Pornography Exposure: How to Keep Your Child Informed and Safe Online

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we are talking about the sensitive but really important topic of pornography, as it relates to our children’s safety and wellness. Many of you have written in asking me to cover this topic on the show. It’s something that we all are increasingly confronted with, our kids are increasingly confronted with, and I think especially perhaps in the era of this pandemic, with kids spending so much more time on devices, this is something that’s been in the forefront of a lot of your minds about “How do I address this with my kids?” It’s really important for us to set aside our own discomfort around the topic, so that we can be an accurate and healthy source of information and a support for our kids, because they need it when it comes to this topic. It can be really difficult to know how to talk about it, when to address it, and how to keep kids as safe as we can. And so to help us explore all of this, we have got Kristen Jenson on the show with us today. Let me tell you a bit about her.

She’s the founder of Defend Young Minds, and a number one bestselling author of the Good pictures, Bad pictures, a series of read aloud books. They’ve been translated into 10 languages and are now augmented by a guidebook for professionals that helps child therapists and educators. She’s also the executive producer of the Brain Defense Digital Safety Curriculum, a powerful and engaging video-based course for families and educators. Kristen is a positive voice for raising empowered, resilient screen-smart kids who know how and why to reject pornography. She instills hope and confidence, and leaves her audience with pragmatic advice they can act on immediately. She’s going to do that for all of us today. Kristen is also a mother of three and a grandmother of two. Welcome to the show, Kristen, thank you for being here.

Kristen Jenson

Oh, it’s wonderful to be with you, Nicole.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So as I said in the intro, this is something that there’s an increasingly large number of parents writing in about, saying, “Boy, this has suddenly become an issue in my family”, or “I’m reading more about this issue, and I haven’t ever talked about it with my kids. Do I raise it? How old should they be?”, all of these questions. And so I’m excited to dive into sort of the nitty gritty of that with you. But before we do that, I would actually like to start by having you share how you came to be focused on this issue. I know you have a story around that, and I’d love just for you to open this whole topic up by talking about what got you interested in focusing on issues of pornography and kids, and maybe even just digital safety more broadly?

Kristen Jenson

Yeah. Well, thank you, Nicole. Well, I raised my kids, and yes, pornography was an issue, it was becoming an issue as more and more people had access to the internet, but it was through computers. And then when mobile devices became a thing, that’s really what tipped the scale, and that is what changed the world, when the iPad came out and when the iPhone came out, and now everybody has a portal to porn in their pocket. But to be honest, when I was growing up, I never really thought I would have anything to do with this topic.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I mean you were a young person going “I know what I’m going to do with my life”, right?

Kristen Jenson

Did not see that coming. But as we all know, life throws you little curveballs. And one night, I got a call from a friend that I just met, and she told me this very heartbreaking story of how her son, a 17-year-old son, he was the oldest child, they found out that he was acting out sexually on his younger brothers and sisters all the way down to the 4-year-old, and porn was involved. So I woke up the next morning, and I just felt compelled to go and try to find a resource. I’m one of those people that believes there’s a book for every problem, probably 10, right? So I thought “I’ll find a book for her and I’ll get it for her” and well, I couldn’t find anything. I knew there were body safety books and all those kinds of books, but I didn’t see anything about pornography. And I’m like, kids are getting into this at young ages. I heard lots of stories about this, and I knew it could become an addiction. So I got this crazy idea after I’d started doing more research, that I should write a book for kids to help them understand, to protect them basically. To help them be protected against pornography, to help parents start those conversations. So that’s what I did. I thought it would take a couple weeks in the summer, but it took about three years. And anyway, it’s been a wonderful journey, and I love, love, love helping parents tackle this tough topic.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, it’s so relevant, because I think how you framed it when you talked about it, it’s important for us to be addressing this because our kids are going to be exposed. This is the reality of the world we live in, whether we want it to be or not. We can have all kinds of arguments or discussions about whether porn should or shouldn’t exist, whether kids should or shouldn’t have access. But the reality is they do, even under circumstances when we are trying really hard for them not to. And so I think that’s how I want to frame the rest of this conversation, it is really around the idea that your kids, my kids, our kids are going to be exposed to this in some way, shape, or form, regardless of what we do. And when we as adults take a head in the sand sort of approach around that of naively thinking, “Well, maybe they won’t”, or “We don’t have it at home”, or “Our church has said not to look at it, so they won’t”, the reality is that even kids who don’t intend to, come across it. And that’s happened in my own family. So I think framing this like, look, this is something that if you are raising children or you are working with kids at this point in time, this is something relevant for all of us to be thinking about, right?

Kristen Jenson

Absolutely. No child deserves to face the porn industry alone. That’s what I say. We have to prepare them. And if you are caught off guard in a situation, you are vulnerable. But if you are prepared, you have a chance of being strong and making a good decision. And it’s the same way with pornography. Your kids are going to be exposed. And it’s not that they’re a bad kid if they’re curious about it, right? So they’re good, it’s just that they’re human. They’re biologically human, and so unless we give them some good tools and arguments about why they shouldn’t be pulled into pornography, then we’re leaving them vulnerable.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

That’s so true. And I think the other piece about vulnerability is simply from a safety standpoint, when we haven’t talked with our kids about this or educated them about it, it does, especially in the world of online predators, and all kinds of things that happen now with all that, we do leave them vulnerable from a safety standpoint. If we aren’t clear with them about what is safe and unsafe behavior, what is appropriate and inappropriate for adults to be talking with kids about or to be showing kids, it can really become actually a safety issue, and I think there’s a lot of parents who are aware of the safety issues involved.

Kristen Jenson

Absolutely, there are, should we call it sextortion? And it’s not kids that are online, posting sexual things, that are vulnerable. It’s kids that are online a lot. And that has increased during the pandemic. And there are rings of sextortion specialists, and they specialize in — someone meets your kid, strikes up a friendship, they’re handed off to another person, they then get your kid to send a picture. And then the next person gets a sexual picture and threatens them. And then the kid thinks they’re just involved with one friend. And they’re really being played by a very sophisticated, well-oiled sextortion machine. And kids, this can just ruin their lives. We want to prepare them, and not only teach them, but monitor them. Because we can talk and we can have the talks, but they need us to monitor. And sometimes — I’ll just say this: Sometimes we are just going to have to make time for that. We may have to give up something else to make time to monitor those things with our kids.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So true. That’s exactly how I talk about it, look, this is just maybe an inconvenient but necessary part of parenting in today’s world. If we are going to give our children access to these devices and everything that they can access with these devices, it’s our responsibility to not only be teaching and modeling for them how to do that in a healthy way, but also being the responsible adult to monitor what they’re doing, to take steps to keep them as safe as we can, knowing that there are things that can get through even filters and parental controls and whatever, but we need to be doing our part with that. It’s not fair to just give kids these devices and say, “Well, good luck, I hope everything is safe and works out!” which of course is what no parent would consciously say they’re doing, and yet, that is the reality of what happens a whole lot of the time.

Kristen Jenson

Absolutely. We have a guide on Defend Young Minds. It’s a guide to assess if your child is ready for a smartphone. It’s like 10 questions. We have some other things that are helpful for parents to really decide on that, because kids need to be mature enough. You need to step them up in their technology use, making sure that they’re following the rules at this level, then they can go to the next level. But to hand a smartphone to a 9-year-old or a 7 year old, it’s just basically not going to turn out well.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I talk about it as the equivalent of giving a kid a Ferrari, and they don’t even have a driver’s license yet. We just need to really think that through. And sometimes the question is more, “Are we as the parent ready for our kid to have a smartphone?”, meaning are we ready to do our part with that? And, of course, a big component of that with the monitoring and the communication, and the management of that is around porn and the safety issues that go on. So let’s start to delve into some of the specifics of that, because I think we have made a good case for the fact that all parents need to have this on their radar, and this is something we need to tackle with kids. But the how to do that gets really tricky, right? So let’s delve into some of the nitty gritty about it. I’d love to have you start by talking about what’s the right age or developmental level to start this conversation? Because I know from my clinical practice, a lot of parents don’t even begin to think about having this conversation until maybe their kid is in high school or they’ve become aware that their kid has been exposed. And yet, I know you have a really different important perspective on when we should at least start having some education and conversation around this.

Kristen Jenson

Yeah. So when I started writing my first book, Good pictures, Bad pictures: Porn-proofing Today’s Young Kids, it’s geared to a 7 year old to an 11 year old. You read it with your child. It teaches them about their brain and about addiction and how these bad pictures can become an addiction. But then I had parents coming to me, both moms and dads asking me, “Would you write a book for preschoolers? For younger kids?” I mean, the first time someone asked me that, I felt like someone sucker punched me in the gut, just like, “What?”. But then I looked around. Every 3-year-old is on an iPad, so of course, they need some kind of gentle warning. So it’s like everything else, you want to start very basic, very simple, and kids don’t need to know the whole ugly part of it. But they need to know enough to recognize it.

So I say they need three things: First, they need a definition. They need to understand so they can recognize it. A definition of pornography, or if you don’t want to use the word pornography, “Bad pictures”, if you are talking to your 3-year-old, but something to help them understand that there are pictures out there that are harmful. And that’s the next step, to teach them that they’re harmful. So in the definition I use in my books, it’s something like this. Pornography is pictures, videos, even cartoons, of people with little or no clothing on that focus on the parts of the body we keep covered with a swimsuit. Now you can say, “Well, that’s just nudity.” Yes, and I don’t think all nudity is porn, but to a child, you need to know if they’re online or on an app and they’re seeing nudity, don’t you want to know about it? I mean, chances are it’s not the Sistine Chapel that they’re looking at, right?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Or an anatomy book or a science website or something. And if it is, great, move along, but probably that’s not what it is.

Kristen Jenson

Exactly. And we mentioned that in the book too. It’s not diagrams, but it’s these pictures that focus, and it might make you feel a certain way. So give them a good definition, age-appropriate. And then second, teach them the harms of pornography, why it’s harmful, what it can become, how it can change their point of view on looking at other people. And then third, give them a plan so they know what to do when they see it. And kids will — I have so many stories of children responding to this. You just teach them what it is, you tell them why it’s harmful, and then you give them a plan. In our younger book, we have the “Turn, Run & Tell” plan, and in our older book, it’s the Can Do plan, and it stands for five steps. One 9-year-old boy, his mom read him Good Pictures, Bad Pictures, he went to school, and on the playground, lo and behold, a third grader had a phone and showed him pornography. Well, he recognized it, he turned away, he realized he didn’t want to keep looking, and he went home and he told his mom. He said, “I was scared, but I knew what to do.” You can just feel the burden falling off his shoulders, and he had an ally, a trusted, safe place. And so then she could walk through with him and teach him about how to kind of forget those images or minimize their power, and how often they come up in the brain, and we have that in the books as well. So kids need our help, and they need it from a younger age than we would ever feel comfortable with. But the one thing people say about the books is that they’re very, very comfortable. And that was the goal, to help parents feel comfortable with this particular set of conversations, right?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s such an important point, because actually, when we are talking about whether it’s porn, or it’s sex, or it’s where babies come from, or whatever, we as the adults tend to be the uncomfortable one in the room. The kids are only uncomfortable if we are uncomfortable with it, and we put a lot of our emotional baggage and discomfort on them, when actually, the way you are recommending to approach this is just a very matter of fact, supportive way. That’s so beneficial to kids, but it does require some work on the part of a lot of adults to handle it in that way, right? Because a lot of adults get escalated, and then either want to avoid it, like “Right, oh, I’m uncomfortable with that. I don’t want to talk to my kids about that, that makes me uncomfortable”, or can approach it in a way that ends up putting perhaps a lot of shame or a lot of negative emotion into it that actually has negative impacts for kids too. Can we talk a little bit about that? Because I think having a book like this and listening to a podcast like this is such a valuable resource for having these conversations, but sort of the art of it is how we approach it and our emotion, and being the mom that you gave in the example where the son was able to come to her, and she didn’t flip out about it, she didn’t yell at him like “How could you look at that!” She just handled it in a very empathic, supportive way. And so I want to delve into that, how important that piece of it is for us as adults to handle it in that way.

Kristen Jenson

Well, we can do a lot more damage by freaking out. And so I would say that we don’t want to shame our children for being normal biological humans and being curious. They’re wired that way, we are all wired that way. So we kind of have to deal with our own emotions first, in some ways if we catch our child, or if we find out that they’ve been looking at pornography, or somebody has shown them pornography. If we are going to have a freak-out moment, that’s fine. Just go in the other room.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Have it in your own head.

Kristen Jenson

Take care of your own emotions first. Stay as calm as you can, because your kids shouldn’t need to take care of you, right? You take care of yourself. And they will feel safe if you can be calm around this topic. So what I suggest is if you find that your child has been shown this or has looked at it, to say, “Okay thank you for telling me, you did the right thing. I’m going to think about this and then we are going to have a talk about it later,” and go in and have your freak-out moment. And that’s okay, totally okay, I get it, the fear, the anger, the whatever, because if a neighbor or this other school child exposed your child to pornography, you are not feeling very happy about that.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And probably don’t call that kid’s mom right away either. Maybe give yourself a few breather moments.

Kristen Jenson

Right. That’s what you need to do, and you know what? You can take 24, 48, 72 hours to think about it, to really deal with your own emotions, and then come and confront or talk to your child about what you found on the iPad or what’s going on. And that is really the best advice I can give. And we have a guide called the “Oh, no. My Kid Saw Porn: The SMART plan.” That’s something that gives us a step-by-step plan about how to deal with the situation. I think every parent should be prepared, because pretty much you will have to deal with this. And if you are prepared, how much better are you going to be able to deal with it. And at the end of the day, it’s your relationship with that child, your love for that child, no matter if they’ve just briefly been exposed or if they’ve kind of been pulled into it, it’s the love and the relationship that’s going to, in the end, help them. But you can learn some very pragmatic things and plans, and kids can learn these things, and they can respond in ways that keep them safer. So, you are talking about the head in the sand thing — We all have two choices, we can go ahead and just cross our fingers and hope that our kid is never exposed, or that that exposure doesn’t happen until the week after we start talking about it. But we cannot control that. And at any age, it’s amazing, the stories I’ve heard of young children, young children being exposed, and they don’t know how to deal with it. One mom told me about how she went to pick up her two daughters, they were at a playdate. And when she drove up, she looked over, they were on the lawn, in the front yard. And the one girl that they were visiting was showing her kids something on the phone. And this is before she was even worried about this. They get back in the car, she goes “Oh, what was she showing you on her phone?” And they look at each other and they’re like, a My Little Pony video. But later when she read Good Pictures, Bad Pictures to them, they were able to unburden themselves and say “Mom, it wasn’t a My Little Pony video. It was pornography. She showed us pornography.” And then she was able to kind of go, “Okay, well, if this happens, again this is what we do.” And talk to them and be their ally and their strength. Kids do not do well. on their own. They need our help.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I love that you just raised that, because I think a lot of parents don’t understand that kids will keep secrets about those things if they’ve gotten the impression that this isn’t something that’s okay to talk about. And how do we give them that impression? By never talking about it, right? So they’re exposed to something and it’s like, “Whoa, let me go through all the files in my brain. I don’t have a file for this. This is not something that we talked about. No one’s ever talked about it. I’ve never seen this.” They, then, create a story in their mind of, “Oh, this is a bad thing to talk about. I shouldn’t bring this up with my parents or other adults”, and they won’t. And so many parents have said to me over the years, “Well, but of course I would have been supportive” or “Of course, I would have…”, but how? Your child doesn’t know that, because you have never put it out there that this was anything even on the radar that was okay to bring up. And kids will assume it’s not okay, unless you tell them otherwise. And that’s a beautiful example of that. It wasn’t until then, when Mom made it okay to talk about by reading the book and bringing it up, that they could unburden that secret that they’ve been carrying around that.

Kristen Jenson

Yeah. And you are right. There’s some research that shows that kids don’t… And kids expose other kids. When I found a Playboy on my dad’s side table, I guess who I showed it to? My 6- or 7-year-old little sister!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s never an adult.

Kristen Jenson

Right. So it’s innocent, it’s innocent. They don’t say the gravity of it. But they can be warned, and then they will turn around and even warn other children. I’ve heard stories of that where they will turn around, say “That’s pornography, and we shouldn’t be looking at it. It’s not good for us.” So kids need their own internal filter in their brain. They need a way to defend themselves because the porn industry is not making it easy. They are looking for new eyes and new consumers, and if you get them hooked young, then you’ve got them for life, in their business model. So we definitely want to help our children from a young age to defend themselves.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I want to follow up on that issue of getting kids hooked at a young age, but I want to go back to something that you were talking about with the head in the sand. I read a research paper fairly recently that looked at exposure to pornography in children, and found that by the time kids have reached the end of fifth grade — and this was a study done here in the US, so by the time they reached the end of fifth grade, 70+% of kids report that they’ve been exposed to at least something inappropriate in the context of pornography via their school use of devices. And I think it’s just really important to underscore that for parents and for educators, for anybody around kids, that even with the best intentions, even when they’re using it for school, this is insidious. It is on the internet, they are exposed to it. And so I think just to underscore the fact that the head in the sand thinking of, “Well, it won’t be my kid” or “Well, my kid’s not going to be exposed”, look: Over 70% of kids are saying they’ve been exposed in school by the time they leave fifth grade. We’d better be having these conversations.

Kristen Jenson

Yeah. And there’s also studies that study the naivete gap. They did one in the UK not too long ago, and they found out that, for example, 25% of parents said, “Well, yeah, I think my kid has probably been exposed to porn”, when it was 53%. And when you looked at the gender, they really were way off when it came to their girls. The girls are looking at porn as well, and we need to make sure that we have these conversations with our girls as much as our boys, because they’re both vulnerable and they’re both curious about sex. It’s a myth that girls aren’t curious about sex.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Totally! And let’s talk about where that’s happening a lot. It’s on social media, and what I find a lot of parents don’t realize is you can have great filters and parental controls set up on your kids devices, but guess what those parental controls and filters do not have the capability of extending into? The interior workings of social media apps like Snapchat, like Instagram, like any of these, and TikTok where kids, especially teen girls, are spending a whole lot of time on there, on those apps. And your parental controls will not protect them once they’re in those apps. And those apps, those platforms are filled with overt pornography, covert pornography, all kinds of sexualized stuff. And so my thing is, at some point, yes, we need to give kids access to these apps as they get to older ages, because they need to learn how to manage it, or they become adults who have no sense of how to do that. But we have to do it knowing what they’re going to be exposed to, and having armed them, and having had the conversations and the ongoing conversations. Don’t think for one minute that you are going to give your 12-year-old or your 10-year-old access to Instagram and they’re not going to be exposed to something inappropriate. They are. It’s going to happen.

Kristen Jenson

Yeah, and it’s very inappropriate it’s not just people having sex. The thing that’s so inappropriate about it all is the objectification. What happens in porn, you decouple love from sex, and you in fact, couple violence, degradation with sex. And we don’t want kids thinking that that’s what sex is all about, but that’s what they’re going to believe if that is their sex education. So I did a study where I talked to 10 people who had identified as addicted to porn, and we talked to them, we interviewed them to try to find out why kids hire porn. Why were they using pornography? What jobs were they hiring porn to do in their lives? It’s so interesting, we identified several different reasons, several different jobs that kids who are going to porn to do for them, but one of the biggest ones is to teach them about sex. So none of these kids or none these adults when they were kids, had parents that really talked to them in any meaningful way at all about sex. And so they had to find out, right? Today’s kids have easy access to find out about sex, but it’s not the kind of sex we want them to find out about. It’s a toxic version. And I find that a lot of parents, especially moms, are — good for them, if they’re not into porn, that’s great, I’m glad. But they need to know what is there, because their kids are bound to potentially see some of this. If you go to a porn site and you even just read the names of the videos, the titles, you’re going to get sick.

So anyway, I just think that we need to be aware. And I don’t go look at porn myself, but I read a lot about it, and I have looked at the titles of these videos, and I know that the best way for parents to help their children be free from the really negative impacts of pornography is to begin a conversation early, arm them with plans, arm them with knowledge, and start that that relationship. And I’ve heard so many moms say that it helped the relationship, that after they had these kinds of incidents where the child came to them and told them what had happened, they say it actually improved and strengthened the trust in their relationship and the bond. So don’t be afraid of it. It is really something that will strengthen your child and strengthen your relationship, because you are helping your child deal with a real threat.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, that’s so wonderfully said. And the piece that you said there around kids using porn to learn about sex, I think is something I hear from kids in my clinic a lot, especially teens and young adults. And one of the trends that we are seeing in the world of mental health, in the world of therapy, is so many young adults and even middle-aged adults who now are having significant problems in their adult relationships, in their sex lives, in being intimate with partners because of the impact of porn and using porn to learn about sex when they were younger, and it really can create a lot of dysfunction, a lot of challenges, a lot of issues later on, that then people spend a lot of years in therapy as adults trying to untangle, and end up with a lot of issues in their relationship. So we have talked around the safety issues, and obviously the health issues for kids, of wanting them to stay safe and not have addictive things. But also another piece here is helping set our kids up for healthy, intimate relationships as they get older.

Kristen Jenson

Absolutely. we don’t often hear ourselves saying, “I want my kids to have a great sex life!” Right? Well, we do. Of course we do. I want that’s what I want. I have a daughter that’s married, and I hope she has a great sex life, and I tried with what knowledge I had and a few books to talk with her about it. But the thing is that pornography teaches your child 180 degrees opposite of what you probably want to teach them about sex. And if they’re not getting it from you, then they’re getting such a toxic form of sex. And kids, there was a report again, out of the UK, they talk to kids, and these 11, 12, and 13 year old girls would say, “If that’s what sex is, it just makes me sick to think that my parents are doing that, and I don’t know that I want to actually have that kind of thing.” But the other part is there is a physical, physiological thing that happens called “Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction”. So if you are topping your brain out on porn, and teaching your brain that porn is a solo sport, and sex and arousal is when you watch your screen, and these extreme, extreme kinds of fetishes that people get into, then how is it that you are going to have a normal sexual relationship with your spouse? You have taught your brain to be aroused by something completely different and super extreme, and you no longer can enjoy. And so there are people that cannot function sexually because they’re so tox-ed out on porn. So I think every kid should know that, we should teach them that as they get older. You step them up in these conversations. Kids, as they grow older, can learn more. They can learn that porn fuels sex trafficking of minors. They can learn that porn is racist. And we talk a lot about this, all these topics on Defend Young Minds, because we want to give parents the information and the tools that they can then use to convince their children, because that’s what you have to do. You have to persuade them and give them good convincing arguments, scientific arguments, arguments that are backed up with studies, so that your kids have some good evidence, because they’re going to need a little backbone to be able to turn away from it and keep it out of their brain.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I think those are such excellent points. And I think the other piece of it is — I was having a conversation the other week with someone who specializes actually in sex therapy with couples who are having these kinds of issues, and she said, on the impact of porn that we need to help young people understand — And again, this isn’t a conversation with a 5-year-old, but it certainly is a conversation with a 15-year-old, is that porn is performance. It’s performance. It’s not real sex. It’s not real intimacy. And she said that the problem is that these kids think that what they’re seeing is actually what sex is, and they’re not understanding that this is performance for a camera. And so to your point, then they get into real relationships with other actual real human beings, and it’s like this is not what it is. They don’t understand that actually, porn has nothing to do with real intimate sexual relationships. And I think those are important things, even from the standpoint of helping kids to develop healthy sexuality, helping kids to understand the dynamics of relationships, to make healthy choices for themselves. Having these conversations around porn, that’s part of all of that, of helping kids grow in those older teen years and into those early adult years. It’s a part of helping them through all of that.

Kristen Jenson

Yeah. And really, the conversations about sex should start earlier, and they should go — I designed the books that you can read it to a child before you talk about sex, but definitely, those things need to go hand in hand. And you talk about performance. I love that because the most intimate sex is not about performance. It’s about love, and it’s about caring, and it’s about thinking about somebody else. And if our kids grow up thinking that they have to perform, then that just leads to the whole dehumanizing and objectifying that they get from pornography. So let’s teach them the what sex is, the most positive ideal view of sex that we all are reaching for, and not let pornography give them this toxic view. They will see it eventually, but then if we have taught them what the ideal should be, then they can know to reject it. They can recognize it, like, oh, man. That’s really showing women being treated in a terrible way, and somebody getting off to that. I mean, how horrible is that? So it’s so important. I wanted for my kids to grow up to have a sexual relationship that was loving and kind and respectful, and not like porn. And again, if you haven’t seen porn, if you haven’t looked at it, or even the titles of the porn films, you will not realize how bad it is and how destructive it is.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, and before we wrap up, I do want to touch a little bit on the addiction piece, because one of the things that I really like about the work that you are doing and the way that you write about this for kids, is helping them understand what’s going on in the brain. And I think this is a really compelling argument with them, and also just good factual information for them to have around what’s happening in their brain with this and the addictive potential. So we won’t get into all of that. But if you could just comment on that and why you felt that was such an important thing to include, not only in your books, but also in the other resources that you make available.

Kristen Jenson

Sure. We live in such an addictive — I mean, there’s so many types of addictions. Our smartphones, video games, drugs, alcohol, and porn, or gambling, shopping. I mean, so many things have become addictive.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Food.

Kristen Jenson

Food, right. That’s my personal choice. I think that we need to teach children, because actually, when I started, I was thinking of just writing a basic kind of primer on addiction. But then I was convinced that pornography was such — think about it, are your kids going to get addicted to cigarettes when they’re 8 years old? Probably not. Are they going to get addicted to alcohol or whatever? Probably not. But could they begin an addiction at 8 with porn? Yes, they can. And so that’s why I think it’s so important to teach a child that they have two brains, a thinking brain and a feeling brain, and how those brains work together. Kids love learning about this. And then how these bad pictures can actually trick the brain and get them going in a direction towards addiction. And if a child knows and understands the basics, and like I said, we don’t have time to go into the neuroscience of dopamine and all that, but it’s on my website. If a child understands the basics of addiction, just how addiction forms in the brain, then they are so much ahead of the curve, because now they understand, “Okay. I can see how this could snowball.” Most people that start out looking at porn, they’re not looking to end up where they end up: Addicted, alone, their marriage ruined, their job lost. No social, no good — I mean, there’s just so many downsides to it. So let’s help our kids understand the brain and how their brain works, and then it becomes a comfortable scientific conversation about how their brain works, and we give them the tools to defend that one precious brain that they have. And we owe them that. Every child deserves that, because like I said: What other addicting kind of thing can a child get into, other than the electronic addictions and the porn addictions? And the thing about pornography, too, is it’s very addicting, because it’s one of the strongest. I mean the sexual arousal template in the brain, first of all, it’s coming from different parts of the brain, not just one part. And it’s so strong, that it’s something that we need to help our kids understand. And I think that we can, we can do it!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And you have created such wonderful resources to help us do that. So let’s have you share — because you have got a variety of resources. We have mentioned the books, but talk to us about where we can get the books, what’s on your websites, give us the URLs.

Kristen Jenson

Sure. You can go to defendyoungminds.com/books or just go to defendyoungminds.com, look at the top menu. You will see our guides and our books. So I’ve got right now the three books, one for kids ages 3-6, the other 7-11, and then one for professionals, but parents can use this too, to help really inculcate those lessons from Good Pictures, Bad Pictures, using various activities. But we also have a variety of guides. Some of them are free. Our most popular one is probably “How to Talk to Kids About Porn, A Quick Start Guide”, it kind of gets you up and gives you a lot of basics about having these conversations. And then we also have that one about the Smart plan, that “My Kid Saw Porn—Now What?” And it helps you respond in a calm and smart way so that your child is benefited. And then we have articles that come out several times a month, and we have therapists, we have experts, we have people write for us. We talk about technology, the latest threats, but also kind of that softer side of relationships. For example, if you have blown up at your kid, if you made that mistake, what do you do now? How do you patch that up? We have that. We just have a plethora; we have a lot of stuff that all pertains to this huge topic. Just trying to give parents the ability to raise empowered, resilient screen-smart kids.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s awesome. So defendyoungminds.com. Awesome.

Kristen Jenson

And you will also find out about our curriculum, which is called Brain Defense, Digital Safety. You can teach that in the home. I’ve even heard kids as young as 6, up to about 11, depending on your kid, but they are video-based, they’re fun. It’s other kids teaching kids, so check that out. That’s on our website as well. And yeah, we have lots of resources to make this easier, because goodness knows, being a parent in this digital age is tough, and you will need all the tools that you can get.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

That’s right, and you have created some great ones. I encourage all of you listening to go check those out. Think about if you have a child maybe with a developmental disability, or maybe some challenges, you can look at the younger resources and use those, even if your child is chronologically older. These materials are created in such a way that you can use the younger version then to help even an older child with some disabilities be able to understand, because this applies to all of our kids with all kinds of diagnoses, and even with intellectual impairment too. They are being exposed as well, and we need to be talking with them. And in some ways, they’re even more vulnerable to these kinds of things because of some of their challenges. So we need to be including all of our kids in these conversations, and you have created such great tools to do that. Kristen, I really appreciate the work that you are doing around this topic. It is a sensitive and important and difficult one, and you do it just wonderfully, and help all of us feel more at ease and empowered with it, which I think is important. So thank you for that and for taking the time to be with us today. We appreciate it.

Kristen Jenson

Thank you so much, Nicole.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And thanks, as always, to all of you for being here and for listening. We will catch you back here next time.