Do Porn Talks Work? New Study Gives Hope to Parents

By: American Decency Staff

Do regular talks about pornography really make a difference?

Do you ever wonder if anything you say is really influencing your kids? Are they even listening? Turns out a new study shows that parents who talk to their kids about avoiding porn are making a difference! In fact, these talks also improve their kids’ self-esteem.

Study results are impressive

Here’s a quick run-down on the ground-breaking study which was done by Texas Tech University and will soon be published in the Journal of Children’s Media.

Children of parents who regularly talked about their dislike for pornography expressed more negative attitudes about pornography as college students.
These negative attitudes correlated to less porn use.
Kids who were caught looking at pornography and consequently received more porn talks also developed a greater degree of emotional resiliency. Specifically, they were less likely to report lowered self-esteem when they discovered that their romantic partner used pornography.

Researcher and author Eric Rasmussen doesn’t know exactly what is causing this increased emotional resiliency.

However, others note that it just makes sense. As reported in the Deseret News article The porn talk works: If parents dislike porn, kids will too, Washington State University associate professor Stacey Hust explains thatparents who can talk to their teens about the hard topics enjoy a more open communication with them.

Hust explains that these adolescents benefit in more ways than one. They “tend to have stronger self-esteem and be higher critical thinkers and be…more aware of the media’s role in their life.”

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