Dear Enda,

My wife found porn on our teenage son’s phone and has asked me to “have a word” with him about it. We have a good relationship and he works with me on the farm. I feel that I can talk to him about most things but let’s face it, talking about sex to your son is something no dad is prepared for.

Any ideas?

Enda replies

There is only one thing worse than your parents finding your porn stash, and that is your parents talking to you about it.

Things were very different in our day when you would never talk to your dad about sex, but your son is growing up in a completely different world to ours.

In our day, we all joked about sex, but when the subject went anywhere serious where we could have learned something, the curtain was pulled tightly shut. Most of us had to stumble along and put the pieces of the jigsaw together ourselves.

As a teenager, he is much more susceptible to the effect of porn so it’s vital that we not just talk to him about it but understand why we need to talk about it.

Pornhub alone has 81 million visits per day. This is more traffic than Amazon, Twitter and Netflix combined. So porn is here to stay and there is no way that you can stop it or prevent your son looking at it.

Adolescents are turning to pornography for their sexual education because they are finding it hard to find reliable and factual information about sex elsewhere. In the absence of other reliable information, porn becomes a valuable resource for them.

Porn use stems from an unfulfilled need for connection. The more he watches porn, the more difficulty he will have making emotional connections with his partner. So, let’s start by building up his connection with those in his life rather than those in porn movies.

Focus on the quality of your relationship with him. Teenage boys can and do talk to their dads when they feel safe enough to do so. Whenever he talks, listen and find identification with his experience from your own. This will help him feel safe.

Keep it light-hearted and irreverent. Explore his attitude and mirror this. Sex education has got to be from your lived experience and not just about the mechanics.

Share the embarrassment of how you felt as a teenager. Get yourself ready for conversations about the porn available when you were his age and how you learned about sex.

Keep the conversation about what his mum found true to science. Admit what you know and don’t know. Look up studies on the effects of porn and teach him how to be a critical consumer of the research on the effect of porn as well as the actual porn itself.

This fits exactly with his adolescent development. He is exposed to it anyway. So, complete the picture for him. Adolescents like to question things and they like to be invited to think for themselves.

Trying to scare or jam him into one particular point of view doesn’t work, gets the opposite result and creates power struggles. Your son needs to learn how to cultivate his relationships. If you don’t want him to learn this from porn, you have to give him a realistic alternative.

Opening up and talking will be as much a journey for you as it will be for him, but there is so much learning for you both in doing so. Best of luck!

Enda Murphy is a cognitive behavioural therapist who focuses on supporting adults to support young people. For more details go to www.seeme.ie. Please email your own queries for Enda to advice@farmersjournal.ie

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