What Parents Don’t Know About Internet Porn: A Parent Guide

Kids are increasingly exposed to sexually explicit content online, both unintentionally and on purpose. Though many wish they could talk to an adult about it, parents and teens alike avoid these conversations, leaving teens to fend for themselves in the world of internet porn.

Parents overestimate how much teens tell them and how well they understand teens. In order to talk to teens about porn and be helpful, parents need to be in the know about why they use porn, how it affects them, and learn what to say.

In a Common Sense Media Survey of 1300 teens ages 12-17 across the country, most teens had watched porn (Robb & Mann, 2023).

More than half came across sexually explicit content accidentally by clicking a link, a video, or typing an innocent word. Significantly, 71% of users who originally found porn accidentally had watched it in the last week, and, of the 44 % who sought it out intentionally, most watched regularly.

Why Do Teens Intentionally Seek Out Porn?

The primary reason teens seek out porn is for information about sex and how to perform certain sexual acts.

The top reasons, in order of priority, are to learn:

1. how to have sex
2. about anatomy
3. what types of partners they like and what sexual acts they want to try
4. what will feel good to their partner

Boys were more likely to use porn for sexual gratification.

How Do Teens Feel After Watching Porn?

Source: Javier Zayas/Istockphoto

Interestingly, although the majority of teens reported feeling okay about their porn use, and watched for “relaxation,” (Vertongen, 2025), half still felt guilty and ashamed afterwards, a sign of betraying one’s values, or feeling out of control.

Influence on Sexual Behaviors

41% of youth said they believed watching pornography made people less respectful of the opposite sex. Only 13% disagreed (BBFC, 2019). Even non-violent porn promotes the message that doing nothing constitutes consent, and that no one uses explicit consent (Rothman et al., 2017).

Youth exposure to online pornography is impacting the development of harmful sexual behaviors — particularly porn that models unsafe practices, associating these acts with pleasure and positive outcomes (Wright, 2021; Ybarra & Thompson, 2018).

The more teens watched porn, the more they were exposed to violent porn and, for some teens, the more likely they were to use dominant sexual behavior including pressuring their partner to have sex. Young men who perceived pornography as realistic and identified with the actors were the most vulnerable to trying out aggressive behaviors (Rostad et al., 2019; Ybarra & Thompson, 2018).

However, teens who imitated and enacted aggressive or forceful sexual behaviors, particularly without consent, were less sexually satisfied, and their partners reported feeling “scared “ “anxious,” “hurt,” or disconnected (Wright et al., 2021).

A majority of teens have watched violent or aggressive porn that includes choking, rape, and inflicting pain — scripts that introduce, normalize, and model unsafe sexual behavior in a context of lack of consent and defiance of explicit statements of non consent, depicting these as acts that will feel good to their partner.

Alarmingly, choking during sex has become mainstream among youth, involving a majority of young undergraduates in some studies, many of whom say it’s pleasurable and believe it’s safe, despite consensus among neurologists that chokeholds can cause brain damage or death regardless of dose and pressure (Herbenick et al., 2021; Joannides, 2022).

Do Teens Think Porn is Real?

Popular advice on talking to teens about porn has focused on informing teens that porn isn’t real. However, teens are critical thinkers and already recognize that porn involves actors. Assuming they don’t know this, and telling them what they already know, is insulting and makes parents seem out of touch.

Notwithstanding, the conspicuous issue is that, in spite of being aware that porn is a performance, 45% still said that porn provides helpful information about sex, perceiving it to be “as real as it gets” (Vertongen et al., 2025).

This means that recognizing the inauthenticity of porn in the abstract does not prevent teens from experiencing it as real sex when watching it, nor does it protect them from internalizing its impact, identifying with the actors, using it as a resource to learn what to do, or drawing conclusions about what they think is safe and will feel good to them and a partner.

Pornography Essential Reads

Exploring the Psychology of Amateur Porn

How Does Internet Porn Shape Romantic Life?

Parent Guidelines

Source: SolStock/Istockphoto

Parents should be prepared and grounded before difficult conversations and use a natural segue. The first step is to find out what their teen is doing, and whether or not there’s a problem. Ask questions in a neutral, interested, respectful way, similar to a talk show host.

• When and how did they discover porn? (Does anyone at home using a shared device have a hidden problem?)
• How often, when, and where are they?
• What apps are involved?
• What have they learned about sex, and themselves?
• What are the reasons they watch?
• How do they feel afterwards?
• How often do the images come into their mind?
• Does anyone know, or is it a secret? (A possible sign of shame)
• Have they ever tried to cut back? (A sign of feeling out of control)
• If they had to name one concern, or down side, to their watching, what would it be? (Access their internal conflict.)

Strategy to Influence Teens

Parents can be more effective at engaging teens in conversations by leveraging issues that are relevant and matter to teens, such as: autonomy, being in control, avoiding humiliation, and seeking pleasure instead of focusing on their own concerns.

Typically, when parents advise teens they make the mistake of imposing their own views, leading the witness, talking too much, and failing to create space for their teen’s point of view.

When trying to influence anyone to change their behavior, locate their internal conflict, rather than imposing yours. This accesses their intrinsic motivation, minimizes opposition, and increases follow-through.

What Parents Can Say To Leverage Teens’ Values and Priorities

• There are other, more sex-positive and accurate, ways to learn about sex.
• Porn gives misleading information about how to approach certain sexual acts and how they will feel, which can lead to negative sexual experiences with a partner.
• Porn is big business. You’re being manipulated so people can make money off of you. You can think you are in control when your sexuality is being shaped by someone else’s agenda.
• Your brain is under construction. What you do and are exposed to shapes the reward circuits of your brain.
• It can be hard to get these images out of your head.

(If your teen is using habitually, or to cope with feelings:)

• Porn is powerful when used as an escape, instantaneously transporting you to an altered state. This may bring immediate relief, but then can cause shame and more difficulty coping.
• Watching porn repeatedly can trick you into thinking it will feel good to watch more but, instead, make you feel out of control.
• Shame and secrecy can be signs of doing something that violates your values.
• Watching porn repeatedly and masturbating reinforces wanting that level of intensity and stimulation, and can make you less able to enjoy what would naturally feel good, and less sexually satisfied with your partner.
• Getting stimulated by certain types of images repeatedly and masturbating reinforces attraction to those images and can lead to the false conclusion that you prefer a particular type of partner, sex act, gender, or behavior, even when the pull is an artifact of this cycle of exposure and reinforcement. This can lead to confusion and shame about your sexual identity — still under formation.

Parents have the power to mediate the negative impact of porn on teens by helping them sort out what they are viewing, consider how it affects them, and make more intentional decisions about what they do.