What to Do if My Child has Seen Porn?

Unfortunately, in our world today, pornography is rampant and one of the fallouts of that is that it’s very possible that we’ll find ourselves in a situation where our children have been exposed to pornography. I think it’s important to set up from the onset that many times that’s just through accidental exposure. Not necessarily that there’s going to look for that or intention, but it does happen.

And, how are we as parents? How do we wanna respond to that? Certainly we would like to give a lot of effort and focus to prevention, making sure that doesn’t happen, but I think we’d be wise to consider what would we do or how would we like to respond if we find ourselves in that situation?

I’d like to just outline a few principles that you might think about if you find yourself in that situation. So the first one would be to avoid extremes, the extreme of fear and panic on one end, and the extreme of avoidance or minimizing on the other end. Either of these can be very easy for us to fall into.

And I think it can just be helpful to think about which side do you see yourself more naturally moving into the fear and like, oh no, and forecasting a really negative future for them and that’s gonna lead to big emotions for you and likely more harsher, punitive responses than you intend.

On the other side, maybe you would move into minimizing or avoiding in the sense of like, oh, I don’t know, it’s just easier to not think about or assume it’s not gonna happen again. And that can lead to just not ever bringing it back up and therefore they go along without the wisdom and counsel that you have to walk beside them in it.

The second principle would be to see the opportunity. I think in many ways as we walk through challenges as parents with our kids, there’s an opportunity. There’s an opportunity for teaching. There’s an opportunity to speak truth into it. There’s an opportunity to show that we love them, that we’re committed to them. That we are for them, whether it’s in success or in difficulty, and if we can give them that sense, there’s an opportunity to really bring a lot of healing and hope and long-term growth through it. If we don’t see it as an opportunity, it’s as again, much more likely for us to move into one of those extremes that tends to then leave the opportunity for shame or lies to take root, and those are gonna have more of a lasting impact.

The last principle I would just say is that you can do this. God has equipped you. He’s put you in the role of walking beside your child on purpose and for a purpose. You can do this. You’ve been gifted and equipped to do it, and I just encourage you that you may not know exactly how to respond. You may even think back and think, oh, I should have handled that differently. But God’s put the Spirit in you. He’s put a group of believers around you, and by His grace, by tapping into those resources, you can do this.