“It’s time to take this seriously. If we want our children to find love someday and to take pleasure in intimate relationships, then they must not learn about sex from porn videos. And, if governments and regulatory agencies insist on doing little to nothing to age-gate the internet, then the entire responsibility for protection falls upon parents.”

As the creator of the Protect Young Eyes website, Chris McKenna gets emails all the time from parents. In a recent essay for the must-bookmark After Babel Substack, he offered this example. Tragically, this is the norm:

“I just caught my 11-year-old at 2 am looking at Pornhub. I’m totally heartbroken and don’t know how to recover from this. I have been crying for an hour trying to figure out what I did wrong. Where did I fail him? Is there a way to block incognito mode [on an iPad]? This is what he used, and it breaks my heart to think how many times this has happened. I don’t think I can sleep at all thinking about this.”

That is now the typical, or average, age for a child’s first exposure to pornography. Imagine the realities a few years down the road, in a world in which 90% of teens have their own smartphones.

When I talk with parents about smartphones, they often mention concerns about pornography, but rarely mention “sexting” — a form of digital abuse that is especially dangerous for girls. Truth is, it’s hard to discuss one abomination without facing the reality of the other. Does anyone have a solid statistic on how many teen suicides are linked to sexting? Search for the word “sextortion.”

As a rule, I hear parents say one of two things when talking about online porn.

(1) That is not going to happen with my kids. I know them too well and there is no way they could hide that from me. Thus, I don’t need to look for alternatives to them having smartphones.

(2) I have no idea how to deal with all of this. It seems like it’s impossible to stop all of this from happening, so I hope my kids will turn out OK. We will do what we can, but I don’t think we can look for alternatives to them having smartphones.

Note the common denominator in those two statements? In most cases, parents are convinced there is nothing that they can do, or need to do, to rebel against the norms of digital screen culture.

Let me stress: Online porn is not the biggest issue here. It is a symptom of a culture in which parents, including believers in traditional forms of faith, are waving white flags of surrender. With a nod to Jonathan “The Anxious Generation” Haidt, let me stress: The disease is parents accepting a smartphone-based childhood as the norm. Online porn and sexting are dangerous symptoms of this sickness that must be addressed by parents, pastors, teachers and counselors.

This is a spiritual issue, a matter of discipleship in the digital age. It is essential for the religious leaders (see “Jonathan Haidt’s warnings for spiritual leaders”), including academics who train clergy, to grasp this. This needed to happen soon after the 2007 screens-culture earthquake that changed the world. Still, better late than never.

It’s tragic that fears about porn have to be discussed in religious sanctuaries and classrooms. But that’s the world in which we live. In his introduction to McKenna’s recent essay, After Babel leader Zach Rausch shared this:

When I was eleven years old, back in 2006, a friend giddily showed me a website he had found on his computer. It was titled “XNXX.” I was nervous for us to lie and say we were 18 (would we get in trouble?) to enter the site, but he did not seem worried. I still remember the dark blue background, and the endless supply of hardcore porn meant for adults. This was the first time I had seen a naked woman, let alone adults having sex. We quickly closed the site when we heard his mom come up the stairs toward the bedroom. From that day forward, when I was alone by a computer, the thought would pop into my mind: XNXX?

Now, in 2025, eleven-year-olds no longer need a laptop or desktop computer. They can access the same kind of content, even more extreme and plentiful, by pulling a phone out of their pockets. They can now access it anytime, anywhere — in the bedroom, bathroom, classroom, or backseat of the car. Nineteen years later, and they still just need to click that button to say that they are 18. The availability and accessibility of hardcore online pornography (often violent, degrading, and addictive) is unprecedented. The effects of watching hardcore online pornography on children’s social and sexual development is not well understood, especially for the many boys who watch it every day, year after year.

It is almost impossible to do safe research on this topic, McKenna noted, for a simple reason: Who would want to randomly assign children to watch hardcore, even violent, pornography?

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