In my experience as a sexuality educator, kids report having a range of responses to porn—from confusion and upset to curiosity and arousal—and responses vary, depending on, among other things, age, gender, and sexual orientation. In one Australian study, researchers found that “younger children (ages 9–12) are more likely to be distressed or upset after being unintentionally exposed to porn.” They also found that “boys are more likely to find porn amusing, arousing, and funny while girls were more likely to find it shocking, scary, or upsetting.” (Boys are more likely to self-report intentionally seeking it out than girls.)

Some kids, once exposed to porn, can have a hard time disengaging from it. In more than a few accounts parents shared with me, it was their quieter child who had been regularly watching it. “You would never have guessed it, though,” one Bay Area mother told me. “My 10-year-old son spends a lot of time in his room reading books or building things. Believe me when I say that he’s shown zero sexual interest in anyone. As far as I know, he’s never even had a crush on a singer or a movie star.” But a few months ago, she discovered his search history on the family computer. Apparently, he had been introduced to porn through a friend at school and had since been watching it compulsively.

What most kids lack, I’ve found, is media and porn literacy—that is, the ability to contextualize and think critically about representations of gender, sex, and sexuality. Cindy Pierce, a sex educator and the author of Sexploitation: Helping Kids Develop Healthy Sexuality in a Porn Driven World, is concerned that parents who don’t talk to their kids about what’s online are leaving the porn industry to step in as their children’s de facto sex educator. “It’s very tricky for middle-school parents [to accept their child might see porn] because most of them just want to believe their child is the exception,” Pierce says. “Therefore they’d rather cross their fingers, put their heads in the sand, and hope for the best.” This makes it hard to have the sort of “proactive and preemptive” conversations that she recommends.

Being proactive, however, might prove difficult for parents who didn’t have such communication modeled for them about sex—let alone porn—when they were kids. Another Bay Area mother, who also asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject matter, says her parents “never, ever, ever” talked to her about sex. The one time her father broached the subject, she recalls, she was in the driveway, about to leave for college. “AIDS is scary,” is the message she remembers him passing along to her then. “Protect yourself. You could die.” Even when parents say little to nothing about sex, their silences—or what little they do say—reveal a lot about their attitudes towards sex.