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For parents worried about the impact of Miley Cyrus’ recent MTV performance on impressionable teens, there’s at least one reason to relax: Your kids have probably seen worse. A universe of pornography is only a mouse-click away. Parents can counter with blocks, filters, tracking and punishments. But even with the most rigorous parental patrols, kids at the peak of their sexual curiosity are going to find their way to porn. The impact of this new universal access to porn will be debated for some time to come. So far the research on the potential impact of porn is relatively thin. But one thing is clear: It’s time to rethink “the talk.”

Parents have always found the sex talk challenging. But it didn’t used to be the case that by the time they had the talk, their child had already seen things on the Internet that the parents had never dreamed of at their kids’ age (possibly even as adults).

The first and most important step to revising the talk is to accept this reality—that, at whatever level, pornography is part of a child’s world. The key for parents is to make sure that this part is in accurate perspective. When biological urgency meets technological capability, the only workable response is to construct a frame of reference—a way to process things past generations their age have never seen. Parents must help kids understand that pornography is real, but it’s not reality.

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Sowing fear or guilt makes no more sense than when boys were told that masturbation was a sin—they did it anyway, but felt terrible about it. Parents must be factual, not emotional. It’s not what the parents think about pornography that matters, it’s how the child learns to process it and incorporate it into his or her understanding of sex.

A conversation will be much more helpful than a lecture. The sex talk has never been easy for parents, even when they could be vague about the realities of sex. Now the degree of difficulty in getting it right goes up.

Parents can start with a few (non-judgmental) questions. Have you ever seen porn on the Internet? How do you feel about it? Do you have any questions about what you saw? Keep in mind, they may have seen things that trouble them or confuse them. Just as likely, they may have seen it, shared it and simply laughed about it.

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Once parents have managed to get a sense of an adolescent’s feelings about the pornography they might have experienced—recognizing it’s not easy to get an adolescent to share feelings about anything—the door is open, at least a crack, for parents to inject their own values into the conversation. It’s possible to lay out the potential problems with pornography, without triggering the rebellion response. Porn can create unrealistic expectations. It can make real-life partners seem less attractive. It can become so important that it shuts out other parts of life. Not that these things will happen—but they can.

The ultimate goal of the talk is not prohibition; it’s perspective. Kids need to know that what they are seeing, in all its often disturbing variety, is not what sex really is. Pornography is a business. It makes money by taking a natural thing to an unnatural extreme. Porn is part of sexuality, but it doesn’t define it. The sex on porn sites is not the sex that is a wonderful part of life.

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