Talking to Chidlren and Teens About Porn

Pornography is no longer something children and teens only find on “adult sites.” It can surface through social media, messaging threads, gaming platforms, and even music streaming, which leaves many parents and caregivers feeling outmatched and unsure of what to say first.

We walk through pornography and adolescence with our resident expert, Dr. Peter Montminy of A Mindful Village, focusing on why the teen brain is especially vulnerable to novelty and reward, how algorithms and peer culture amplify risk, and what repeated exposure can do to expectations around intimacy and consent. We also dig into the difference between intentional versus unintentional exposure, and why frequency and content type matter when you’re deciding how concerned to be and what next step makes sense.

Most importantly, we share a practical, non-shaming approach for families: lead with compassionate curiosity, normalize developmentally typical questions, and provide clear values about respectful, caring, consensual relationships. You’ll hear concrete guardrails you can use at home, including “trust but verify” monitoring, parental controls, device-free zones, and a simple “see something, say something” plan that helps kids pause, exit, and come to a trusted adult without fear.

If you’re trying to protect your child’s mental health while still building trust and resilience, this conversation gives you language you can actually use. Subscribe to Ripples of Resilience, share this with a caregiver or educator, and leave a review with the biggest question you want us to tackle next.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 for immediate support. 

This podcast is brought to you by Jana Marie Foundation and A Mindful Village. 

Jana Marie Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization located in State College, Pennsylvania which harnesses the power of creative expression and dialogue to spark conversations build connections, and promote mental health and wellbeing among young people and their communities. Learn more at Jana Marie Foundation.

A Mindful Village is Dr. Peter Montminy's private consulting practice dedicated to improving the mental health of kids and their caregivers. Learn more at A Mindful Village | Holistic Mental Health Care for Kids.

Music created by Ken Baxter. 

(c) 2025. Jana Marie Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

This podcast was developed in part under a grant number SM090046 from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The views, policies, and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of SAMHSA, HHS or the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services.

Transcript

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 0:16

Hello, and welcome to Ripples of Resilience, a podcast from the Jana Marie Foundation, where we explore ideas, tools, and conversations that support mental health, resilience, and well-being for young people and the adults who care about them. I'm your host, Marisa Vicere, and today we're focusing on an important and often challenging topic, pornography and adolescence. With the internet, smartphones, and streaming platforms, many young people are encountering sexualized content earlier than ever. And it's not just on traditional adult websites. Content can be hidden in unexpected places like music streaming apps, social media, and gaming platforms. This raises critical questions for parents and caregivers about how to help teens navigate what they see, understand healthy relationships, and develop resilience. To help unpack this, I'm joined by our resident expert, Dr. Peter Montminy from A Mindful Village. Dr. Montminy, thank you so much for being here today.

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 1:26

Yeah, thanks, Marisa. Glad to be here again. Again, another important topic, sensitive and tricky, but one that, you know, we can't raise our kids in a bubble. It's one so that the kids are out there dealing with. Let's see what we can do today to help them deal with it better.

Why Adolescence Is Vulnerable

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 1:41

Wonderful. Thank you so much. So, as you mentioned, this is never an easy conversation, but one we know that is critical to have. Why is this especially important to talk about during the adolescent years?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 1:54

Yeah, really important again with the adolescent years, and we could talk about the tweens, right? The preteen and as well as the early teen and the later teen years. It's a time of curiosity, identity development, learning about relationships, where I fit in outside of the family unit, how I belong, and trying to figure that out. They're out there exploring different aspects of life, online and off, as we know. And they're going to come across stuff that they have to go, hmm, what do I want to do with this, right? And they're doing that while the brain is still developing, especially in those areas related to judgment, impulse control, and critical thinking. The emotional brain feels good, I want some more of that, is way out in front in terms of developing, going after those reward centers, those dopamine hits, the hormones, you know, amplify that. And the cognitive controls of let me think about that in terms of critical thinking, anticipating consequences, especially looking at long-term consequences, not so much, right? So when young kids, young people are exposed to pornography without the context and the bigger picture considerations that we can offer them, they might just try to make sense out of it on their own and kind of go down a negative spiral, if you will.

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 3:14

So before we can really talk about what we can do as adults to help and support, I think we need a better understanding of why teens may watch pornography or be interested in this type of content.

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 3:27

Yeah, right. And so there's a couple different reasons. The obvious one is that it people are curious. They're curious, and teenagers are very curious about exploring their bodies, learning about the body, learning about uh physical pleasure, sexual pleasure. So, of course, again, it's part of the natural development of teens. It's their job to start figuring out this part of who they are and how they want to be in the world, how they want to be in relationships. So they're curious, they're trying to learn about, you know, educating themselves about their body and pleasure. They're also you know into, again, as we said, identity exploration, and may think that some of this can help them explore what they're attracted by or not attracted by, or even their orientation or their fantasies. So pornography online quietly and alone can maybe help them explore some of that in their views. And it can also be used as a stressor mood regulator. Sometimes, you know, under stress, I'm just gonna tune out and check this out. You know, any of us watch a comedy or a TV show of any interest, and some, of course, that may head into this arena as well. So there's internal reasons why kids are going to be drawn to it. And then the challenge is you might say, well, that's always been true. We always had curiosity about sexuality in teen years, and there was always, you know, magazines and graphic novels before there was online internet. But the problem is the external conditions now is why are they getting on and looking at porn? The quick short answer is because they can. Because they can so easily, because easy access, purposely and not purposely, you hit a button or two, and next thing you know, you're there. It's just a step away. So the compounding problem is online now, easy access. The algorithms are built, the programs are designed to increase eyeballs on the screen. And the way they do that is we amplify more and more extreme sensationalized things. And we know this to be true in the non-sexual realm. It's also true in the sexual realm. So there's these external conditions, and then finally, the external factor of peer culture shares and dares, which again you could say always existed, but now easy access in their hands, someone's saying, Hey, you gotta look at this, you gotta look at this at the lunchroom or in the bathroom at the junior high or high school, and you don't know what's going on. And next thing you know, it's being shared around, and there's pressure to, hey, why don't you try this? Or in your intimate relationship, boyfriends, girlfriends, hey, why don't we try this? Look what I saw, let's try this. And it starts warping, especially because we'll talk about the extremes that ramp them in this world online nowadays.

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 6:11

So, what are some of the key concerns around exposure, especially for our adolescents?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 6:17

Yeah. So, first we want to consider the circumstances a little bit. To what degree was this intentional or unintentional exposure? And there's some of both. Again, we want to go into being kind and curious, not judgmental and critical with our kids. But let's see. A lot of times they're coming across things unintentionally, good to know. Then we can coach them on what to do with that. Sometimes it's intentional, they're curious, they're aroused, they're interested, they're exploring different things. Then we need to coach them on where and how to draw healthy lines around that, which we're gonna do with our own different family values about this, as we should communicate those lines and coping skills to our kids based on our values. But we want to see intentional or unintentional exposure, we want to consider the frequency and the content or type. So, what I call quantity and quality. How often are they winding up on porn sites? And what's the quality in nature from their, you know, can be very relatively mutually kind, caring sexual depictions online, and there can be more degrading, violent, coercive, lots of more, let's say, to me, horrible things online as well. So you want to have a little sense of that. And context matters, context matters. How much, again, degrading or violence is involved, how much is this kids are doing it when they're feeling down, stressed, anxious. And so we want to look at a few of those variables. And then all of that comes to these couple of final main points. The key concern that pornography one of our key concerns is that it often presents unrealistic or incomplete portrayals of relationships, intimate relationships, sexual relationships, and consent. It's really often unrealistic. It's staged entertainment, right? And it's not about how are we really developing our style of intimacy in a relationship and a caring relationship, including the sexual subpart of that relationship. It's really about, you know, unrealistic presentations of bodies and of relationships and often of sexual acts. And without guidance, young people may begin to form expectations based on what they see there and think that's normal or healthy, or think, oh, well, if that's there, I feel now the pressure to do that with my partner. And so you start going down again, what I call this negative snowball effect. Rather than we need to counterweight that with teaching our kids about healthy, respectful, real-world relationships, sexual or otherwise.

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 8:55

Thank you so much. And I know as a parent, I am always looking at how I can add in those safety controls within my home environment and places that he can access. Although what I'm finding is that it's getting harder and harder. So now our kiddos are getting on this in unexpected places, which makes that monitoring even harder. Can you explain a little bit about what this looks like?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 9:20

Yeah, absolutely. Many adults assume pornography only comes from pornography websites or places like that. But it is, as you've said, embedded more and more in other places. Streaming music apps like Spotify or YouTube music, social media platforms, gaming platforms, messaging apps, Discord servers, all are places where they may be coming across, sharing willingly or unwillingly, more and more sexual material. So the challenge again is that children and teens often don't recognize even these as pornography. They just, they're little clips or it's little sexualized this or that pieces. And adults may not realize how easily accessible these are in everyday spaces.

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 10:04

Yeah, always tricky to navigate. So, as parents, what do we need to be aware of on how these exposures can affect adolescent development?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 10:15

Well, remember that those teen brains are highly responsive to novelty and rewards. So it's going to be easier, plain and simple, to get sucked into it, to get sucked into compulsive behaviors or addictive behaviors with this stuff. Repeated exposure to highly stimulating content can shape our expectations. Our expectations shape our attention loops, shape our behaviors where we get again into more addictive cycles. At the same time, teens may have more difficulty with critical evaluation and impulse control, which makes guidance again from us being the guardrails, the wise voice of experience with hopefully fully developed frontal lobes ourselves. We can help kids again put this back into thoughtful perspective, not just impulsive or emotional reactions to these things.

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 11:04

Yeah. So I have to be honest, this is feeling a little overwhelming of all these different things to know and to navigate and how to be proactive in this field. So, what's the role of adults in helping young people make sense of this and how can they approach the conversation?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 11:23

Yeah, we'll go back to our gold standard, right? Approach it, approach it with caring curiosity, compassionate curiosity rather than judgment or shame. Our most important thing is to ground kids in our values and give them better context for how what they're seeing isn't, again, necessarily typical or healthy or the ways that we want to be with one another. At the same time, normalize their curiosity about this, again, without the shaming part. Of course, you're going to be curious about this. Maybe some of it's exciting, maybe it's just crazy, maybe it's new or novel. You're going to be naturally exploring your sexuality. Let's acknowledge that and say, that's okay. Now let's just consider what you want to do with it more. You want to provide accurate, age-appropriate information about what healthy relationships and consent look like or mean to you, and really have it be a dialogue, not a lecture, right? Hey, here I really feel it's important. Tim McGraw has a song, great song, Always Be Humble and Kind. And one of the lines in there, I love so much, it's very subtle and quick, but it goes, know the difference between loving someone and being with someone you love. You know, and just a little subtle thing like that, helping people understand that. And then talk about media literacy, explaining that sexualized content often distorts reality, rarely again reflects those healthy relationships. Always encourage questions, as I said, make it a dialogue, not a monologue or lecture. And be open and judgment-free to help kids go. Let's think what this is like for you and what you can do. I got your back, let's figure it out together.

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 13:07

Yeah. Great practical tips that you provided there. So, you know, I mentioned my kiddo before. I'm very into working with him and trying really hard to be a supportive parent. And at times he questions whether I'm being invasive or not, right? Absolutely. As I think most kids do. They want their privacy, they want their independence, and we're trying to help them and guide them. So how do we balance those two sides out?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 13:37

Yeah. Very quickly, I have this thing I do with all the families I work with, with the kids and the adults. And I remind the kiddos of whatever age, six, sixteen, twelve, seventeen, until you're 18 are out there, your parents are legally, financially, medically, and morally responsible for you. So we're talking about rights and responsibilities. And your parents not only have a right, they have the responsibility to check in and know: are you safe? Are you legal? Are you okay? Whether it's what are you hiding in your backpack or under your bed or on your phone? So absolutely you start with the message of until you are a legal adult and out on your own, yes, I am responsible for what you're doing online and off. And over time, showing me you're making better choices slowly grows you, earns you more freedoms and privacy. As you're making, but I will always be there to spot check it. And that's the rules of our life under the roof with a caring adult. Sorry, you got stuck with a parent who cares enough to check on this stuff and for you to be mad at when you get busted. But you don't have full privacy until you're out on your own. Now, having said that, I'm not about nosing around unnecessarily. I'll be more checking earlier on, and the more you show me healthy choices, slowly I can fade that to spot checking. Does that make sense just overall?

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 15:08

Absolutely.

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 15:09

Yeah, so I really that that's a way. And and the the combination of then, oh, President Reagan's you know, trust but verify. So we want to be doing this coaching them on healthy relationships, healthy choices while monitoring and controlling. It is not either-or, it's empathy and accountability. It's let's coach you up on how you want to handle this, and no, I'm gonna check in. And if and when we see you making mistakes, yes, there'll be consequences to deal with that. And both are true. And that includes I'm gonna have parental controls, digital controls on your devices, it that is gonna limit your exposure. It's gonna provide guardrails for you when it's hard for you to be going around a turn with your adolescent hormones at too fast a speed and you're gonna spin out into danger. I don't want you rolling down, you know, a gulf into a mess, pornography or otherwise. I'm gonna put up guardrails to help keep you safe, even when you don't like it. So controls, digital controls and monitoring, 100% we want to do that. And we're not stupid. We say we understand it leads to a game of cat and mouse. Kids are gonna try to find ways around our controls on our monitoring. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It means we still have to put that in place and then say, and if you're busted, sneaking out or doing something not okay, we're gonna talk about what to do about that and make that right. Meantime, I'm also coaching you on the skills to make better, healthier choices, whether you get caught or not. Combination of both.

Building Healthy Development Offline

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 16:43

Yeah, wonderful. Thank you so much. And we know that a lot of this comes around healthy development. So obviously, online is a big component of that these days, but there's a lot of other things that families can do as well to support young people. What are some of those ways that we can help encourage that healthy development?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 17:02

Yeah, absolutely. Um, teaching kids the reality of pornography, as we said. I'll just start there briefly and then we'll go into these other areas too. Digital literacy around pornography, three main points you want to be teaching on. Pornography is about entertainment, not sexual education. It's about being attention grabbing and increasingly sensationalizing. It's not about really teaching you about your body in necessarily a healthy way. So scrap that idea of I'm looking at it for sex ed. By default, kids are going to go there for it. We need to give them other avenues of where we think we wanted to learn healthy sexual development, but understand this is entertainment to be attention grabbing. Relating to that is unrealistic scripts, unrealistic bodies, unrealistic performance, unrealistic ideas of consent or absence of consent and more coercion, not healthy and not normal, not typical. And that there's often aggression and boundaries that are being pushed there that again are not are not typical or okay. So you want to emphasize the reality of that to give it context. Now, beyond that, we want to promote healthy online behavior in general as well as offline behavior. So let's encourage offline experiences that build social and emotional skills and relationship skills, right? Let's emphasize a balanced media use with limits on screen times, having device-free zones as we've talked about before in general is still a good way to minimize kids' exposure to unhealthy stuff online, to minimize kids' dependency on going into unhealthy things online. Counterbalance their social diet with these other offline activities and even ways to limit the device stuff and or co-share, get engaged in doing online video stuff together, right? Too. This isn't a substitute, but it's a it's a it's an important counterbalance to the specific issue. Yeah?

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 19:03

Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 19:04

All right. The other thing we say is if you see, you know, the old see something, say something, right? And teach your kid, here's a see something, say something plan. If and when you see something, come across some pornographic material, sexual material online. One, we want you to pause and step away from it. Pause and exit, step away, breathe to recenter yourself, and then come talk to a trusted adult about what do I do with this, right? And and and just name that as a practical problem-solving thing. And we will talk about how to block it, how to how to preserve it, how to get to police or not for it, how to clear it off your history and what to do with it. So we want to teach kids practical skills. And then finally, let's reinforce that we're safe resources, mistakes are gonna happen, curiosity is what we'll do with it in our household, and we'll figure out what to do with it together, that same message again.

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 19:57

Wonderful. And while a lot of these conversations start at home, sometimes a youth or a parent may need some extra support. How might someone know when it's starting to reach that point where external support would be helpful?

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 20:10

Yeah. So when you're seeing significant or concern at all of emotional distress, anxiety, shame about what they've seen online and they're struggling with what to do with those feelings, maybe they could use some extra help. When their exposure to harassment or explicit content that feels unsafe to them and they're feeling maybe more traumatized by it, definitely let's get them some help. Or when their persistent curiosity starts morphing into more compulsive viewing that's interfering with daily functioning and really heading towards kind of an addiction, even if you're not all the way there. If it's too compulsive and frequent, you want to get some help to get them back on track.

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 20:51

Thank you so much. So at the core, this is really about helping young people develop those healthy perspectives.

Closing Thoughts And Share Request

Dr. Peter Montminy, A Mindful Village 20:58

Exactly. We can't say it again. It's not just about telling kids what don't to do or not, or that's bad, but it's really about promoting what's the flip side of that coin, what's a caring relationship, what's respectful, what's consensual, sexual or otherwise.

Marisa Vicere, President and Founder, Jana Marie Foundation 21:14

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Pornography and adolescence can be a difficult topic, but open and honest conversations are key. When adults provide context, guidance, and support, they help young people navigate what they see and build a healthier understanding of relationships. Thank you, Dr. Montminy, for your insights. And thank you to everyone listening to Ripples of Resilience. This podcast is brought to you by Jana Marie Foundation, where we're dedicated to opening minds and saving lives through conversations that matter. And by A Mindful Village, where Dr. Peter Montminy provides holistic mental health care for kids and their caregivers. If you found this episode helpful, consider sharing it with a friend, caregiver, or educator. Small conversations can create powerful ripples of resilience in our communities. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.