How to Talk to Your Kids about Porn

You should expect your child will be exposed to pornography on the internet, someone’s phone or a tablet by age 10. This isn’t the porn of our childhoods – Playboy Magazine or Hustler. It’s an entirely different experience that can be damaging to our children’s perspective of healthy sexuality.

This means you need to talk to them by the time they are 9, so they are prepared to deal with this.

You can tell young kids sometimes people look at pictures of naked people on the internet and that it’s called pornography. Tell them that it’s not okay for kids to look at this because their hearts and minds aren’t ready to see this and it can be very confusing or scary.

With your older kids – 9+ tell them that people sometimes look at pictures and videos of people having sex.

Go ahead and be explicit. And then talk about why it’s not okay for kids to look at this. Talk about how kids are curious about sex, this is normal, but porn isn’t the best way to learn about sex. Be sure to talk about your values as well.

Talk about the problems associated with young people viewing porn. They can become reliant upon it for sexual stimulation, it sets up unrealistic expectations of bodies and sexual encounters, it can be scary, creepy and anything else you believe to a problem related to porn.

Next, give your kid (of any age) some ideas of things they can do if someone shows them porn, or if one of their friends wants to look at porn. It’s important to provide them with scripts so they don’t have to think on their feet, when their eyes are full of “THAT!” Give them a script or have them make up their own.

Finally, have your older kids – 10 and up help you decide what the consequences for viewing porn, sexting (sending texts with sexual content) and being sexy on social networking sites should be. When children are involved in decision making around consequences, they are more compliant.

Protect Young Minds has some good advice and support for navigating this yucky part of parenting. I don’t fully agree with their overall perspective, but they do have good ideas.