Knowing how to respond to your young teen’s porn use can be overwhelming. Learn how to approach them with grace, patience, and understanding.
There have been countless times I’ve had to respond to a parent’s pleas for help after they have just discovered their child has viewed pornography. Knowing what to do after discovering your teen’s porn use brings an assortment of questions. They say, “What do I do?” “How do I confront my daughter?” “How do I talk to my son about this?”
I can still recall a desperate phone call from a mom and dad who had discovered their 9-year-old daughter had been secretly accessing pornographic sites on the computer. They thought it was just a boy thing and that a 9 year old wouldn’t be interested. It turns out she accidentally opened an ad that had popped up and continued to seek it out from that point on. The same scenario has happened to too many parents.
First, don’t panic and spend some time praying! I know that’s easy to say, but difficult to do. How can parents not panic? I get it. First of all, I have two teens and sexual culture is searching for their attention just like it is any other child. God designed our mind, body and spirit to respond to sex. I wish their sexual curiosities would remain silent and just magically appear when they get married. Wouldn’t that be nice. God wants us to enjoy sex and wants us to have freedom and your children need to see that and not be lured into an illusion.
I have worked with boys and girls entangled in the grips of pornography and obsessive sexual fantasizing. Let me reassure you they are able to find freedom, especially when God is at the center of the transformation. He is the author of sex and wants us to freely enjoy the real deal. That last thing he wants is for us to get drawn into a counterfeit illusion that leaves a person thirsty, empty and loveless.
Kids initially need grace, then boundaries, intentional conversations about love, respect and gratitude. Kids will also benefit from learning how to wisely adapt to a consumer-driven, sexually consuming culture. In essence, they will need for you to model the 7 Traits of an Effective Parent.
If grace is the first step, what is it? It means approaching the situation with understanding and love. Boys and girls are desperately searching to belong, to be loved, to have worth, to feel normal, to feel they are good at something and to be wanted. That is the undertow that pornography and sexual fantasies are working off of.
Although first exposure to pornography, sexual images and fantasy are happening earlier and earlier in a person’s life, teens are usually the ones more frequently showing an addiction and a denial that it’s even a problem.
During adolescence, a developing brain easily falls prey to pornography. In fact, over time, viewing sexually explicit images can actually alter brain tissue and an individual’s personality. Dishonesty — with self or others—is one of the first signs the brain is changing.
Though our kids and teens seldom realize it, porn use destroys their sincerity. Let me give you an example. A young man I worked with said he had difficulty connecting and talking with attractive women, but no difficulty talking and connecting with unattractive women. He noticed that his pornography use caused him to only care about what a woman could provide for him. Not only that, but he cared a lot about the attractive women, because he wanted to have sex with them even if they were strangers. He did not care about unattractive women and could care less about what they thought.
Another example involves a young woman who had multiple boys she would exchange sexual pictures with. She said she didn’t care about any of them, but that they made her feel good and would get her whatever she wanted. She expected boys to do things for her and had no concern for their well-being.
Child and teen porn use drives a wedge into their psyche. In effect, this separates him or her from the person he or she used to be and the person he or she wants to become. It entraps him or her in an ongoing cover-up. Over time, it develops into full-blown denial.
Look at the Biblical account of David’s pursuit of Bathsheeba (2nd Samuel 11). He was in complete denial and blindness. Nathan had to use a parable to wake him up.
Denial takes many forms and can be a part of many people’s perceptions. There was a young couple living with each other. They could not understand what the problem was in their relationship. She had a subscriber only pornographic webcam service she provided her viewers and would perform as a stripper. He loved having more people in their sexual experiences besides just his live-in girlfriend. There is more to the story, but I need to go no further. The denial is completely clear here. We can see it, but both of them could not. They could not see why they felt depressed, empty, love less and hopeless?
Whatever shape it takes, denial is always a technique for rationalizing destructive behavior. And it always postpones necessary treatment.
The first step toward a child’s freedom is to confront the denial, help him face the truth and together establish a positive path forward from a Biblical perspective. With truth and grace, explain some of the following talking points involving child and teen pornography use:
The young man I mentioned earlier that only responded to attractive women had an ongoing sexual hunger, wanted to get married someday, loved his sister and mom, had been a Christian for several years and wanted freedom from the grip of pornography and a good relationship with God. As the deception of pornography became his reality, he increasingly pushed away God and people. He felt increasingly depressed.
What opened his eyes? The thought of others viewing his mother or sister in a similar way.
He made the decision to love and care for women by learning to have self-control. We discussed how men and women ironically find the best expression of themselves when they learn to master self-control. This is what God has been telling us all along. He wants us to be free to be ourselves, so he continually tells us to be sober minded and self-controlled. This young man wanted to find love like many other young men and women entangled in sexual perversion, sin and fantasy, but was having difficulty managing his own sexual desires. Self-control is difficult. It takes practice. It takes pursuing a goal. As a person practices, self-control becomes more natural and common place.
This young man worked toward genuinely caring about women he spoke with. As he pursued an honest relationship with others and God, pornography became less and less alluring and more sickening to him. In the times when he isolated himself from God and people, he felt vulnerable to the lure of pornography, moody and depressed. God repeatedly tells us that we can find true peace through a relationship with Him and reassurance through his statues and commandments (Psalm 119).
Healing begins when your child decides to grapple with his or her pornography use and the reason he or she pursued it in the first place. An angry confrontation doesn’t help. This is about trying to understand what they were looking for or what they are struggling with. Are they having difficulty managing arousal, stress, depression, curiosity or peer pressure? What are they running away from? What feeling are they trying to numb?
Change, growth and healing are most effective and lasting when they include contributions from a trusted support system, which could include family, friends, pastors and/or counselors.
Let your child know you love him or her and want freedom for him or her. You want him or her to experience the depths and fullness of attachment, love and connection. A strong faith would mean involvement with peers and their own personal Spiritual growth through prayer and Scripture reading. You can model a strong faith and relationship with God. I like to apply the following phrase in my own life and recommend it to parents I work with as we consider faith, “I act as if I believe… about God”
What kinds of activities do you do as a family? Do you spend time together? Are you able to put distractions aside and go for hikes, play board games together, have meals together, laugh together and conquer chores around the house together? I recommend using the Five Love Languages information to learn more about the unique ways we take in and communicate love with one another.
In talking with your child, remember freedom from pornography’s slavery is your objective. You may be filled with anger and fear, but letting it interfere with the conversation will make things worse. Some parents explode and some go toward extreme reactions. In combating teen porn use, the tendency is to go to defense. But the best goal now is to have open conversations about healthy sexuality and why it’s important. This is a conversation you’ll want to prepare for, and as you do, keep these things in mind:
Read Isaiah 26 together and discuss what it means to have perfect peace. Is there peacefulness in the world of pornography? Why did Job in Job 33 make a covenant with his eyes? There wasn’t internet then, so what does that tell us about the wiring of our minds?
Passion and attraction are an important component of a romantic love, but can be destroyed over time by the illusion and distraction of pornography making commitment one of the only things that may keep a marriage together. Marriage gets its fuel from having all three – passion, commitment and intimacy working on all cylinders with God at the core.
I consistently hear people in their 20s tell me that they are not getting married or delaying getting married out of fear of getting a divorce. They live together and assume it will keep them from being hurt. This is the consumer mindset culture has created. Let me test drive it and see if I like it. The economy of love requires the sweat and risk of commitment, the intentionality and humility in intimacy mixed with the focused, faithful and directed passion. That is the recipe your child can work towards to find deep connection.
Dr. Daniel Huerta is Vice President of Parenting and Youth for Focus on the Family, overseeing the ministry’s initiatives that equip moms and dads with biblical principles and counsel for raising healthy, resilient children rooted in a thriving faith.
He is a psychologist, a licensed clinical social worker, and the author of 7 Traits of Effective Parenting. For many years, he has provided families with practical, biblically-based and research-based parenting advice on topics including media discernment, discipline, communication, mental health issues, conflict resolution, and healthy sexuality in the home. He is passionate about coming alongside parents as they raise contributors, instead of consumers, in a culture desperately in need of God’s kingdom.
Dr. Huerta has been interviewed by various media outlets including Fox News, Fatherly, Christianity Today, WORLD Magazine, and CBN, and he is a frequent guest on Christian radio stations across the nation. He’s also written for publications, including The Washington Post, on various topics related to marriage and parenting. He participated in the development of Focus on the Family’s Launch Into the Teen Years, a resource to help parents prepare their kids for adolescence, and he speaks regularly at retreats, conventions, and online events.
Dr. Huerta has maintained a private practice in Colorado Springs, Colorado since 2003 and has served families through Focus on the Family since 2004. He and his wife, Heather, have been married since 1997 and love being parents to their three teen children, Alex, Lexi, and Maci.
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