Parents also need to remember that just like adults, the kind of porn that a kid looks does not automatically signal the kind of sex that kid is personally interested in. In fact, most research on the subject is inconclusive at best. Though a lot of people assume that seeing porn automatically damages kids, the research doesn’t back this up. Porn-watching kids are not perverts, or weird, or on a slippery slope to deviancy. Besides masturbating, kids this age typically have very few outlets to express their sexuality, so looking at porn can be extremely appealing. It is totally normal for a middle schooler to be interested in sex and sexual images.

Most of these parents were worried about the effect that seeing intense sexual imagery could have on a 12- or 13-year-old, and all of them reached out because it can be really hard to know what to say about porn to kids – or how to say it. So it is not surprising that in the decade that I have taught health and sex education, more than a few parents of middle schoolers have contacted me for advice after discovering their child looking at porn. Like most people my age, my first exposure to porn predates the Internet.Īnd while the majority of my youthful experiences were pretty tame (like sneaking into my friend Jen’s basement to peek at her dad’s Playboys), even in the days of print and VHS tapes things could get sketchy (like in eighth grade when I was shown an explicit porn by the pot-smoking adult tenant who rented a room in my friend Amanda’s house).īut whatever the setting, the impact of porn on my life was much more limited than it is on the lives of a lot of today’s wired kids.

Doing It Right by Bronwen Pardes