The sexual media that our young people see today is not the Playboy magazine we stole from our dads when we were growing up. This pornography is dangerous to their developing minds, hurts their physical brains, disrupts the mechanisms necessary to develop relationship skills, and takes all the wonder and fun out of exploring this part of their personalities gradually. It rushes them through what should be a fun and exciting time, ripe with its own challenges. It also puts your daughters into wildly uncomfortable sexual predicaments without any input from you. Now, with an ocean of explicit adult videos available at the click of a button to act as “guidance” for this part of their lives, our children’s sexual instruction comes externally from the family, and on every device they use. We can’t as dads and fathers do better than that? Of course we can, and this is how.
Trying to navigate this sensitive time in their young lives with such a solid and ever-present outside influence is nearly impossible for a child. It’s even worse when no one is talking to them about it, and maybe worse yet that their dad, their protector, defender, and guardian, may be silent on the topic. From my experience, if you do not shame your kids during the conversation, they’ll talk with you about it. They want to discuss pornography and have you set the rules. It’s us, me, you, all the dads, that have pulled back or completely ignored this danger to our children. That has got to stop. It is not your fear that matters here at all dads, it is the fear our children feel by stumbling across this content uninformed by you that matters.
Parents constantly tell me how scary it is to talk about this topic with their kids, and that sometimes fear is why they don’t talk about it. Grown-ups (especially dads) have a responsibility to protect their children at all costs. We owe them that obligation no matter how difficult or frightening it may be to offer it. If a lion charged our family, we would not stop, wait, or weigh the potential outcomes between teeth VS. claws. We would throw ourselves in between the lion and our children no matter what the cost. “I’m not good at fighting lions” or “I don’t have any experience with that” would seem cold comfort as you stood beside your child in a hospital bed without a scratch on you.
We would never send our children hiking in the Mojave Desert to study flora and fauna and forget to mention rattlesnakes, heatstroke, and dehydration. The internet is a wild place, a wilderness full of good and bad, and our kids will find hardcore online pornography by themselves, or together in a youth group, girls scout troop, or middle school class. When they do, the messages that they will internalize at this very young and impressionable time in their lives will hurt them for a very long time; (both boys and girls). Pornography leads to Human Trafficking, IPV, dating violence, and assault. Not to mention allowing our daughters to be put in wildly compromising positions by porn soaked teenage boys. Simply allowing this, which you are by omission, allows significant and negative consequences to enter your child’s future life, and maybe only because it’s “icky” for you to talk about it. What happened to us dads? We did not used to operate this way especially when it came to our kids.
Sometimes we can’t see the hurt. It can look like normal “teenage angst” but trust me, the hurt is there. Our children watch more internet porn than the entire country of Canada, or Germany or Japan. Not the children in those countries, the entire country itself, and we can’t see it? I’m fond of saying that if children would just turn green from watching online pornography, the CDC would have helicopters in the air, and this would be a “red-lights-flashing” all hands on deck national emergency! Until then, dads, you, are in the best place to speak with your kids about avoiding this content. You may be the only ones who can.
We speak with dads all the time, and besides fear, another reason dads don’t talk to their kids is hypocrisy. If you got home after work, and grabbed a beer from the fridge, sat on your couch in your house and drank a beer, you’re not breaking any rules. Your house, your couch, your beer. If your 11 year old came in and grabbed a beer and sat down next to you however, you would have something to say. That does not make you a hypocrite regarding beer. You’re the dad, you make the rules. You pay for the fridge and the electricity to keep it running. Well, you bought your child’s phone, you pay the Verizon bill, you pay for internet into the house. Same thing here! You wouldn’t knowingly let your children absorb an addictive substance like alcohol or cocaine, you would sit down with them, tell them “no” and explain why its harmful / dangerous for them. Well…online pornography fires all the same receptors in their brains as cocaine, heroine and methamphetamines. I honestly wish that weren’t true. I’m not condoning pornography viewing by grown-ups but you are grown-ups. What you do is up to you. I’;m offering that having the conversation with your kids regardless of your own habits is better that just not talking about it.
The national solution is for all dads to agree together, right now, that it is socially acceptable, encouraged even, to speak with our young people about avoiding online pornography. After that, you talk to your kids, I’ll talk to my kids, and we’ll all talk together as parents. I know we can do this dads, and we have to! Without our help, participation and active engagement, it’s not going to get any better. Someone needs to stand up and address this issue for kids, and dads get my vote to do it.
If you just cannot have the conversation with your kids however, would you please make an anonymous $5 donation? Your gift will allow The Third Talk® to send this message out to resonate so loudly that many people will hear it; maybe even your little ones. I am asking you to be brave here, dads. I am asking you for your help.
Thank you.
John
