Becoming the Trusted Voice: Talking with Your Teens About Sexuality
- Guest Contributor
- Jul 31, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 1, 2025
By Julia Sadusky, PsyD
Note: In this third part of a four-part mini-series, we delve into how parents can address sexuality in general, and pornography in specific, with their children. Dr. Julia Sadusky, a licensed clinical psychologist and local author, considers the cultural pressures on youth and offers real, practical advice for parents — including potential scripts to follow when having these difficult conversations. Given recent survey data that show a worrisome and marked increase in societal acceptance of pornography in the United States, this series might be more timely than ever.
“It wasn’t so much what my parents said about sexuality that was the problem. It was all they didn’t say. What they said highlighted the things not to do, which is helpful in some ways. What they didn’t say was what to do when I stumbled across porn, when a boyfriend crossed physical boundaries or when friends told me masturbation was normal and healthy. My friends, porn and social media were teaching me about sexuality long before my parents did. By the time my parents gave me ‘the sex talk,’ their obvious discomfort made me think it would be better if I didn’t bring anything sexuality-related to them again. But I had so many questions. I found answers online, even if some of the answers weren’t accurate or consistent with my faith. I love my parents and recognize they also didn’t have the models they needed to speak well about sexuality. I can’t help but wonder what would have been different if they’d been better equipped.”
This quote from a Catholic mom after a recent talk I gave captures the experience of too many Catholic adults and teens today.
Setting the Cultural Context
In our Western culture, depictions of sexuality often run counter to our Catholic faith. Moral relativism, post-modernism and a range of related ideologies shape society. They make up the water many teens swim in, without even realizing it. This context, combined with silence from many Catholic parents about sexuality prior to a formal “sex talk,” is a recipe for disaster.
Sadly, many Catholic children don’t see their parents as helpful guides when it comes to sexuality topics. At best, teens think their parents are well-meaning but naïve and outdated in their knowledge. At worst, teens see their parents as the villain, just another source of oppression trying to block their freedom and authenticity in the realm of sexuality.
Parents are called to be the primary educators of their children, supported by their faith community, educators, friends, spiritual directors and therapists (see Gravissiumum Educationis, 3). At the same time, most parents don’t feel equipped with practical tips for actual conversations with their children and teens.
Now is the time to equip Catholic parents to have effective, calm and clear conversations with children and teens about sexuality in developmentally appropriate ways!
Naming Pressures on our Youth
So many things weigh on our youth today. From a psychological perspective, adolescence is when young people ask questions about identity, purpose, beliefs, values and belonging. This is no easy task.
Too often in these formative years, youth are being exposed to traumatic experiences, including pornographic sexual content and sexual harm at remarkably high rates. It’s common for teens to find themselves masturbating, without guidance from trusted adults beyond “don’t do it!” Many don’t even know what they do when they begin this behavior and why they return to it repeatedly. Without people to help them be curious about these behaviors and learn how to move away from them, they are left with nothing but guilt and shame. Guilt can help us learn, but shame spirals us back to the very problematic behaviors we are trying to stop (see this and other depictions of shame cycles).
Within this already fraught terrain, teens are under enormous pressure to discover and express who they are in the realm of identity. This focus is central to youth and occupies a great deal of energy. All the while, extracurriculars, academics and friendships compete for their attention.
They need trusted adults in their corner now more than ever.
Practical Tips for Conversations
Where do we begin with building trust and having better conversations about sexuality with our teens? In what follows, I present scripts for conversations about sexuality with children before the teen years from Start Talking to Your Kids About Sex: A Practical Guide for Catholics. Practical tips for teens can be found in Talking with Your Teen About Sex: A Practical Guide for Catholics.
Set yourself up for success
The best time for conversations is any time you are “side-by-side.” Face-to-face conversations can be too intense for what can already feel difficult to talk about. Driving in the car, going for a short walk or engaging in another activity or sport together are great moments to initiate conversations. Whenever possible, pick a moment when you and your teen seem to be calm and open. Take breaks if you hit a wall in a conversation, and don’t forget to circle back later. Invite the Holy Spirit into these moments. He is ready to equip you.
Acknowledge if you’re behind
If you feel behind in this, it’s not too late! Acknowledge that you haven’t previously talked about sexuality openly in your home:
“As you’re getting older, there are so many things we get to talk about together that will help you grow into a healthy adult. We will talk about what you want to do after high school, friendships, crushes and a lot in between. Up until now, we haven’t had much open conversation about sexuality. My guess is you have learned a thing or two about it, and it’s important that you can talk with us, too. Over time, we are going to have more intentional moments to check in about things you might be wondering about or learning about sexuality. How would it be to talk about sexuality with me? What might make it easier or harder to do?”
Ask open-ended questions
“Lots of things pop up online, and when we talk to friends or overhear conversations of adults. What have you heard about ________?”
This sentence stem applies to a lot of things. You could fill in the blank with so many words — porn, masturbation, sex, gay, gender, marriage, dating, Catholic teaching on sex.
Several other questions will help you get a baseline understanding of your teen’s knowledge. You will want to know what your teen found helpful about what they learned, and build their critical thinking around information they encounter from different sources:
“Where did you learn that?”
“What did you find interesting or helpful about that?”
“What questions did you have about what you learned?”
“What, if anything, didn’t quite sit right with you about that?”
The key is to get your teen talking about what they’ve heard and learned. If you hear misinformation, resist the urge to jump into lecture mode. First, take in what your teen tells you, repeating what you hear them saying along the way. This is to ensure you understand more fully and help them build their ability to think through information before offering correction or disputation.
Addressing Pornography Without Overexposing
There are endless access points to pornography for youth (peers, others’ devices, online search typos, social media suggestions, etc.) The first exposure to pornography is almost always accidental. Because of this, sadly, it’s not a matter of if but more a matter of when a teen is exposed to pornography.
It’s no secret that many cultural and popular portrayals of psychology counter that of our faith when it comes to many topics, including pornography. Some therapists will argue that pornography is healthy and good for human relationships. We want our teens to know these messages exist and offer them clarity about inaccuracies in popular takes on sexual behaviors.
At the same time, we can too simplistically pit our Catholic beliefs against culture, as if everything we believe is a departure from cultural understandings. In the case of pornography, we’re seeing more secular voices — including celebrities and secular porn awareness organizations — band together to speak out about the harms of pornography.
To address these topics, we want to set the stage for what teens will likely hear about pornography from others:
“Did you know that sometimes online, there are naked pictures and videos of people touching each other in sexual and romantic ways? Usually, when we first come across it, it’s by accident. How often have you stumbled upon this or heard about it from friends or other people? People might tell you it’s healthy to watch porn to learn about our bodies and sex. Porn actually is a very unhelpful way to learn. It takes the real thing, the beauty of sex in marriage, and makes it entertainment. If someone were having sex in the next room, would we go watch? No! But because porn is hidden and draws us in by the beauty of the human body (even if in a distorted way), many people turn to it again and again. It’s normal to be curious about your body, and if you want to learn more, Mom and Dad know a lot about how the body works and can teach you the science behind it. Insofar as you have seen porn, it’s something we can talk about in our home. There are plenty of healthy ways to learn about your body that aren’t pornography, so we want to make sure we are talking about things like this together, okay?”
(See Talking with Your Teen About Sex: A Practical Guide for Catholics for a range of ways to reduce body shame and increase body knowledge.)
We are learning a lot about the harms of pornography. Even many people who aren’t Christians are catching up to the way porn hurts us, others and our world. There are excellent resources that talk more about this if you want to learn more, like those put out by Fight the New Drug, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and Enough is Enough.
God is not scandalized or surprised when we struggle with porn, or with anything else, for that matter. He is ready to help us grow in sexual stewardship and self-mastery through prayer, the sacraments, especially Confession and the Eucharist, and the assistance of people he puts in our lives. He doesn’t leave us alone.
When it comes to challenging the notion that porn is “healthy and necessary,” we can remind our children that God would never ask us to refrain completely from a behavior that is essential for our health and well-being. God’s best for our lives, and our sexual lives, inevitably includes saying “no” to some behaviors, to open us up to the mystery of what sexuality reflects about who God is, who we are and our ultimate destiny.
Integrating sexuality into our personhood is a lifelong process (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 2342-2343). It demands much of all of us, insofar as we believe that God’s plan for sexuality is best for us. We want to help youth know they might fall short of God’s best at times, and see their relationships with God, parents, pastors and therapists as resources to help them disrupt shame and learn over time to steward their sexuality better when mistakes happen.
Our vision for sexual ethics is radically different from dominant narratives, to be sure. We don’t need to shirk away from this. It’s precisely because of this that we want to expect and invite our youth to “wrestle” with God, including his harder teachings. We also want to make space for young people to uncover the “yes” they can say with their lives as they follow his law imperfectly and gradually, with our help.
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Dr. Sadusky is a licensed clinical psychologist who owns a private practice in Littleton, CO. She is the author of several books, including “Talking with Your Teen About Sex: A Practical Guide for Catholics.” Dr. Sadusky has studied sexual and gender development for over a decade and regularly trains churches, dioceses and faith-based therapy practices around human sexuality, gender and faith.
