Have the 'Porn Talk' with your Children

Talking to my 9 year old son about pornography has been one of the most wonderful and fulfilling parenting experiences I’ve had to date.

The conversations we’ve had have bonded us together deeply, generated a mutual respect and connected us both to our powerful inner voices that speak of justice. He has a lived experience of me talking about difficult things, being honest and brave, and that I am stepping up to my role as parent to keep him safe. I can see he feels proud of me. I feel proud of how I have protected him and his potential for happiness and healthy relationship.

The story behind all of this is a story of heartbreak and trauma.

When my son was a little baby, his father became violent towards me and we split up. After many years of single parenting, I met a wonderful man, fell in love, and in time he moved in and became my son’s much needed and adored step dad. They got on like a house on fire. We were all so happy. A year later I discovered he secretly used pornography. Arguments started, lies ensued, my heart slowly broke into pieces, his deep feelings of shame were activated and eventually it became apparent he was not prepared to address the issue and instead the problems in our relationship were blamed on me. It soon spiralled into a nightmare of gaslighting and verbal abuse as he tried to cover his tracks, minimise his problem and deflect responsibility. And meanwhile my little boy saw the father figure he adored slip away between his fingers. He walked out the day before my son’s 9th birthday, having been caught lying yet again about another mammoth porn session.

My little boy was devastated, confused and heartbroken. It was not long before he became angry with me, blaming me for the relationship breakdowns. He did not know about his father’s violence or his step father’s porn habit. All he could see was his mother emotionally smashed to pieces, with his fathers expertly feigning calm, kind gentlemanliness (something they had done their whole lives, creating a smokescreen for their abusive behaviours). The two fathers became friends, spending time together with my son, all three of them sharing in their experiences of me being an emotionally unstable woman (no doubt not discussing the porn or violence). I’m not quite sure how I survived the following months.

Discovering my ex partner’s porn habit catapulted me into a world that I knew nothing about. I began to educate myself on the effects porn has on users, partners, performers, families and society. I learned about the industry and how it is run. I learned about the brain and addiction. And I learned that a child is first exposed to pornography around the age of 10. In other words, it is not a matter of ‘if’ my son would be exposed to pornography, but ‘when’. And having witnessed the deeply destructive effects that porn has on users’ mental health and potential for healthy relationship, I felt a strong urge to protect him from the negative effects of his inevitable first exposure. The more I researched it, the more I realised I needed to have this conversation with him.

Somehow it doesn’t seem right to talk with such a young child about pornography. I wanted his first knowledge of sexual intimacy to not be pornography! But sadly, if we don’t have these conversations with children, we run a high chance of them being exposed without any tools to handle it. And the effects of that are nothing less than traumatising.

That first conversation, in the end, turned out to be surprisingly easy. I used a book called Good Pictures Bad Pictures which has been written especially for parents to read aloud to their children. I changed a few words as I went along, but the book basically did all the work for me. And it turns out that a child centred approach to discussing pornography involves informative and educative learning about the brain and how to protect it as it is growing and maturing. I realise now that it was good my son was so young, because he still wanted to ask me questions, have a conversation and engage on the subject. He was not too embarrassed.

Since then he notices images of women and girls being sexually objectified (they are everywhere) and he asks me if it is pornography. I have been able to explain that it isn’t, but that these women and girls are being turned into objects in the same way that it happens in porn. Now, when we see images of women and girls being objectified, we notice how it is impossible to know anything about who they are and we try to wonder about what hobbies she might have or what her favourite film might be. He commented once that it was like the images turn the woman/girl into a toy - whom you can discard easily.

My ex partner’s porn addiction has undone the desensitisation of sexual objectification I embodied from being bombarded with it everywhere in society. And my son now has also been protected from this desensitisation. He now, aged 10, calls out the objectification of women and girls whenever he sees or hears it. And sadly he hears it amongst his peers at school already. We know that those are the children who have not had the conversation and have not been protected.

I have heard it said many times that we need to teach our sons to respect women. But from my perspective my son doesn’t need these kind of lessons. He was born good and moral and with a strong sense of humanity and fairness and justice. The issue is not to teach him these things, but more to protect him from the people and parts of our society that lead him astray from this.

Discussing pornography with our children protects their inherent nature to be good. It is the job of parents and all grown ups to protect children. Pornography bonds a user to an image on a screen, connecting their brain and physiology to an object. It can bring about a loss of connection to our own natural libido, threatening our potential for connection, bonding and belonging with another human. All the evidence shows that using pornography causes fragmentation within individuals and damages bonding in relationship. So it is ironic that talking with my little boy about pornography has had the opposite effect. It has bonded my son and I together, giving us each a sense of belonging both internally and together. From terrible trauma has grown a sense of belonging.

For more support and information on how to address the issue of pornography with your child, tween or teen, please have a look at the Parents Program which is a free online course offered by Culture Reframed, or look up the book Good Pictures, Bad Pictures.

(And if you wonder why I have put this blog on my yoga website …. Yoga is to ‘yoke’, to connect. So talking with your child to protect them from pornography, to me, is yoga in action. And porn is the opposite of yoga.)

---