You Better Have ‘The Talk’ With Your Kid Before the Internet Does!

Parents of teens have known to hide their stash of naughty mags and DVDs, vibrators and lube to keep their adult playtime safe from innocent, prying eyes. But more and more evidence indicates that parents of young kids should be worried, as well!

Children as young as 8-years old are exposed to online pornography every day!

“Parental safety controls” aren’t controlling much.

According to a national study, 7 out of 10 kids came across pornography accidentally online. In other words, kids who search for images on Google for school projects stumble upon uncensored, explicit sex pictures about 70 percent of the time.

In fact, 40 percent of porn was downloaded as a result of an innocent keyword search (the word “sex” ranks fourth out of the 10 most popular word searches).

There are even sites that deliberately set up precisely to trick folks into visiting them, which are easy traps for kids. For example, whitehouse.com is not really an informational site about the president. It launches into a virtual black hole of sex pop-ups that are next to impossible to escape.

The “easy fix” (or so we’re told) is blocking these adult sites by installing parental controls. Well, what I discovered after surveying approximately 3,000 parents is what the national study found — kids are exposed to pornography more often through accidental (and albeit, unfortunate) circumstances.

Many parents even confessed that their kids accidentally intercepted a sexy text, video or picture intended for a significant other.

Basically, the old “block it and monitor” tactics are not even close to being effective enough, nor does it address how to deal with the inevitable when it does (and it will) happen.

Your kids WILL see it. Here’s how to respond when they do …  

With the average 10-year-old having access to five different screens at home, chances are good that your child has seen some kind of sexually explicit message.

So with that being said, at what age do we start talking to our kids about what they are seeing? And more importantly, have we set the stage for our kids to even step up and tell us when they do see it?

As parents, be calm and listen to them even if they hold a picture on oral sex before you and asking you questions that can almost choke you because you cannot imagine them behold such site!

Take a deep breath within yourself and speak to them.Never act unreasonably by keeping such inquisitive child silent.

What our kids need in conversations about porn is clarity and (if necessary) consequences.

Lying to our children or making them feel shamed for seeing something sexual is a dangerous road to go down. It can lead to our kids having unsafe sex at a premature age. One peer-reviewed study found that boys, between 12 and 17 years old, who were exposed to pornography had sex earlier and initiated oral sex earlier in an imitation of what they had seen.

If children are being exposed to sex as young as 6 … (and let’s face it, if you’re sexually active, your kids have either caught you or overheard you talk about it already) … then, we as parents need to start having conversations about anatomy around that same age.

I’m not saying to teach your first-grader about oral sex or orgasms, but do teach your child that boys have penises and girls have vaginas (and that babies come out of that vagina). Also that their bodies belong to them and no one should touch it without their consent.