I Found Out My Kid is Searching for Porn

Question:  I opened up my laptop (which doubles as our family computer) yesterday and discovered that my 14-year-old has visited several porn sites.  I won’t share the names of the sites, but I can tell you I feel gross and freaked out and I have no idea what to do.  Should I confront him about it?  I don’t want to shut him down but I also don’t want him looking at porn on my computer.  I’m worried about viruses, I’m worried about predators, but mostly I wish I didn’t even know the sites he went to and am dreading talking to him about this.  What should I do?  

I don’t have a lot of “shoulds” when it comes to talking with kids about sexuality, but these days I do includepornography as one of the things I think most parents should, at some point, talk to their kids about.  Once your kid has unsupervised access to the Internet they will eventually see porn.  If they don’t go looking for it, they will stumble across it.  Either way, we need to talk to kids about pornography because it’s such askewed representation of sexuality, gender, relationships, and desire (not to mention: race, class, bodies…we don’t just learn about sex from pornography).  Imagine if every thing you learned about sex and gender you learned from pornography.  It wouldn’t be great.

So instead of asking whether or not you should talk about pornography, I want to ask questions about when should you do it, and what should you say.

Conversation Over Confrontation
I think your choice of word “confront” probably says a lot about how you’re feeling and how you are imagining the conversation will go.  When we start with a confrontation we’re more likely to end up in a debate (or fight) than a conversation.  With very few exceptions I think that talking with your child about sex should be a conversation, meaning that you spend as much time asking questions and listening as you do talking.

If it feels to you like it’s going to be confrontational, bringing up what you found on your computer might not be the best way to approach.  It depends on you and your relationship with your child.  Do you think you can bring it up in a way that won’t completely embarrass or mortify your kid?  Do you imagine them wanting to talk to you after you bring it up?  If the answer is yes, then  maybe it would work to start a conversation by saying something like:

“I was on the computer and some sites came up in the browser.  There are actually some important things I’d want you to know about pornography and I’m wondering if it’s okay for us to talk about it.”

If you try this, it’s crucial that you follow it by waiting for an answer.  Don’t just push ahead into a lecture about pornography or sex.  Let your kid check in with themselves and their comfort level.  If they say they don’t want to talk about it, respect that.  Let them know you do think it’s important and you’ll want to try again later, but for now, it’s fine to not talk any more.  And then give it a week or two before you bring it up again.

Forcing a conversation about sex is a problem on at least two levels.  First, it’s unlikely to be fruitful.  Second, it delivers a subtext that says that when it come to talking about sex, you just have to force it.  It may feel that way to a lot of us, but that doesn’t mean it’s effective, or right.

When Is the Right Time to Have the Talk?
In terms of age, my usual answer is that it’s time to talk about pornography when you are letting your child spend more than just a few minutes alone online.  What you say will be different if you’re talking to a 9-year-old than if you’re talking to a 14-year-old, but since they are going to come across it, I’d rather they be a little prepared.

But how do you bring it up in a way that feels “natural”?  The world is full of teachable moments.  Any time the word pornography comes up – on the radio, in a movie or TV show, in a magazine article – is an opportunity to ask a few questions:

• do you know what they mean by pornography?
• do you know about how pornography and the law works?
• do you have friends who look at or talk about pornography?

These questions shouldn’t feel like an interrogation, and try to wait to ask them when your kid is going to be most comfortable and feel free to talk.  These may not even be the right questions, but they might get you to the right ones.  The right question in this context mean the questions that get your kid talking.

If you’ve found porn on the computer and you don’t want to wait for a teachable moment you can also fabricate one.  You can be the one to bring up the topic.  If you consume any sort of media in your home it won’t be long before you see something that might be considered pornographic (a music video, a magazine ad, a commercial for lingerie or alcohol or in some cases hamburgers).  When you see something like that you can simply say out loud “wow, some people would call that pornographic!”  It’s true, and it opens up the word for conversation.  Your kid might pick up on it or might just leave it there, but one of the reasons why talking about pornography is so difficult is that it isn’t a word we use much around kids.  One way to open up the conversation is by making the topic more present in your home, as something that is okay to talk about.

How Do You Think and Feel About Pornography?
I believe the first thing you child should know about pornography is how you feel and think about it.  There are safety concerns and more concrete information about the law (which I cover below) but meaningful conversations and meaningful learning needs to connect to values and beliefs in your family and community.

I recommend sharing a bit about what you think of it, where you first learned about or saw pornography, and how you feel it should be talked about in your family.   In one family this might include talking about how a lot of art that today hangs in galleries and museums was once considered pornographic.  In another family the conversation might be about nudity and who you show your body to.  In a third family religious beliefs might be talked about.  Obviously this is a conversation you have to prepare for.  So before you have it, here are a few questions to answer for yourself:

• Do you remember when you first learned about and/or saw pornography?
• What was your experience of it?
• What do you wish someone had told you about pornography when you were a teenager?
• What, if any, worries do you have about your kid seeing pornography?
• Are there rules you want to make in the house regarding pornography?  And why?
• Are there values and rules about pornography that you identify as being linked to your community and/or culture?  If there are, in what ways does your own families values and rules differ from or align with those in your community and culture?

These aren’t questions to answer to your kid.  They are just for you, to get you thinking.  It can help to talk this out with a partner or friend, especially if you haven’t thought that much about this before.

Once you’ve had a chance to unpack some of this for yourself, think about what you are comfortable sharing with your kid.  Think of maybe two or three statements that reflect your thoughts and feelings about it.  Don’t try to have some perfect answer.  One of the statements might be “I find pornography confusing and don’t know exactly what I think of it.”  Sex education is best when it is connected to the life a child knows.  Sharing your own feelings and some information about how your community and culture treat pornography offers a context before you hand down a whole bunch of rules or “facts” about pornography.

What You Child Needs to Know
It’s not enough to only talk with your kid about how you feel about pornography. You need to teach them about safety and about the law, since ones age has a bearing on how the law treats people viewing pornography.  When possible, if you can do this without scaring your kids that is best, but the truth is that some of this stuff is a little scary.

1.  Start by providing a definition of pornography.  It’s important to explain that in the U.S. legal pornography shows people who are over the age of 18.  If you are looking at pictures of someone under 18 it is very likely that it would be considered child pornography, which is illegal. This is a part that’s hard to talk about without sounding scary, but it’s a reality, and since you are probably having this conversation with someone under 18, it’s crucial.

2.  Make sure your child knows that the Internet is forever.  Once something is online it is essentially impossible to make it go away completely.   Your child might not see a connection between looking at porn and the way that some young people take pictures and video of themselves naked and share it online (an activity which adults have come to call sexting, and about which much confusion still reins).  Which is why you need to explain to them that in the eyes of the law there is no difference.

This is only one of the many reasons they shouldn’t do this, even if their friends are doing it, even if they want to, even if someone they really like asks or pressures them to.   How you will talk about this should connect back to values in your community and culture, so it will be different for different people, but avoid simply saying “don’t do it” or only using fear.  Help your child understand the bigger picture and context and give them a chance to talk and ask questions.

3.  Talk about computer safety and security. If you haven’t brought it up yet, at this point you may want to let them know that you came across the websites they were looking at.  Depending on the age of your child they may already know more than you do about clearing their search history.  But younger children may not know that when they search for something that search is being recorded, both on the device they are using and, of course, by the search engine they are using.  How detailed you go depends on level of sophistication.  But keeping them ignorant of the way technology works isn’t protecting them.  Which brings us to…

4. If you’re using software to filter and block “adult” sites, explain why.  As a sex educator I have a concern about a lot of the blocking software available as it often blocks good sex education sites along with porn sites.  But if you’ve chosen to use blocking software as a tool, I do recommend that you explain why to your child.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with you monitoring and deciding what is appropriate and inappropriate for your child to see.  That’s one of the roles of parents and caregivers.  You don’t let your kid go see any movie they want, you don’t let them read any book or magazine they want, reading and watching things online is no different.

But if you don’t explain this, you’re missing an important opportunity to talk about why you believe some things should be seen when you’re older.  If you don’t explain it your child is left to fill in the blanks not only about why you don’t think they should view this material, but what the material is.

5. Make this the start of the conversation.  You can’t predict what your child might come across online, or what situation they may find themselves in on a social network.  Technology changes too fast, and kids move from one developmental stage and interest to another before you know it.  What is most important is that after talking with your kid about pornography they feel like they can come back and talk to you some more. That might mean saying something like,

“if you ever see something online that is confusing or scary or makes you feel weird, it’s okay for you to ask me about it.  You might feel embarrassed, but I’d rather us talk about it then you have to stay feeling confused or scared.”

Or it might mean checking in after you’ve had the talk.  How you do this will depend on your family, but most educators agree that it’s more important to be the “askable parent” than to be the parent with all the answers.

I want to end by reflecting on your final comment, which was that you wish you hadn’t seen any of these sites in the first place.  I completely understand the squeamishness.  Most kids never want to think about their parents having sex and most parents feel the same way.   Those are boundaries and they are there for a reason (even though those reasons are different for each of us).

One of the strange and some would say unfortunate side effects of there being so much sexually explicit material so easily available is that we do sometimes come across the sexual queries of parents, children, uncles and aunts, on our family computers.  There’s nothing wrong with your sons sexual curiosity AND there’s nothing wrong with you wishing you didn’t have to know the details. Both things can be true at the same time and I encourage you to try and hold both truths when talking with your son.