Three weeks ago, a feature story on The World and Everything In It podcast began, Today, there is a pandemic with families: not with Covid 19 but with pornography. It is more accessable than ever before and reaching children at a young age. We cannot afford to be naive as parents or adults. This episode looks at what is happening today, how to protect our kids from pornography, and how to equip them with a biblical view of pornography.
In 2019, porn sites received more traffic than Amazzon, Twitter, and Netflix combined. At present 27% of all video content on the Internet is pornography. Because of the fall, pornograpy has probably been around since cave drawings. But let's do a quick fly over of the last 70 years to get some perspective. In the fifties we had pinup girls clothed and in sexy poses. From the sixties and seventies, we had girly magazines, like Playboy showing breasts at first, but eventually showing full nudity. In the eighties we had VHS video pornography and video porn on cable. In the nineties we had chat rooms and webcams. These forms of pornography were available, but hard to get, especially for children. There were often physical barriers—drugstores that sold porn were in bad parts of town, as were sex shops. And there were social barriers. The dirty magazines were behind the counter and required a teenage boy (or Christian man) to ask the clerk to get him a copy to buy. Video porn was available through cable and VHS, but it required a subscription that wives would find out about, unless viewed while traveling.
It is completely different today. Triple X porn video is in our kid’s pockets. It is available on almost every platform, including Twitter and, of course, Snapchat, which permits porn performers to make thousands of dollars off of their accounts every night. A group of teenage boys were asked, "How many guys at your school look at porn, would you guess?" One guy said immediately, “every guy.” His friend said, “I can only think of one guy in my high school who does not.” For Christians, battling Internet porn has been an issue primarily for CHRISTIAN MEN. A small percentage of women have become addicted to porn, often because their husbands dragged them into watching soft porn to get them aroused. But in the last five years, Internet pornography has become a CHILDREN’S problem. Those who track such things point out these startling changes in children’s awareness of online pornography. In 2015, ages 11-12 the awareness level of porn was 8%; in 2020 it climbed to 57%. In 2015, ages 13-14, the awareness level was 16.5%; it rose to 61% in 2020. In 2015, ages 15-16, the awareness level was 22.7%; it went up to 79% by 2020. This is a pandemic.
Mikayla Wegner, the author of the World and Everything In It article about children and pornography tells the story of Jack. His pornography addiction started when he got a smartphone in eighth grade. He accidently saw a pornographic image when he was thirteen. Unable to stop thinking about it, he searched the Internet again for it at home. He says, “I would always say in my mind, ‘this is the last time I am going to watch this video.’ That’s just a lie you tell yourself to watch one more video. The truth of it is that you can’t overcome an addiction and a desire like that on your own.”
Currently twenty-six percent of 13-17-year-olds admit to actively seeking out pornography on the Internet. When parents don’t help their children battle this scourge one writer makes this analogy:
I imagined growing up and having a coffee table in the middle of the living room that I passed by numerous times each day. There were four magazines on that coffee table. One of them was pornographic and three of them weren’t. And everyday my parents just hoped that I wouldn’t look at the wrong one. That is what the unfiltered Internet IS for kids today. We have put little boxes of porn in their pockets.
HOW TO PROTECT OUR KIDS FROM PORNOGRAPHY
- Don’t be ignorant or naïve about what is happening on the Internet. My eyes were opened in doing this podcast through a YouTube video entitled, Social Media Dangers Documentary: Childhood 2.0. I urge every parent, youth leader, and church leader to view this documentary.
- Protect younger children through filters. Twenty percent of kids were not seeking porn when they first viewed porn online. But it’s addicting, so very often as Jack (mentioned earlier) demonstrated, kids go back to it. The number one common denominator of those who sexually abuse kids is early use of pornography. Here is a list of Monitor apps or services identified by a classical Christian School:
- Bark - Monitors texts, email and social media for issues like cyberbullying, sexual predators and suicidal ideation (which means ideas forming about suicide) and alerts the parents.
- Qustodio - Supervise, manage and protect your child’s device.
- Net Nanny - Parental Control Software and Website Blocker.
- Covenant Eyes - An accountability service designed to help individuals overcome porn addiction.
- Ultimate Parental Control Guide –Already have an iPhone or Android? Click on this link to find out how to set parental controls on almost any device.
3. Allow your child the privilege of having a smart phone only with the requirement that he or she must instantly hand it to you if you ask to see it. And Ask often. Nicholas Black, the author of iSnooping on You Kid, gives the reason that iSnooping is imperative:
Pornography can capture the mind and heart of a child almost instantly. And it can set the stage for years of inner turmoil, along with depraved thinking, hiding, lying, and experiencing deeply broken sexuality. Porn produces a warped concept of sexuality and relationships, which later can erupt with destructive force in dating, marriage, family, or vocation. The fact is that almost every adult who struggles with sexually addictive behavior was introduced to porn at a young age. (Booklet produced by Harvest USA).
4. Require your kids to leave their phones, ipads, (and, if necessary, their laptops) in your kitchen or downstairs study at bedtime (where they can also be recharged). Although a smart phone can be used to access porn anywhere, there is phone connectivity or WIFI, most consumption of porn by kids and husbands occurs at night after parents and wives are asleep.
Protecting kids as much as possible from having access to Internet or cable porn is vital. But there are serious limitations to this method of protection. Here are a few:
- You may stop your child from bumping into porn at your house, but you can’t isolate him from the kid on the bus with porn on his phone or the kid who lives next door.
- Whether we like it or not, preventing our children from having smartphones too long will cause them to be stigmatized by their friends. This is a very, very high price to pay. The teen years are hard enough for kids. I believe looking back on it, we caused this to happen with our kids by preventing them from taking sex ed in the public school, because we didn’t agree with some things being taught. Parents have to weigh how the damage done to our child’s self-esteem by embarrassment being heaped on them by their friends against the value of protecting them from explicit sexual images. The world is fallen. We can’t protect our kids from temptation forever.
- Similarly, we must recognize that today, a teen’s whole life is centered around his or her smart phone. I’ve seen studies showing that teenage girls average 10 hours per day on the phone. This is unhealthy, but it demonstrates a reality about your kids’ friends. Everyone knows that what is cool is knowing what the latest news event, tweet that has gone viral, or funniest Facebook posting is. Like it or not, today what is happening on the social media with their friends is the foundation of friendship in our children’s lives. To take that away because we are trying to separate our child from temptation, peer pressure, etc. only works when they are young. Instead, we must EQUIP our kids to understand the dangers of the Internet, including the dangers of pornography, and at some point, give them the freedom to internalize biblical values by having the freedom to fail. The rest of this episode addresses How to EQUIP our kids to take responsible stewardship of their phone and how to help them see the way that consuming pornography destroys.
EQUIPING OUR KIDS WITH A BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW OF SEX AND PORN
After listening to teens talk about their culture, I found out something I’d never thought much about. Many teens, especially the girls, mentioned that they looked at porn to learn about sex. This reality means that we need to talk to kids about sex before puberty. As a men’s ministry leader, one of the seminars I lead is entitle Grace Transformed Sexuality: How Grace Changes a Man’s Heart and His Battle with Lust. During such seminars, I often ask the men to raise their hand, if their father explained sex to them. Usually, over 85% keep their hands down. Obviously, this is one of the more difficult challenges from God to forsake our natural passivity and step up to the plate and do our job. I learned what I knew about sex from the locker room, and three quarters of it was wrong. I refused to make that mistake with my five kids. When my twin daughters turned ten, I noticed a discomfort level at the term sex. I already had a habit of taking a different one of my kids out for breakfast on Monday, my day off. So, borrowing some magnets from my wife, I set off to McDonald’s to explain the birds and the bees to my oldest daughter as straightforwardly as I could. You should have seen the look on the faces of those sitting close enough to hear what I was saying! So don’t make the mistake of doing this at a restaurant. I wanted this discussion to fit naturally into our routine—I just should have found a more private part of our routine to adapt to this topic. I left it to my wife to help my girls understand their bodies, later.
So kid, by kid, as best I can remember, the magnets and I went through the talk with each of the kids. I had to also have the hard talk with each of my three sons about masturbation. I wanted to help them see that 1) solo sex was never God’s intent, 2) that lust for a woman you are not married to is a destructive thing to feed, 3) that ninety-nine percent of men masturbate and that the other one percent are liars, 4) and that frankly, I was more concerned about the shame they felt when they masturbated driving them away from God than anything else. I wanted to help them understand that turning to God afterwards, they will always see the Father running towards them to throw his arms around them. I wanted to help them understand that it is experiencing God’s unconditional love for us that makes us love God back. That understanding is the source of power we need for next time—not allowing Satan, The Accuser of the Brothers, to heap shame on us when we have repented. These discussions—"How Sex Works" with all my kids and "How to Deal with Masturbation" were specific aspects of sexuality. But here is the broader worldview that we need to communicate. It begins with creation
Creation
Gen 2:23-25. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. This text is nearly always read at weddings because it describes the two fundamental components of marriage. The first is the joining of LIVES or SOULS. (Both the Hebrew and Greek words for soul are translated, lives. The husband leaves his past life with his family of origin. He pursues a woman to spend a lifetime giving her his love and sharing their life together. As they prepare for a life together in marriage, they become one at the level of the soul. Their hearts are united in love, their feelings about various topics are shared, their differences in opinion are hammered out in unified decisions. They are joining two lives.
The second component of marriage is the joining of two BODIES— “they become one flesh.” The bible has a very high view of sexual union. God created a man to experience sexual desire for his wife and no one else. This physical love-relationship between a husband and wife is intended to be like a fire in the home fireplace providing constant warmth for the family. But if that fire is taken outside the home, it becomes as destructive as a wildfire, consuming and destroying. God’s view of sexual union is that he wants husband and wife to drink deeply of the sexual pleasure that comes from love-making. In Song of Songs, when the marriage is consummated, God’s words are, Eat friends and drink, and be drunk with love (vs 5:1). As fathers we must make sure that our children understand that God’s prohibitions against sex outside of marriage are not because God is a prude. Quite to the contrary, the Christians’ very high view of sexual unity is that we save it and protect it, as much as sinners are able to, for marriage, alone. Sexual union outside of marriage, like all sin, is destructive, but also, like other sins, is forgivable in Christ.
Fall
Four Ways Sin Has Polluted Our Sexual Nature
1. Fallen man takes NAKEDNESS outside the confines of marriage. Only doctors, morticians, and husbands have any business looking at a woman’s naked body. A woman has no business revealing her body in public. Our bodies are not dirty or shameful; they are private.
2. Fallen man takes SEX outside the confines of marriage. The Greek word, “porneia,” which is translated, “sexual immorality,” refers to sex with anyone other than one’s opposite sex spouse. Some rationalize that intimate touching, oral sex, anything short of intercourse--is permissible. But that is not God’s view. Sexual touching is part of the sexual intimacy reserved for marriage and is intended to awaken the desire for full intercourse. They became prostitutes in Egypt, engaging in prostitution from their youth. In that land their breasts were fondled and their virgin bosoms caressed (Ezekiel 23:3)
3. Our sinful nature also damages the sexual relationship within monogamous marriage. Christian couples often feel rejected, misunderstood, and sexually unsatisfied in their marriage. Few Christian couples are given any help working through their sexual misunderstandings and differences.
4. Fallen men want sexual pleasure without the hard work of emotional intimacy with a real woman. The sinful nature of both single and married men easily defaults to wanting the benefits of femininity—sexual pleasure, but without the risk and work of real involvement with a real woman. Married men who feel distant from their wives, or whose wives are mad at them find self-sex easier than taking the risk of rejection to ask their wives to make love. When men masturbate to pornography, whether single or married, it trains them to treat their wife or future wife as an OBJECT for sexual gratification. It cheapens God’s glorious design for sexual union--of this glorious creature, a woman opening up her soul and life and body—making herself extremely vulnerable to rejection, crying out to be loved, cherished, wanted—and then receiving her husband to surround him with the warm nourishment of her love. Sometimes a mate is horny in marriage, and it is okay to go for it. But anything that tempts us to separate sex from intimacy of heart is destructive.
Many insights are available to help our boys and men win their battles with lust, including my podcast series, Ruling Over Our Sexuality for God’s Glory, and the nine-week study mentioned earlier, Grace Transformed Sexuality, available only on my website or the PCA bookstore. But I wanted to close this podcast with jus one truth required for defeating lust: You can’t win the battle against pornography alone. One of the stories in the World podcast cited earlier was the story of Jack. Nearly five years into his addiction to pornography, as a college freshman, Jack joined a group called Dangerous Men. He met weekly with eleven guys all freshmen university students. They talked abut lust and pornography. Jack says, It started feeling like this burden, this addiction I have is no longer just mine—like the other guys are sharing in it—it was a place where we could just share and not feel like we’re going to be judged. One of the best ways we can help our kids, especially our sons, in the battle with lust, is to model connection to other brothers, who support US in OUR spiritual battles—whatever they are. As we often say on this podcast—but is especially true in defeating lust, God never intended us to fight our spiritual battles alone.
For Further Prayerful Thought
- Is there some parent in your circle of friends who needs the information in this podcast?
- Why would you say that not permitting a high school teen to have a smart phone might be shortsighted? Why doesn’t taking away the opportunity to view porn not succeed at preventing teens from using it?
- If you were doing the dad, sex talk and overall equipping with a biblical worldview of sexuality and porn, what things do you think need to be included?
