During the coronavirus pandemic, stressed out parents have embraced screens as a reliable way to keep their kids entertained for hours at a time.
But amidst the classroom Zoom calls, marathon Minecraft sessions, and YouTube bingeing, there may be an unwelcome distraction: porn.
Kids find porn online regardless of whether there's a global pandemic that's forced more than 50 million of them to stay home from school. Now many kids happen to be spending more time online with probably less supervision, more feelings of loneliness, and a lot of curiosity.
A new set of commercials produced by AMAZE, a YouTube sex ed series for adolescents and teens, gives parents a glimpse of what happens when adults aren't aware of what their children encounter online.
In one video, a young boy has spent the day with his dad, playing video games, getting a haircut, and going for a drive. He seems poised to ask his father a hard question but follows up with a casual "never mind." Fast forward to bedtime, when he disappears under his sheets along with his glowing device. A worrisome question flashes on the screen: "If you aren't teaching your kid about sex, who is?"
In two other videos, kids raise the subject of boners and masturbation with a stunned parent.
The commercials were produced alongside a parent's guide to talking about porn and videos featuring Melissa Pintor Carnagey, a licensed social worker, sexuality educator, and founder of the educational business Sex Positive Families. (The agencies Sanctuary Content and Goodby Silverstein & Partners made the commercials pro bono.)
Pintor Carnagey said in an interview that since stay-at-home orders began, she's received requests from parents for advice and resources after discovering their child accidentally found or searched for porn.
She said it's important for parents to start shame-free conversations with children about seeing online porn and for families to develop a safety plan for how to deal with encountering sexually explicit media. Pintor Carnagey covers tips, strategies, and resources to have these conversations in the videos produced with AMAZE.
The bottom line, she said, is that "we need to be more accessible to them than porn is."
Topics Health Social Good Family & Parenting
