Many parents are hopeful that porn won’t impact their own children. This is a great hope, but it will not come to fruition. Porn impacts all of us but this article will help moms and dads prepare for difficult conversations.
Porn is the biggest sex educator of our day. Whether our child is in homeschooling or public school, has a committed faith or is wandering, is in strong relationship with us or living in rebellion—porn will impact each one.
As a Christian sex educator, I believe pornography will ruin marriages and families more than anything else on the internet.
We live in a sexualized world. Whether we’re scrolling through our news feed, perusing online products, or walking around the disappearing storefronts of the local mall, sex is everywhere.
In case anyone tries to convince you this is a new era, remember that humans have lived in a sexualized world for a long time. In the Old Testament we read a horrifying story of desired sodomy, abuse, and rape, all within one chapter (Judges 19). We read about Kings who took women as prizes and objects of lust. We read of women who sold their bodies or slept around. We read of extreme sexual sin and shame from cover to cover. Both the Old and New Testament are filled with examples of husbands who used and abused women, and people who lived lives of unfaithfulness, cheating, exploitation, and sexual sin.
Sexual immorality is not new.
The internet, however, is.
Just 20 years ago the procurement of XXX material was at least somewhat difficult to acquire. Today, we can pull up any sexual act we want to see within the next 10 seconds from the secrecy of our own phone and room.
Here’s one of the worst parts; so can your children. While this understandably infuriates us and creates a sense of fear for many, we might wish this truth away. Surely not our kids. Surely not our daughters, not our toddlers, not in this home, not since they’ve accepted Jesus, not with the way we’ve raised them. But porn doesn’t care about any of that.
Porn is like an equal opportunity force of destruction.
We might think our young child won’t be touched by the sexual sins of the world. We’d be mistaken.
We might be tempted to fully fall back on our defense system of intelligently purchased filters and household rules of minimized device use. However, the average age children see pornography is 11 years old. As these precious kids grow, nearly 80% of them become men who attend evangelical church and still watch porn. Sixty-four percent of all Christian families have a current issue with porn in the home.
As much as we’d love to shield our kids, we might not be able to. The chance that a child will come across pornography in their own home is high, but even with their own home protected, other places won’t be.
So, what do we do?
Do we keep them from going to other houses, from spending time at a cousins, playing at the neighbors, or turning on a TV? We could, but in the matter of porn, what is ultimately best for our kids is to talk to them about this pandemic.
We need to help them recognize it for the trash it is.
We can do this with communication and conversation.
We need to tell them that:
- naked images or videos is never appropriate or right.
- When we watch porn we sin against God, ourselves, and the people made in God’s image who are on the screen, exposed and vulnerable. If we unintentionally come across porn (I use the term ‘bad images’ when they’re under 10), we need to get away and tell an adult.
- Viewing porn will always hurt people. It might not feel like it at the time, but the material hurts our brains, our walks with God, ourselves, a future spouse, and our views of each other.
Nakedness between adults is for married couples, who share life together, not for everyone to see exposed in photos or videos. Bad images might spark our curiosity, even intrigue or excite us (important to normalize the natural physical reaction of our bodies), but God made that reaction for us to be shared in a marriage covenant, where we are safe, cared for, known, and loved. Just as when we are in a relationship with God, spending actual time with him, we can feel safe, cared for, known, and loved.
Marriage reflects this.
Porn never does.
The physical reaction porn stirs in us is normal but meant for a certain context, and porn is not that context.
The answer to the pandemic: engaged parents.
Instead of denying porn’s presence in the home, church, or everyday world, we need an army of moms who are at the ready, arming the next precious generation to fight this pandemic. We can do this out of love, not fear. We can engage with our children on topics already swirling around their worlds. We can take challenges as presented opportunities to ask our kids, ‘What do you think about that (movie, song, celebrity, couple, etc)?’
Through open communication we are able to learn more about our children as they navigate the landscape of culture and the ever-changing sexual narrative with its origins of old. We can remind them of God’s love, awareness of our sin, and forgiveness, all of which are a focus of the cross. Porn is filth.
But that teaching alone won’t help our children.
We need to prepare them with honesty, facts, and God’s word. Human beings are sexual– God made us male and female – so the story of creation, fall, and redemption is also about our sexuality. Let us willingly include our children in this beautiful story. Yes, we have fallen. We are broken and damaged by the pain of our own sin, and the sin of those around us. Yet there is God who sees (Genesis 16:13). He knows us and yearns to bring hope and redemption to all areas of our broken lives, including sexual sin.
Your children will experience the brokenness of their fallen sexuality, but may we teach and show that God can restore all, he is not afraid of our sin, but willingly goes to the cross to save.
Porn is everyone’s battle, but praise God there’s a hero who has won the war.
Need HELP with these conversations? Check out Sex Ed Reclaimed, which will help you open and continue these conversations with your kids in age-appropriate ways.
Author Bio: Kristen Miele has been educating youth on the topic of sex for 13 years. Kristen has experience teaching ages 3 and up on content related to sex and sexuality. She has a Bachelor’s and Master’s of Science in Community Health from the University of Illinois and is a Certified Health Education Specialist (NCHEC). She is the Owner and Founder of Sex Ed Reclaimed, a company designed to help educate kids about sex in a God glorifying way. Kristen has a daughter, Emma Joy and is married to Anthony. They previously lived in Honduras as overseas workers teaching and providing medical care. She can be found on social media @sexedreclaimed.
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