G'day, my name is Matt Fradd and this is Ascension Presents.
This is gonna be a two-part video that I want to do.
So this week I want to teach you how to talk to your young children about pornography.
I know, I know. Keep watching — I promise it'll be okay.
Next week I want to help you as a parent to talk to your older children about pornography.
All right, so, the first thing you might be thinking is: are you serious?
That's ridiculous. I'm not gonna talk to my kids about pornography.
I don't want to scandalize them. I don't want to put these awful thoughts in their head.
Okay, I get that, all right. We shouldn't scandalize our children,
nor should we be putting vulgar, dirty images in their head.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be talking to our children about pornography.
Put it this way: either YOU educate your children about pornography
or the porn industry will educate your children about pornography.
We live in an unfiltered world. What we need to give our children is a filter for an unfiltered world.
Not just to block them from the bad stuff — though that is a very good thing and you have to be doing that,
especially when your children are young — but to give them a discerning heart
so that they will know how to respond when they see pornography.
Like, your children are going to see pornography. So how do we prepare them?
Well, first of all, let me respond to that objection
that maybe was bubbling up in your mind about not wanting to scandalize them.
I would say this: we talk to our children about all sorts of things that are even worse than pornography,
but we do it in an age-appropriate way.
Okay, what do I mean?
Suppose you're at a movie theater and there's people all around.
Your child might run off to the bathroom on his own.
You don't know where they are and so what felt like 10 minutes — maybe it was just one minute.
And you're looking for them frantically and when you finally find them,
you get down on their level, don't you? And you look them in the eye and you say,
“Sweetheart, you can't run away from dad like that.” Right?
And they'll say, “Well why not? I was just going to the bathroom.”
“Okay, I understand that. But you can't just run away in a crowded place like this.”
Now if they were to say “Why?” what might be a reasonable response that a parent might give?
They'll say something like, “Well a bad man could take you away from us.”
That's a reasonable thing to say because — though it's unlikely — it is a real possibility.
Because you love your children and want the good for your children,
you have to protect your children so that evil things don't happen to them.
And yet you'll notice you did it in an age-appropriate way.
You didn't get down on their level and start explaining sex trafficking and abduction to them.
You said what you needed to say in an age-appropriate way.
If we can say that about these sorts of evils, we should, I think, and can
speak about pornography in an age-appropriate way as well.
How might this happen?
A few years back I was driving in the car with a friend and my son was in the back.
He was about six and out of nowhere he said, “Dad, what's pornography?”
I paused, caught my breath, and said “Whaaat?”
He said, “Pornography.”
Now I suppose it shouldn't shock me that my son would ask me about that.
I've written books on pornography, I speak about it... but it did shock me.
And I said this... Now the reason I'm relaying this to you is, I think that it was quite a good way to handle it.
And you might adjust it accordingly and use it yourself.
So I caught my breath and I turned around and I said, “Okay, you know how there are good pictures?”
And he said, “Like comics?” I said, “Yeah, like comics. But also...”
and I took out my phone and I opened up an image of his brother Peter.
I said “Well see, like, your brother Peter? This is a good picture.”
And my son said “Aww, he's so cute! I miss him already.”
I said “Right, he is really cute. Well, this is a good picture and it makes us want to do good things.
But pornography is bad pictures that make us want to do bad things.”
And he said, “Well what are they pictures of?”
And here I want to thank Kristen Jenson who wrote a fantastic little book called
‘Good Pictures, Bad Pictures: Porn Proofing Today's Young Kids,’ because I learned this from her.
I said to my son, “Well, pornography is pictures or videos or cartoons of people
who are showing parts of their body that their bathing suit should cover.
And if you ever see this, you should always tell mummy and daddy, and we'd be really proud of you.
You might think that you'd be in trouble but you wouldn't be in trouble.
We'd actually be really proud of you for doing that, okay?”
That's it.
Now is that a thorough explanation, a sufficient explanation, of pornography?
No. But it'll do for now.
Notice I didn't say if you go to the internet and type in porn, that's what porn is.
I'm not putting ideas in his head.
I'm saying picture, videos, cartoons, maybe someone shows it to you,
maybe you see it online, maybe you see it on the television,
of people showing parts of their body that their bathing suit should cover.
That's it.
That should not scandalize you and it will not scandalize your child.
If they haven't seen pornography, what are they thinking of?
Maybe they're thinking of mum, maybe they're thinking of their brother and sister in the bathtub, okay?
And then you say to them, “You should always come to me.”
Now I can't tell you just how many people write to me on a weekly basis
who are young kids, some as young as 12 years old, you know.
They'll write to me after a talk and say “Matt, I'm totally addicted to porn and I'm so afraid to tell my mum.”
And that's why I'm begging you as a parent to talk to your child about pornography.
I think to myself, my life would be a whole lot different, I think, if I was able to come to my parents
and say, yeah this is something I saw and it's something I'm struggling with.
And if they were then to offer help — I'm pretty sure they would have offered help if I’d have said it,
but they never warned me about it.
Maybe we could have got away with that back in the day,
before the internet for every screen — including Xboxes and iPads and computers — accessed the Internet.
But today, we can't get around it. You've got to talk to your children about porn.
Now, you probably have a thousand and one questions. Here's a couple of suggestions, okay?
Number one: I recorded a whole full-length CD with the Augustine Institute called ‘Protecting Innocence.”
We'll try and put a link to that here just beneath the video — you can go to listen to that online.
Second thing I would recommend that you do is get Kristen Jensen's fantastic book —
again, we'll put a link below:
‘Good Pictures, Bad Pictures: Porn Proofing Today's Young Kids.”
It's a beautifully illustrated book designed for you to read to your children about pornography.
I beg you to get that. Don't just get one, get two. Give one to a friend,
or get a lot of copies and give them to everyone in your neighborhood.
And then thirdly, I'd say, you might want to check out our podcast, ‘Love People, Use Things’
in which we help parents have these conversations with their children.
Is this a difficult conversation to have? Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is.
Do we wish we didn't have to have it? Yep. Yep.
But we live in a fallen world and we cannot get away from that fact.
And we can't get away from the fact that our children are going to be accessing the Internet
and therefore they’re going to be seeing porn and therefore we owe it to them to teach them
what to do in advance, before they see it.
I'm Matt Fradd, this is Ascension Presents.
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Thanks for watching!