What advice would you give to a father of a teenage daughter on how to protect her from boys, dating, and social media? How should fathers discuss these topics with their daughters?

The reason for citing these statistics is to share as much information about the reality of unrealistic expectations. Considering the average age of youth first seeing pornography being 11 and 12, and they do not know what healthy sex is, their understanding may be one of, “Is this the way sex is supposed to be?” Depending upon what the adolescent views, it may be significantly traumatic, and upon an adolescent’s first experience experimenting out of curiosity, it could end up permanently traumatizing for both youths. While Pornhub is not a traditional social media site like Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, or TikTok, it still presents the problem of viewing something that is not reality. To quote a famous televangelist, “Living Your Best Life” according to any of these social media sites is not reality and striving to gain a “Best Life” means striving to maintain that fantasy of a best life. Adolescents do not know the emptiness of striving to achieve fame through clicks, but they do know what bullying is if a pic posted is not perfect.

Because girls are the ones who become pregnant and carry the baby, a conversation with a daughter could begin with that reality. A conversation could go along the lines of questioning dating and thinking about the expectations of both teens. This approach is because of the false reality that both males and females see on social media, thinking it looks appealing. One social media site that garners clicks is Pornhub; it far exceeds Facebook. Facebook has over 3 billion monthly active users. Psychology Today states statistics for 2017 that “Pornhub claims 28.5 billion total visits. That is 81 million a day, almost 4 million an hour, 56,000 a minute. In the time it takes to read this, the site will have recorded more than 100,000 visits. Pornhub tallied 25 billion searches last year. That is 800 per second. As for 2017 uploads to the site, Pornhub estimates 7,000 gigabytes per minute, enough to fill the memories of every smartphone in the world. The demographics of Pornhub says its audience is 75 percent men and 25 percent women. This comes as a surprise. Most estimates of the Internet porn audience skew more toward men, on the order of 90 percent male, 10 percent female.

In this opinion, the best way to explain how to date is through an honest conversation concerning the awkwardness of learning to communicate honestly. Parents must remember how awkward it was for them when they first started dating and honestly share that experience. Also, when sharing, only share what is age-appropriate; a parent would not want to give their child the impression that promiscuous behavior is acceptable, considering the bad choices the parents may have made at a similar age. Parents who have matured are trying to prevent the consequences of their child’s bad choices that may be like the ones the parent made. A last thought for the parent to remember is that the amount of time a parent spends with their child is not enough considering the amount of time a child will spend with their friends and teachers at school, after school, socializing, and other events like that of sports and the typical parties children experience all through adolescents. The best advice this parent can offer is to be the parent who allows their children’s friends to come over to your home. Be a parent who engages in your child’s life; do not be an absentee parent relegating babysitting duties to afterschool care and or to the latest 1200-dollar smartphone.

How can I help my cat adjust to sleeping in its own room after allowing it to sleep with us as a kitten?

In this experience, allowing our children’s friends to come over to our home meant we spent more time with them rather than dropping them off at someone else’s home we did not know. Also, because our children’s friends came over to our home, we got to know the other kids our children spent time together with and who had a good or bad influence on them. Through that observation of all our children’s friends, we could talk with them about those other children, asking them what they thought of them. We also learned about their friends’ parents, whether they were divorced or not, living with a boyfriend or girlfriend, if their friends had siblings, and other related things that would help us be better friends to their parents and our children’s friends. Our goal as parents was to be the single most positive influence in our children’s lives, not their friends, teachers, social media, TV, books, or music. My wife and I were only children, so we know what a good influence on another person could be besides a bad influence. As parents, we wanted to make sure to positively impact our children’s lives, not just their friends. Thus, we did not leave parenting duties to others to do for us; we made sure to be parents to our children.