What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn – NY Times
This is not an easy article to read but it is a very important one for us as parents and leaders so we can see where culture it as today and how we help our kids to have a better understanding of pornography. I don’t think most parents faith-based or not would want their kids to view pornography, but we all need to talk to our kids about pornography and teach them how to process what they might see:
American adolescents watch much more pornography than their parents know — and it’s shaping their ideas about pleasure, power and intimacy. Can they be taught to see it more critically?
Statistics are also scary:
On average, boys are around 13, and girls are around 14, when they first see pornography, says Bryant Paul, an associate professor at Indiana University’s Media School and the author of studies on porn content and adolescent and adult viewing habits. In a 2008 University of New Hampshire survey, 93 percent of male college students and 62 percent of female students said they saw online porn before they were 18. Many females, in particular, weren’t seeking it out. Thirty-five percent of males said they had watched it 10 or more times during adolescence.
For all the parents who tell me that they want to be the ones to talk to their kids about sex and porn we seem to be failing in this regard:
It’s not surprising, then, that some adolescents use porn as a how-to guide. In a study that Rothman carried out in 2016 of 72 high schoolers ages 16 and 17, teenagers reported that porn was their primary source for information about sex — more than friends, siblings, schools or parents.
Drew, who had once used porn as his main sex educator, was now thinking about sex differently. “Some things need to come to us naturally, not by watching it and seeing what turns you on,” he told me. The discussions about anatomy and fake displays of pleasure made him realize that girls didn’t always respond as they did in porn and that they didn’t all want the same things. And guys didn’t, either. Maybe that porn clip in which the nice, tender guy didn’t excite the girl was wrong.
In our church world, we need to look at how we can have better conversations on pornography. With many of today’s teenagers getting their sex education from pornography we have to look at how we can help parents have this conversation in their homes, and then assist them by equipping and empowering them in our churches.
This actually would fall under a larger topic of equipping parents to help their kids get a Biblical Worldview of healthy sexuality. This would encompass everything from pornography, sexuality, dating, media awareness, pregnancy, STI’s, etc.
Love to hear peoples thoughts.
Click here for the entire article.
