Pornography’s Effects on Children

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/opinion/pornographys-effects-on-children.html

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To the Editor:

Re “On PornHub, Nobody Knows You’re a Kid,” by Judith Shulevitz (Sunday Review, July 17):

Ms. Shulevitz, writing about efforts to restrict access to pornography, says that “left-leaning parents shy away from a cause they identify with right-wing culture warriors.”

Labeling parents as conservative or liberal does a disservice to children. Political ideology is about adults and their worldview, not about children and their developmentally based needs.

The purpose of parenting is to nurture children, who come into the world as helpless, totally dependent infants, to a state of near total independence as young adults. When we make parenting about politics we miss that point entirely. Parenting is a job, and if we’re really good at what we do, our children eventually fire us, which was the point all along.

One part of nurturing independence is providing young people with the kind of knowledge, values and skills they’ll need to make healthy, caring, respectful, responsible and ethical sexual decisions.

So the question for all parents is the same: If viewing pornography does the exact opposite, and may in fact become inevitable for many if not most teenagers and even children, how do we make sure to “get there first” so we’re the ones framing the conversation about sex, not an exploitative commercial medium?

DEBORAH M. ROFFMAN

Baltimore

The writer, a teacher of human sexuality at the Park School of Baltimore, is the author of “Talk to Me First: Everything You Need to Know to Become Your Kids’ ‘Go-To’ Person About Sex.”