Teens shouldn't have to wait until adulthood to start outgrowing porn. Because porn is reaching boys sooner than ever, healing should start sooner, too. If you’re a young man who feels stuck in a cycle of sexual shame or a parent who wants to help, this podcast is for you. Each episode empowers fathers and sons to heal together and find lasting freedom from porn through vulnerability, curiosity, and compassion from a Christian perspective. Join author Drew Boa, clinical psychologist Dr. Doug Carpenter, and youth recovery expert Blake Brinkman for the conversations most of us never had—but desperately need. Don’t wait! Outgrow porn at any age.
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When and how should you start talking to your kids about sex? Rather than having one overwhelming, 100-minute "talk," the key is normalizing sex education through thousands of unhurried, everyday micro-conversations. From teaching toddlers about "swimming suit parts" to helping teens navigate complex online risks like sextortion, this episode offers a practical, age-by-age roadmap for every stage of parenting.
What we cover in this episode:
The Power of First Mention: Why parents must be the first source of truth before culture, peers, or porn fill the gap.
Age-Appropriate Development (2 to 17): Specific guidelines for what topics to cover—and when—from body parts and puberty to dating boundaries and emotional intimacy.
Sexual Abuse Prevention: Using simple boundaries, safety quizzes, and clear rules to equip your child against inappropriate touch.
Playing Catch-Up with Teens: How to use vulnerability, ownership, and curiosity if you feel like you started too late.
Tackling Tough Topics: Approaching sensitive subjects like masturbation, porn, sexting, and online predators without shame or fear.
Got Questions? We want to hear from you! Scroll down to the "Send Us Fan Mail" link in the podcast decription to submit your questions for future sex ed episodes.
Welcome to Start Younger, the podcast about outgrowing porn, understanding our sexuality, and building healthy recovery practices.
SPEAKER_02
Porn is reaching boys sooner than ever, which means helping and healing has to start sooner, too. Let's start younger. Hello and welcome to the Start Younger podcast. And I'm here with Drew Boa and Blake Brinkman, my great co-host. And we're definitely going to open up a can of worms today and talk about a sensitive subject. We're going to talk about when and how to start talking to your kids about sex. And that's a really, really important discussion. I think the first thing I want to say about this is it's never too early to start. You can't wait till they're 14 or 13 or 11 even. I know I started with my kids at a very young age. And I tried to answer questions as they would come up. Like ages three to five, start teaching them about their body and body parts. And what do you call them? And who can see them and who can't see them? Who can touch them? Who can't touch them? In our house, we used your swimming suit parts. Let's talk about your swimming suit parts. Who can see that? Who can touch that? For what reasons? Um, so you can put it in language that they understand. You know, they're not gonna understand the word genitalia. You need to make it something simple for them, like swimming suit parts or the part that your underwear goes on. Okay, you've got to start from those ages very early and build on those conversations as time goes on. I know I've done that with my kids, and it was extremely helpful along the way because I really normalized being able to talk and ask questions. Like my son very easily comes up throughout his life and asks me questions because I didn't make it a taboo subject. I didn't make it something we couldn't talk about. I made it something we could open openly share, especially we're both guys, we're both boys. So let's talk about our bodies.
SPEAKER_01
When we don't get that, sex becomes this forbidden, magicalized world that is full of secrecy. And the antidote to that is exactly what Doug's saying: normalizing, treating it as any other part of life rather than having a single 100-minute conversation, having hundreds or thousands of one-minute conversations. And just like you would integrate talking about money into everyday life, we can talk about our swimming suit parts, we can talk about new words
that kids may have never heard in an ongoing, everyday kind of way. One concept everyone should be aware of is the power of first mention. Whenever you hear a word for the first time, like the word masturbation, for example, the first time you hear it, it inherently has more influence, more authority. It's going to affect the way you feel about that word, the way you view that word. If you as a parent can have the power of first mention, that is going to help tremendously and help your child view you as a trustworthy source.
SPEAKER_02
Dre, I kind of have a funny story about that. I knew what masturbation was from a very young age, but I'd never heard the professional word masturbation till I was like 16. And Oprah said it on her show when I was sitting in the living room with my mother, and I turned around and I go, What is that? And I thought my mom was gonna faint and fall off the couch. Oh so you know, the younger you can start talking about this and normalizing behavior, the better.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, here's one way that I do that for masturbation specifically. We can talk about tickling. You know, certain parts of the body are ticklish, certain parts are more sensitive. What does it feel like when someone tickles your neck or when someone tickles your arm? Now, there's a part of the body that's even more sensitive to that. And if you tickle it, it will have a strong reaction. That can be a lead-in to talking about masturbation without shame.
SPEAKER_00
Yes. I like the sound of that. And it's building this whole idea of the more we talk about these things, the more our tone is kind and gentle and unscared, unhurried, unanxious, the more the topic feels safe. Right? Think about anything you talk a lot about as a family. I bet your kids feel pretty open to bringing that topic up. And the big comparison here is you know who is completely unashamed to talk about sex? The broader culture at hand talks about sex non-stop. Nonstop. When kids are experiencing that world in one way, shape, form, or another, and then they come home and sex is never talked about, it puts them in a really difficult paradigm of what does this mean about sex? And should I talk about this? Should I ask a question or should I hide this and make sure I'm I'm looking around and talking to other people to learn about it.
SPEAKER_02
Well, that brings up an important point that I really actually should have probably started with is that recognizing your kids are going to hear about it from somewhere. And it would be best if it comes from you as their parent, where you know you can answer their questions, you can give them truthful information, you can give them information that they're ready to hear. So don't rely on some other source to educate your children, even from a very young age, about their bodies and then how it's going to change as they age. You need to be the expert in this area of how to talk about this without shame, without embarrassment. And they need to hear it from you, not from porn, not
from friends, not any other way they might hear it. It needs to come from you.
SPEAKER_01
And if you're wondering how I can become that expert, there are some great resources. I really like thesextalk.com that can help you both work through your own sexual story and become a safe person to do sex education. Another resource I absolutely love is called Having the Talks by Dear Young Married Couple that turns sex ed conversations into a card game. And that card game is different for younger kids than it is for teens. And as kids get older, another great resource for relating to teens about anything, including sex ed, is an organization called Axis, axis.org. They've got teen conversation guides for any and every topic you can think of, even the ones that you think like, wait, that's a thing now with the way AI is changing the world. You definitely want to be ahead of some of these trends, and Axis can help with that.
SPEAKER_02
As a psychologist who has written books and deals a lot in the area of sexual abuse, this is another reason why you need to start very early with educating them about sexual abuse. So that way you can start teaching them about types of touch, what the touch feels like, when it's appropriate and when it's not. Because just as much as you need to educate them about sex, you need to educate them about sexual abuse and what's not appropriate, what should happen if somebody touches you in an inappropriate way. So those conversations can all go hand in hand while you open the door and you're hitting more than one important subject.
SPEAKER_01
Every once in a while, I give my kids a quiz on what to do if something inappropriate happens.
SPEAKER_02
Yes, I would, I would do that too. Before my kid spent the night anywhere, before they went with people alone, that they were going to be gone for several hours. I would just kind of review hey, let's have our swimming suit talk. Where does your swimming suit cover? Who can touch that? If somebody tries to touch that, what what are you supposed to do? That's an adult decision. You come and tell dad, right? And I will deal with it and take care of it. You will not be in trouble. You know, and you have to start building that trust and that foundation from a young age.
saying some brilliant points here about starting younger, starting early. What about for the teen or the parent who feels like they are behind? Feels like, I haven't heard of half of these things, and I certainly haven't talked about it, or I feel really uncomfortable with these conversations. Where do we go from here?
SPEAKER_01
That's a situation where I would encourage you to ask your teen what they already know. Rather than just trying to give them information, find out what they've already been picking up, and you might be surprised.
SPEAKER_00
And I would say that too. Don't be afraid to just own it. Teens value vulnerability, ownership, authenticity so much to just say, hey, cards on the table. We haven't talked about this a whole lot. And I'd like to change that. And so I'm going to be talking about it a little bit more. And I'd love for starters to hear what do you know about sex? What have you been hearing, learning? What's your understanding of it thus far?
SPEAKER_02
Well, and I think it's good as a parent for you to say, when I was your age, this is what I was aware of, and things I wasn't aware of. I don't want you to be in the dark. I want you to be able to have a safe place to come and ask these questions and talk to me about them. I remember being your age. I remember being curious. I remember having a lot of questions, and nobody was answering my questions. And that was really hurtful and unfair to me. And I want to be here for you, even you know, if it's late in the game, we can still learn to open up this discussion and talk.
SPEAKER_01
And take ownership and apologize for the ways that I'm sorry. I I really should have set you up better.
SPEAKER_00
I can go such a long way with teens. And really, we we've said this before, but the goal of these conversations is not to get them 100% right. It's really to get them about 50% right and repair the other 50% of time. And so to get really in the habit of saying, hey, I'm sorry, I should have talked to you about this. And it just came to my attention and I missed it. Can we talk about X? Can we talk about Y?
SPEAKER_01
Sex education can cover so many different topics, whether it's ethics about what's appropriate, what's not appropriate, also biology and anatomy about how our bodies work. It also can go into relationships and dating and marriage and what's healthy and what's not healthy. You really can never run out of interesting ways to keep this conversation going.
SPEAKER_02
Media, movies, all kinds of things can open doors for conversations. For me and my son, I mean, I had opened the door already, and we'd been talking for a long time about males and bodies and females and bodies. But we went to see a Broadway play, and there was reference to a condom, and somebody pulled a condom out of their pocket. And my son looked up at me like, I know what that is, kind of. So that opened a door for us to have a conversation later about well, what was that that he pulled out of his pocket and what's that used for? And that was just a beautiful conversation. And I just used that opportunity as something positive instead of like covering his ears and acting like, oh, you should never have heard that.
SPEAKER_00
Such a good example, Doug, of we'll hear a lot from parents of you can tell me anything. But rather than telling them that, it's better to show them that by how much you talk about it, your tone, your comfortability, your ease with talking about it.
That's what shows kids and teens that, hey, you can bring anything to this table and we can talk about it together.
SPEAKER_01
What would you say to a parent who is concerned about sharing too much of their sex lives within marriage with their kids? Like, should they even know that mom and dad have sex? How much should they know about that? And should they know about mom and dad's sexual stories and maybe any trauma that's happened in their relationship?
SPEAKER_00
A hundred percent on all of the above. And obviously, there is some discretion here of I don't want to share every gory detail of my sexual history or past, but I often think we undershare more than we overshare. And what I would also recommend with that is get with a good counselor, a good coach, get with a close friend, uh, get with a small group, get with someone that can help you build out that discretion a little bit of what's really helpful to tell them and what might be too much. But my goal here is I want to share enough with them that they know mom and dad are not sexually perfect beings, that we have made our own sexual mistakes, even together, maybe. And two, that they can talk to me about anything sexually. That's I want to share enough to make sure those things are happening.
SPEAKER_01
And the level of detail is probably going to be a lot lower when kids are younger and a lot higher when they get older.
SPEAKER_02
But in that, I want to say you probably need to start covering topics more ahead of time than what you think. So, for
example, you can find this information like in any sexual development or sexuality textbook. But I just kind of want to go over this chart a little bit to just give you an idea of things that you need to bring up before time. So, like from ages two to four, that's when you should really be teaching them about their body parts, the names of their body parts, like who can touch them and who can't. We've already talked about that. But then five to seven, they're gonna start having curiosity about what other kids' bodies look like. They're gonna start having questions about where do babies come from. That's when you can start talking about appropriate and inappropriate touch and consent. And here's the one that's probably gonna blow your mind. But from age to eight to 10 is appropriate time to start talking about puberty, menstruation, erections, ejaculations, body changes that are gonna happen, your feelings of attraction, sexual and sexualized media. I think most parents would think, oh, I'm not, I'm not gonna talk to my eight to 10-year-old about that yet. I'm gonna wait a few more years. But I want to tell you that that's the age when you need to start those conversations. And then between 11 and 13, you need to have more direct conversations like intercourse, contraception, that you can get diseases, sexual orientation questions, dating questions are gonna start coming up. And then 14 to 17 is the time to start hitting what does a healthy relationship look like? What's emotional intimacy? What's good sexual decisions? What are consequences for sexual decisions? What are your personal values? What are our values as a family? What do you want your boundaries going to be? How are you gonna navigate sexual pressure from other people? Or if somebody wants to do something with you and you're not ready. And like I said, you can look that up on the internet and find. I'm not giving you, you know, secret information here. It's in every developmental textbook. But I just don't think parents think that they're ready for those conversations at those early ages where they actually are. Man, I wish I had that. I know. I think as a father, I did a pretty good job of hitting those marks, but I had taken developmental psychology. I'd been exposed to this information. So it was a real concerted effort on my part to hit those things in those age ranges. But it had to be very delicate. And, you know, I I guess I had the sense of when I was having that conversation, if I was getting too far in the weeds or I was starting to explain too much, he'd just get this dazed look on his face, like, I don't know, I don't understand what you're saying. And I knew it was time to stop until he grew a little more, and then we'd come back to the topic.
SPEAKER_01
That's a great point. As you're having these sex ed conversations, notice the nonverbal signals and reactions of the other person.
A little more niche one, but it's really important. I want to point out is Drew, you kind of alluded to this of how much should we be talking about sex? And another one that I think is really important is Doug, you were hitting on this of what makes for healthy sexual intimacy? Where's the emotional intimacy piece? How does it work to work through some of these conversations and repair with a partner? Because for many of my teens in that 14 to 17 window, they've built up this worldview that one day I will get married, I will have married Christian sex, uh, we will orgasm every time, and it will be the most euphoric experience ever. You know, it's not Hollywood, it's it's not what real sex looks like. And unless they are having these types of conversations, of hey, sex at times can be really hard. Sex at times can be really amazing, but they need a safe person to really talk through all of those nuances with them to give them a healthy understanding or at least guardrails of questions to ask, conversations to have, and to start building what do I want my sexual life to look like one day?
SPEAKER_02
I think all that's great information, Blake. Another thing I did is when my kids came to me with a question about sex, I usually, before I would answer it, I would be like, Well, I first want to hear what you think. I want to hear what what do you think that is? What have you heard that that is? And sometimes I was able to go, that's exactly right. You know exactly what that is. You know, and then other times I'm like, well, you have half the story, right? You know, it was like when my son and I had that conversation about condoms. He thought you bought one and used it over and over and over. And I was like, nope, that's not how that works. You know, so he he knew what it was for, but didn't exactly know the intricacies of it. And so that opened another door. But I encouraged him and praised him for the information that he did know and tried to then expand his learning, not make it shaming. Like, why are you at 10 years old? How do you know what a condom is? You know, that would not have been a
So when it comes to porn, it really needs to be talked about, I would say probably even by age five. Researcher Gail Dines says, eight is too late. Talking to kids about porn at age eight is still too late. And there are some great resources, like good pictures, bad pictures, junior, for older kids, good pictures, bad pictures. And we've also talked about Brainheart World as another helpful resource for teens and for older young adults. I also think it's extremely important in today's world to include warnings about creating sexual images of yourself. Absolutely. Because once you create an image of yourself naked, if it gets shared, you can never fully get it back. It's never deleted. It can live forever. You never know where that picture has gone. So it's important for anyone to be aware of the risks of creating that kind of content.
SPEAKER_00
And I want to pair this with what Doug just said about we have to be able to talk about this in a non-shaming way. Because many of the teens I work with have a desire to share an image of themselves or receive an image of another. And there's some obvious, very emotionally deep reasons of why that feels really attractive, why that feels really intense. And so we can understand the desire and be very compassionate and understanding, and pair that with hey, here's some things you should know about some of the risks involved. And another thing we're seeing a lot of too is the sexual extortion going up of fake people, predators asking for these sort of pictures and then trying to use it to abuse or get money or whatever it is. And so to understand how powerful these desires are and that people are waiting to prey on it in some ways. And so, once again, we have to be having conversations, protecting against it, creating a safe place where we can have these conversations.
SPEAKER_02
And Blake, I think it's important to tell parents that there will be predators representing themselves as a girl who's a couple years older than your son and who's interested in them and wants to see their body, and they're easily tricked and manipulated. And you have to give them the correct information and learning about how to see this, how to spot
We will continue to do more episodes about some of these topics within the category of sex ed. What are your questions? What would you like to see on a future episode? Please let us know. You can go down to a link in the description that says send us fan mail, and you can ask any question. We will answer it on this podcast. We would love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening as you outgrow porn at any age. At any age. At any age.
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