Keeping Kids Off Porn

Children’s exposure to porn is one of the top concerns mentioned by parents on the 130,000-plus member parenting and tech Facebook group I recently joined. With a 10-year-old son begging for more gaming time and a 16-year-old daughter hoping to join Instagram, I needed the feedback and support from other parents on the page, who exchange information daily on navigating screens and encourage one another against the “digital empire” that threatens to consume our children. 

A recent discussion topic was the Wall Street Journal’s undercover investigation of TikTok, which revealed the popular app pushes hundreds of sexually explicit ads to teen users as young as age 13, including links to sites depicting hard core porn. While some parents seemed surprised by the news, most acknowledged that porn is readily available on popular apps like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and others. 

Unfortunately, many of the parents report that their child was first exposed to porn in elementary school via a phone, laptop, or gaming device. The stories include: children shown porn on a classmate’s phone while riding bus or standing in the car pool line; an 8 year-old looking up information on hamsters who accidently clicked the wrong link; tween boys caught looking at a porn site during class; a 10-year-old who accessed a porn site through Discord; an 11 year-old whose parents believe is already addicted to porn—the examples go on and on. 

And it’s not just parents who are dealing with these issues.

In a social media post that went viral in 2020, middle school principal, Chris Cochran shared:

In situations where I have to search a student’s cell phone, I often get sick to my stomach at what I find (highly inappropriate photos, videos, messages, social media usage, etc). The things our students are willing to try and be a part of at such a young age gets worse and worse every year. 

None of this surprises clinical social worker, Erica Komisar, who works with children and their parents in New York. “In my practice,” she told me, “I have seen an increase in children on the younger side who are able to access pornography online without adult supervision.” 

And what kids are seeing should worry every parent. 

“Young people [today] are dealing with the challenges of pornography and a hyper-sexualized culture like no other generation in the history of the world,” Clay Olsen, co-founder of Fight the New Drug, wrote in an email to IFS. “Not only is pornography more prevalent and accessible than any other time in history, but the very nature of the content has also evolved to be more aggressive and extreme.”

So how can we protect our children in an online world where pornography is pushed at them at every turn? And how do we help them grow into young men and women who are able to recognize and reject the dangerous messages porn teaches about sex and relationships?

I asked a few experts for some advice, and what they told me is best summed up in three words: protect, prepare, and empower. 

1. Protect—guard their innocence for as long as possible by delaying screens and taking advantage of protective technology. 

Research shows that the earlier children are exposed to sexually explicit content, the more long-term harm it can do to their understanding of sex, women, and relationships, as well as to their own sexual behavior. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, 1 in 5 children have been seen unwanted sexually explicit content online with some experts putting the age of first exposure for most boys around age 10 and a few years later for girls. 

That’s why delaying children’s private access to screens is the top piece of advice I heard from experts. 

Australian-based author and parenting expert, Dr. Justin Coulson, likes to use a model developed by Dr. Laura Walker at Brigham Young University that begins with “cocooning.”

“When children are young, they are likely to do best when we cocoon them,” Coulson explained. “In the context of sexually explicit content, this means we keep them away from it completely, and we don't even explain its existence.” 

One of the best ways to cocoon children is to delay the introduction of private screens, especially the smartphone until at least after middle school, as groups like Wait Until 8th advocate. In addition to delaying the smartphone, restricting all screen use—including gaming devices, laptops, and televisions—to public areas of the home is also key to delaying potential exposure to sexually explicit content. 

“All screens should be in a public area, not in a child’s room,” according to Dr. Lori Langdon, a pediatrician in North Carolina and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “[Sexual] images witnessed stay in a child’s brain and can’t be deleted. Parents need to know what a child is viewing.”

Moreover, protecting children online requires doing whatever we can to block harmful content. As the middle school principal wisely advised parents in his Facebook post: “get in your kids’ way at all times, because the Internet is by far the most dangerous place our students go every day.” 

The good news is that it is easier than ever to get in between our children and harmful online content. We have at our fingertips a wide variety of monitoring, blocking, and filtering tools to help us. This includes: the built-in parental controls available on phones, computers, and gaming devices, as well as programs/apps like DisneyCircle or Canopy, which enable parents to control and their child's devices; filtering software, like NetNanny, Protect Young Eyes, or CleanRouter; and monitoring apps, like Bark, which alerts parents to inappropriate content and messages. Because there are so many choices, there are a number of excellent digital training resources available to help overwhelmed parents navigate using these tools.

2. Prepare—educate kids early and often about the dangers of porn.

Of course, we can’t cocoon our children forever, especially when many kids are exposed to sexually explicit content on another child’s device. Rather than allowing the porn industry to miseducate our children about sex, the experts I spoke to urged parents to provide age-appropriate information on porn as early as possible. 

Dr. Coulson describes this as “pre-arming” our children and explained: “as they mature, this means parents explain to a child at a developmentally appropriate time that, ‘There is something called pornography’ and asks, ‘Have you heard of it?’”

Deciding what is developmentally appropriate should depend on the child’s age, curiosity, and level of screen access, he said, emphasizing that:

Parents have the opportunity to provide clear teaching to their child, instructing them on how they would like to see their child behave if pornographic content appeared in their browser or was shown to them by a peer. This pre-arming ideally occurs prior to exposure but can still be helpful after.

Clay Olsen agrees, stressing that, “Open, shame, and judgement-free conversations” should be parents’ top strategy. “The more natural the conversations are, the easier they’ll be for you or your child to instigate later on,” he said. “This should be an ongoing, age-appropriate conversation that starts sooner than you think and [continues] on into their adulthood.” 

Teaching our children to dwell on the edifying and beautiful things in this world—and how to seek out that content wherever they look—can help them reject harmful content, like porn.

A great resource for this first conversation is the book, Good Pictures, Bad Pictures, which introduces a family discussion about pornography in an age-appropriate way, including how to be safe online and what to do when sexually explicit content is encountered, such as “look away and shut down the device,” think about something good and beautiful, and immediately tell a parent. There are also a number of free online safety education resource for children and parents to watch together.

Older kids especially need to understand why porn is so harmful.

Dr. Komisar notes that porn “impacts kids in terms of their perception of sexual relationships for the future,” and children “also may have difficulty handling the aggressive and perverse nature of pornography. This can easily overwhelm them emotionally.”

One of the greatest harms is what pornography teaches about sex and relationships. As a Harvard report explained, pornography is: 

steeped in misogyny and reinforces all sorts of pernicious ideas about sex—that women want what men think they want, that seeking to dominate is a sign of strength rather than fragility, and that women enjoy domination and degradation, and that real intimacy is unerotic.

Porn use during adolescence has been linked to more sexually aggressive behavior in boys and the sexual victimization of girls, as well as more sexual risk taking and sexting. And recent articles describe how widespread porn is harming girls in particular, who report that they are expected to act like porn stars and whose bodies are damaged from being pressured to engage in degrading and harmful sexual acts popularized in pornographic content online. Another, more recent, long-term harm is the outright rejection of sex by young people who have grown up with porn as their main sex educator.

Then there is the potential for addiction.

“Adolescents are more susceptible to the stimulation of sexual content because their ventral striatum, or the reward center of the brain, is more active from ages 9 to 25, and the prefrontal cortex, or the emotional regulation part of the brain, lags behind in development,” explained Dr. Komisar. “There are few checks and balances on the pleasure centers of the brain during these years, which means they are more vulnerable to addictions of all kinds.”

3. Empower Children and Teens to Reject Porn When They Encounter It.

Preventing our children from becoming the porn industry’s next addicts also involves equipping them to reject porn when they encounter it, which starts with pointing them to something better and then helping them to make wise decisions alone. 

Even as we warn them away from harmful content, we should introduce children to the beauty and purpose of healthy sexuality, relationships, and marriage early and often, so they can identify the fraudulent messages of pornography. 

“Teach them the good before you warn them against the bad,” Olsen said. “They need to know that sex with the right person at the right time can be beautiful and is nothing to be ashamed of.”

Through our families, faith communities, and schools, we can infuse our children’s minds with beautiful and rich depictions of friendship, love, marriage, and family life from Scripture, good books, movies, music, art, and even social media. Teaching our kids to dwell on the edifying and beautiful things in this world—and how to seek out that content wherever they look—can help them reject harmful content.

Additionally, children and teens should have a rich life outside of the Internet. Along these lines, principal Chris Cochran advised parents to “create opportunities for them to have experiences” so they can see, do, and learn new things. “This not only strengthens their brain development, emotional development and builds resiliency in kids,” he wrote, “but it also strengthens your relationship with them.” 

Ultimately, we want to raise our children to become wise and responsible young men and women who recognize the harms of pornography and have the power to reject it. To that end, Dr. Coulson advises parents to use an “autonomy-supportive approach that empowers a child to work through responses to challenging circumstances in a safe, conversational environment before encountering it alone.” This means we: 

defer to the child in a reasoned way, saying something like, ’We've talked about explicit content before. You know what pornography is. And by now you're at an age where your peers are engaging with it. How do you feel about it? What do you see as the best way to deal with explicit content in your environment?’

When he spoke with me a few years ago about his book, The Tech-Wise Family, Andy Crouch made a similar point, underscoring the power of close, healthy family relationships and accountability. Our goal as parents, he said, should be to: 

create an environment where the default is, we’re connected to each other, we know what’s going on in each other’s lives and on each other’s phones. So, we have kind of the relationships that support us when we encounter things that we shouldn’t, that kind of help bring us back to health and sanity.

Preserving our children’s innocence in a world where violent and degrading sexual content is promoted to them at younger and younger ages can feel like an insurmountable problem. But as Clay Olsen assured me, every step we take as parents to protect, prepare, and empower our children can benefit them over the long term. 

“Parents are the tip of the spear,” Olsen said. “Take courage in knowing that even small efforts can have significant influence on your child. I love this quote by Edward Everett Hale, ‘I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.’”

Alysse ElHage is Editor of the Institute for Family Studies blog.