With general societal shifts away from organized courtship, and the advent of social media, dating apps, and instant forms of communication, the dating landscape looks very different than it did even when most of us parents were navigating it. Establishing a dialogue around what dating is for, how it can happen, when it can happen, and with whom provides kids with solid parameters for exploring their personal preferences and needs. The Number Twelve Rule also may help children identify when someone is attempting to lure them into an unsafe and inappropriate relationship via grooming.
Key Takeaways
Children may not date while they are under twelve years old.
Early dating is generally chaperoned group events, school functions, and interactions at school. Kids may begin to experiment with physical intimacy like holding hands and kissing.
Due to developmental differences and differing legal statues, once a child has started dating, they should not date anyone more than twelve months older or twelve months younger than they are.
No one over the age of eighteen should begin dating someone under the age of eighteen.
Dating is not required, but socializing and developing a social support system are very important in fostering and maintaining resilience, so socializing should be encouraged and facilitated.
CHAPTER 13 “The Internet Is for Porn”—Avenue Q
“I just can’t freaking believe it. He’s had the phone for what, six months? And he LOST IT ALREADY?” my friend Liz vented. “I got him a phone so he could call me in an emergency, and it’s just gone.” As a single mom, Liz has done a great job in raising her son, Jackson. He’s respectful, sweet, smart, funny, and kind. He helps with the garbage without being asked. He does the dishes. He mows the lawn. He talks to her about his friends and video games and the books he loves. They are very close.
But he’s also a tween boy, and he can be irresponsible. Just like any of his friends, Jackson sometimes forgets his football cleats, leaves his homework on the kitchen table, or neglects to brush his teeth. So this wasn’t a huge stretch of the imagination—he lost his phone. He had apologized and had promised to earn the money to replace it. It seemed like everything was just going to move on until he had enough saved to buy a new one.
The night they chose to watch Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was just like any other Friday Movie Night in their apartment. Liz popped the popcorn, Jackson prepped the movie, and they sat down to watch it together. They watched as Miles was bitten by a radioactive spider. They watched as he turned into Spider-Man, developing his myriad of powers. They watched as Miles resisted telling his dad about the changes he was experiencing for fear of being rejected or shamed. They watched him struggle to do so many adult things when he was barely ready to handle being a teen. They watched Miles lean on help from Peter Parker, the original Spider-Man. A person who was only kind of equipped to care for him, and certainly wasn’t unconditional in his love and support.
When the movie ended, they did what they always did—discuss the themes and takeaways. “Oh man, I loved the part when he crashed the trains in the supercollider!” Jackson said enthusiastically.
“Yeah, that was such cool animation! I thought Peter Parker was an interesting choice for a role model for Miles as he was learning to become Spider-Man. I wonder what he learned from having to almost … parent Miles,” Liz asked aloud.
Jackson thought about it for a bit and suggested that maybe having to watch Miles be so responsible made Peter want to try harder.
“That’s a good point,” Liz said, “but is it really fair that Miles had to do all that? Like … what do you think would have happened if he had just told his parents what was up?”
Jackson was quiet. He didn’t meet Liz’s gaze when he said, “I mean … he was scared they would be mad.”
“Well, yeah, he was scared—that’s true. But do you think his mom and dad would really have abandoned him just because he was accidentally bitten by a spider? It wasn’t his fault! I mean, would I ever leave you to deal with Kingpin all by yourself just because I didn’t like Spider-Man?”
Jackson quietly agreed that no, his mom would never leave him high and dry, and that it would have been a much shorter movie if Miles had just asked for help. Then he declared that he was getting tired and walked himself up to bed.
Roughly a week later, Jackson approached Liz as she was making their breakfast. “Mom, I need to tell you something.”
“What’s up, bud?”
“I didn’t lose my phone,” he confessed. “I hid it.”
“You hid it? Why would you hide it?”
“Because … I looked up some … bad pictures on it and I didn’t know how to get them off of there and I didn’t want you to be mad at me. So I hid it.”
Liz had to take a second to process that information. He was only eleven—she didn’t think she needed to be ready for the porn conversation quite yet, but clearly, they had arrived at a crossroads. She took a deep breath and began from the beginning.
“Oh, dude. Okay, so you have pornography on your phone and you were scared I’d be super pissed that you looked at it?”
“Yeah. And I saw some … scary stuff … and I didn’t know how to close it.”
“Oh jeez—scary stuff?”
“Yeah, some gifs and stuff.”
It was time to have a thorough sit-down and get everything out in the open. She made them each a cup of hot cocoa, texted me to let me know she wouldn’t be making it to hang out, and walked Jackson through the completely natural but sometimes terrifying maze that is curiosity in early puberty.
Nobody wants to pay for researching porn. Okay, that’s not true—some people want to pay for researching porn, and may have financial motivations for doing so. Unfortunately, that means a lot of porn research is going to end up biased. When people have an agenda, the research is at risk of being swayed in whatever direction favors the financiers. Not all of it—I’ll be the first to admit that some research into porn is relatively balanced—but it’s difficult to find sources that do not have bias in sampling, measures, definitions … the list goes on. Because of this, we don’t have a lot of great information on the impact of pornography today—we don’t really understand what the change in access to pornography has done to us as humans because the children with so much increased access are not yet grown up. We have a little bit of an idea based on statistical usage, a small group of studies, and the variation in some of the diagnoses associated over time, but we only have best guesses as to what it all means. This is especially true for the impact of porn on teenage brains.
One thing we do know is that the age of first exposure to pornography has gotten younger than in previous generations in part because of the internet—studies vary, but the average age of first exposure generally lands somewhere between ten and thirteen years of age. Though it’s not well studied, anecdotal reports assert that previously, people didn’t generally interact with pornographic imagery until their early to mid-teens. Maybe somebody stumbled upon their dad’s dirty magazine and brought it to the clubhouse for their friends to see, or snuck into the room behind the curtain at the back of the video rental place. Usually, they were more likely to have been exposed to nonsexualized images of bodies before they stumbled across pornography or erotica—case in point, my interest in the World Book Encyclopedia and National Geographic at a young age. But truly pornographic and erotic imagery wasn’t something we ran into all that often in our pre-2000s middle childhoods.
As a result of this increase in access, we need to be having conversations with our children about pornography—discussing how the facts we do have about porn interact with our values and morals—and having them earlier than we ever expected to. How can we in good conscience tell our kids “Just don’t look at it,” particularly when we have evidence that sexualized human bodies have been a point of curiosity for human beings for centuries? By denying both the innate curiosity about such images and the ease of availability, we may choose to simply tell our kids “Don’t look.” And in so doing, we run the risk of shutting down the conversation … and risk having our kids seek information from less trustworthy sources. Instead, by saying “Here’s an alternative that is safer for your brain,” we both steer our kids away from doing what we don’t want them to do and keep the lines of communication open.
I don’t want my kids watching video pornography on the internet for a myriad of reasons, all of which I’m willing to spell out to them. As I said above, pornographic imagery and erotica has been around for millenia, and curiosity about these images is not a new feature of the human race. Video pornography, however, has only been around … well, since the advent of the video camera (though the zoetrope and other forms of “moving pictures” were probably used for viewing pornography long before that). And widespread easy access to video pornography via the internet has only been around since the early 2000s. It is partially this newness and our lack of understanding about the long-term impacts of pornography that makes me say “I don’t want you interacting with this until your brain is done cooking in your skull, because we don’t have a good idea of what it’s doing to your development, but most signs point to it not being good for you.”
Looking at pictures of other people’s bodies is something that even I did as a kid—kids are curious, and kids who have new and precariously balanced sex hormones are some of the most curious. In the interest of balancing a curious brain with my responsibility of protecting that brain, I decided to start having conversations with my children about pornography early and to check in often. There’s a lot of discussion and debate and discourse about porn’s place in a healthy sexual relationship and sexual identity, and that is something for individuals to explore on their own. But as parents try to help children navigate the world of intimacy, romance, sexuality, and relationships, identifying pornography as something that can get in the way of a healthy relationship when engaged with the wrong way is something worth prioritizing.
Sample Scripts
Protecting Your Brain
Early Adolescence (ages 10+), or as Soon as They Have an Unmonitored Device—Whichever Is Earlier
“Hey, kiddo, your brain is going to get really curious soon. You will want to know what other people’s bodies look like, and you might even look for images that show you what you’re looking for. I know that idea seems weird to you now because you’re not necessarily excited about it yet, but the time will come when other people’s bodies are attractive to you. I want to talk about this with you before that happens, because it’s important to me that you understand the boundaries we need to put in place to help keep you safe. Right now, I have safe search turned on on your tablet and I have unsafe images blurred out. Not because I don’t think you should ever see them, but because I don’t think your brain is ready to see them right now. I want you to build an understanding about your own body before you start understanding other people’s bodies. Got it? And I want you to know that if you’ve already looked, I’m not mad at you and you’re not in trouble. If you have, and you have questions, I am here to help—just let me know.”
Middle Adolescence (ages 12 to 13)
