sex

Talking to Your Kids About Porn

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Dr. Corinne Masur

It’s time to recycle and update this post from 2018.

But – you aren’t going to want to read this, even though you need to.

Kids and porn – it’s a difficult subject.

Parents don’t want to believe that their kids are watching porn. 

But…your kids are probably watching porn.

Common Sense Media reports that by 13 – 17, a majority of kids have watched porn.

And I’ve had patients as young as seven who admitted that they had gone to a porn site and watched “sex.”  This was accompanied by giggling and embarrassment.  But behind the giggling was confusion over what sex is and why people are all watching this stuff.

Older kids, from ages 10 through adolescence, may understand more about the meaning of the word sex and why people watch porn – but don’t assume that they have accurate ideas about either.

A teacher at Philadelphia’s Friends Central School, Al Vernaccio, teaches sexual literacy starting in elementary school.  He begins by talking about puberty to the 4th and 5th graders, continues with discussions about romantic crushes with the middle school kids, and in high school, he talks about the question: what is sex? 

Surprisingly, he finds, there is confusion over the answer.  He allows his students to ask questions anonymously at the beginning of every class by submitting written messages to him. He answers these questions and then continues his classes by talking about a range of issues: the meaning of sex, the meaning of consent, the misinformation gained from watching pornography, etc.

Is this novel? Does this happen at your child’s school? Would you want it to?

Surprisingly, says Vernaccio, parents of his students are asking kids if they can read what he assigns for homework.  The parents are hungry for information about how to talk to their children, as well as how to have relevant conversations about an online world in which everything is accessible.

Vernaccio was raised Roman Catholic, attended parochial school and St. Joseph’s University, and obtained a degree in theology. Strange that he would have a career in teaching that involves teaching sexual literacy? Not so much.  When Vernaccio was 19 he told his parents that he was gay and, unable to talk about it themselves, they told him to talk to their priest. He’s quoted in Philadelphia Magazine as saying that his parents missed out on a huge portion of his life because they didn’t know how to talk with him about his sexual identity. This is one reason that Al Vernaccio teaches sex education today; he wants to help other kids and parents to be able to talk together about what he and his parents were unable to talk about.

This man is on a mission to help kids to learn about the multiple meanings of the word “sex,” to learn about the use and misuse of power in sexual relationships, and to understand some very basic things about themselves as sexual beings. When defining the word “sex,” he uses the analogy of pizza (and his classroom is filled with pizza posters, bumper stickers about pizza, etc). He says that sex is more than one act; instead, it’s like choosing toppings for your pizza. There are lots of options and each person participating should have a say in which options are chosen.

Ultimately, Vernacchio’s approach to sex education is simple: If we can talk about sex, we can make smart choices about sex. Yet it feels revolutionary in a society that has largely failed to initiate the conversation.

So if you think your child may have watched pornography online, or if you think they might, or even if you’re still convinced they haven’t – it’s time to start the conversation with your child or teen. And before you do, it’s important to know that many kids and teens feel guilty and ashamed about watching porn. So when you bring it up, do two things: normalize watching porn and generalize about watching porn. And what I mean by this is that you can say, “A lot of kids your age have watched porn. And most kids your age are curious about bodies and sex and they think porn is a good way to find out about this stuff.” But then you can go on to tell them that what’s available online can be confusing and that what they see when they watch porn is not like real life. The bodies shown in porn are not like average, everyday bodies and some of the things done in porn videos are not the things regular people expect to do. Discuss how movie or porn sex can be very different from “real-life sex”. Tell them that porn sets up unrealistic expectations for what sex is really like.

Encourage your kids to ask you questions about sex and identify trusted online sources of information for them. And talk about how to think critically about pornography, whether it is realistic or not, whether it is really helpful or not and whether it represents what people really want when they share intimacy together.

According to Common Sense Media, while less than half (43%) of the teens in their research reported that they had conversations about pornography with a trusted adult, most who did have these conversations said it encouraged them to find other ways to explore their sexuality besides pornography.

And the Common Sense Media report concludes by saying, “Educating kids and teens to be discerning about all content they see online is an important aspect of digital literacy, and that’s certainly true with pornography. When it comes to learning about sexuality, kids and teens need to see healthy, realistic, and age-appropriate storylines about relationships, attraction, and sex. Parents, educators, and industry leaders can help guide kids to higher-quality content and put the right protections in place to allow kids to explore the digital world safely.”

For additional information:

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/kids-action/articles/teens-are-watching-pornography-and-its-time-to-talk-about-it

https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/blog/growing-up-with-pornography-advice-for-parents-and-schools/#:~:text=By%20age%20nine%2C%2010%25%20had,self%2Desteem%20as%20young%20adults.

https://www.phillymag.com/news/2018/06/01/al-vernacchio-friends-central-school-sex-education

What’s Up With Hook-ups?

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Hook-up culture has been around for a while. Often fueled by alcohol, these encounters avoid all the the preliminaries – the flirting, the talking, the “dates”.

Kids in their teens as well as young adults are getting drunk and having sex of one sort or another… and then ghosting each other.

But why?

And what can they possibly be getting out of this?

Delaney Ruston of “Screenagers” recently released a podcast and a blog post on this subject and she interviewed Dr. Lisa Wade, author of American Hook-up: The New Culture of Sex on Campus.

According to Wade, kids in high school and college often feel that “everyone is doing it”, referring to hooking up.

So perhaps one motivation for hook-ups is to be doing what “everybody” else is doing.

But there must be more.

Having an intimate encounter with someone can involve allowing oneself to be vulnerable. And allowing vulnerability, often leads to feelings of closeness and connection – which is something most teens want.

But teens who opt for hook-ups are getting the vulnerability and the physical closeness with none of the emotional connection.

Why opt for this?

I wonder if some teens – whether in high school or college – are avoiding something by engaging in hook-ups. I wonder if they are avoiding the anxiety of acknowledging that they like someone, taking the risk of contacting that person and actually talking with them face to face. I wonder if the anxiety and the potential for an awkward encounter – or even worse, for disappointment – is keeping some kids from trying.

But why is this more true now than ever before? Why is there even a hook-up “culture” at this point in history?

Could the isolation of COVID, combined with the usual awkwardness of adolescence and the prevalence of social media have made it harder for many adolescents to socialize face to face?

Of course, it is true that casual dating decreased during COVID. It was harder to meet people and it was harder to get together without the risk of exposure to illness. (2)

But the desire for a relationship did not decrease. This put teens in a difficult position. The longer kids were in isolation, the more many kids looked forward to the rewards of getting back to socializing and potentially finding a romantic relationship. (1)

However, hook-up culture existed pre-COVID and still exists post-COVID. So the appeal of the hook-up must transcend the loss of opportunities and the lack of social skills kids experienced as a result of COVID.

So this leaves me to speculate: I think there was always a certain amount of hooking-up. I think that kids have been having substance-fueled sex for a long, long time. But perhaps the prevalence of hook-ups now points to something more malignant.

At this point, many teens and young adults seem ill at ease with one-on-one interactions. And this is true even when it comes to the phone. Recently I read that one teen likened hearing his phone ring to being stabbed in the chest. People in this age group do not like to talk on the phone. They seem to lack confidence in their ability to hold down a one-on-one conversation. Even worse, for some, is getting together. Many kids prefer to stay on their beds. Many don’t have “friends” anymore – if they have anything, they have remote friends they talk to on social media or with whom they play video games. At best, they have “friend groups”. While sometimes they may get together one-on-one, more often the group does things together.

Something has happened to teens and young adults in regard to their ability to tolerate contact and intimacy.

And it is not just a few teens and young adults, it is many.

I suspect the advent of contact through screens has something to do with this – but perhaps not all of it. With the use of video gaming and social media, kids no longer have to leave the house to get stimulation. Now it can be had from the comfort of bed or basement. Social skills are no longer needed. And there are not nearly as many opportunities to practice what social skills a teen may have, or to make mistakes and recover, or to experiment.

I also think that one one-on-one conversations and interpersonal interactions are not demanded of teens and young adults often enough. Parents AND children spend hours each day on their phones. Even when they are together, parents are not talking to kids as much and kids are not talking to their parents as much as in previous generations.

And at school, as I wrote about in my last post, kids are on their phones at least some of the day, rather than interacting with each other. And at some schools and in some classrooms, kids use their computers rather than engaging in classroom discussion and debate.

The malignant thing I referred to earlier is not just the proliferation of screens, it is not just the aftermath of the isolation of COVID, it is our teenagers’ loss of faith in themselves as social beings.

And it is contributed to by our allowing teens to hide behind screens, stay on their beds, and avoid interpersonal interaction.

I think hook-ups, in many cases, are the workarounds that many kids have found to get to have sex and contact without having to utilize much in the way of social skills.

But hook-ups are a desperate workaround, a decidedly second-rate, often risky, and more often hurtful and disappointing way to try to get something rather than to risk what kids fear: getting nothing in the way of romance or sex.

One male student said:

“Most of the time, it’s not a fun experience. Sometimes it’s great, but more often than not, people are kind of left feeling maybe a little bit regretful, kind of embarrassed, awkward. There’s pressure to hook up, but if you don’t, you feel like you’re missing out.” He added, “If you hook up with someone and they don’t text you after, that can be pretty hurtful.” 1

This is only one student, but I suspect he speaks for many others. Hook-ups meet a basic desire for sex, but they don’t meet any of the other needs that teens have for interpersonal relatedness and connection, for affection, support, and validation.

References

1 Ruston, Delany. 2025. Is Hookup Culture Really the Norm? Feb. 18.


 Kuperberg, Arielle (2022). Dating during COVID-19: A sociologist’s perspective.


2 Breaux R, Cash AR, Lewis J, Garcia KM, Dvorsky MR, Becker SP. Impacts of COVID-19 quarantine and isolation on adolescent social functioning. Curr Opin Psychol. 2023 Aug;52:101613. Epub 2023 Jun 1. PMID: 37364468; PMCID: PMC10232930.Ki

“Yes, Your Kid”

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Debby Herbenick is a researcher of sexual behavior and is the director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. Her book Yes, Your Kid explores the growing trend amongst sexually active teenagers of engaging in choking, or sexual strangulation.

This is an important read for those of you who are parents of adolescents – although you may not want to read it.

And it is important for adolescents themselves, although it is not likely that many of them will read it either.

Herbenick calls the information “lifesaving.”

She wants kids, and parents to know that sexual strangulation is dangerous, even life threatening.

Evidently, many kids think their partners expect to be choked during sex.

But why?

The depiction of sexual strangulation in porn may have led some kids to try it. After all, all kids have access to porn at this point, and most have watched some.

And those same teens may have thought that choking is part of a normal sexual experience.

In fact, the rise of the use of sexual strangulation amongst older teens and college age kids has been meteoric. According to Herbenick, the number of teen girls between the ages of 12 and 17 who say that a partner has choked them during sex has risen to forty per cent. Two decades ago, sexual asphyxiation was unusual amongst any demographic, let alone young people.

The problem is that sexual strangulation can lead to unintentional unconsciousness or even death.

And some researchers, including Keisuke Kawata, a neuroscientist at Indiana University, thinks that each non-lethal episode can cause damage to the brain, similar to the ways that CTE‘s experienced by football players do.

It’s time to approach this issue with our teens.

It may be hard – but it is crucial.

Once your child is around 14, you can have a discussion about consent and its importance. And during that discussion, you can bring up the fact that lots of kids watch porn – but that not everything that happens in porn should happen in real life – just like the fact that not everything that happens in movies (chase scenes, shootings, dystopian disasters, etc.) should happen in reality.

You can talk with your kids about what they think their partners might want or expect and where these ideas come from.

This can lead to talking about how some things shown in porn are actually dangerous – and how porn does not show you that part.

Again, this is hard to talk about – but the time to start is now.

References

Yes, Your Kid, What parents need to know about today’s teens and sex, Debby Herbenick et al.

Peggy Orenstein, New York Times, The Teen Trend of Sexual Choking (4/12/2024)