so we’ve been very scientific about it so far). But now the 8 year old wants to know about kissing and how women get the baby… so we’ve talked about sex (only to answer the questions she has and we move on when she seems satisfied). I know the more in depth talks will come soon but I dread the Pornography talk. Right now I monitor their screen time, but sometimes they want to search for something – and bam there is a sexual img… it is rampant. One day they will stumble upon it when I am not there to shield them. I hate this part of our culture that tries to lure them away from innocence.
Yes, unfortunately is it rampant. She she starts to learn more about sex it is so important to teach her God’s beauty and design of it so that you can contrast it against our culture’s messages. Building that foundation of understanding is so key. These are not easy times we are living in. God bless Tiffany!
Thank you for this. I am passionate about encouraging a relationship with my children where they will feel comfortable to talk to me about everything. I discuss this with my 13 year old son and express the danger in looking at those things and how we believe it’s a sin etc. We also take extreme measure to protect him. I say extreme because of his traumatic past there are methods we have to use in our parenting of him that we wouldn’t with children with no trauma.
It’s so awesome Heather that you have taken measures to protect your son and keep him safe from the evil of pornography. This is all the more important for children who have endured traumatic pasts and may already have a skewed understanding of love and/or sex. God bless you and your family’s journey!