Dr. Megan Moreno, a pediatrician who is vice chair of digital health at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said: “My main message would be for parents to step back for a minute from the alarmist nature of the word ‘sexting’ and think about developmentally appropriate foolish romantic things teenagers do.” Parents might, for example, think about the risky things they did themselves when they were younger, and when they discuss it with their teenagers, “try to view sexting through that lens: here is something that might feel like a normal thing to do and a normal thing to ask, and other people are doing it, but it’s a risky thing for you to do and if you find yourself in that situation we can talk about it.”
As kids get older, the parenting guide by Dr. Moreno in the journal suggests, conversations can — and should — become more direct. Let kids tell you what they know, what they think, what they’re seeing, what they’re feeling. It’s part of talking about safety, online and offline, and part of talking about social behavior, friendships and romantic relationships and how people treat others and want to be treated. For teenagers themselves, there is a thorough handbook available from Common Sense Media, which will walk a kid through the scarier scenarios.
“Parents are very invested in the idea that sexting is a terrible thing,” Dr. Englander said. “They want to be able to turn to their kids and say, this could be the end of your life as we know it, it could ruin your chances for college, it could ruin your chances for jobs.”
By focusing on those possible but worst case scenarios, parents are not necessarily addressing the much more common problems: About 13 percent of sexters report bad experiences, and another 7 to 8 percent mixed experiences; the negatives are for the most part emotional.
So those conversations should include the “what if” scenarios: What if you feel pressured to send a sext and you don’t want to, what are the right strategies? Who would you turn to, how could you get help and advice?
The most upsetting statistic to come out of these studies is that one in nine teenagers report forwarding sexts without consent. Those are the scenarios parents worry about most; images end up in someone else’s hands, or made public. The sender’s trust has been violated, and there can be legal implications.
But Dr. Ellen Selkie, an adolescent medicine specialist in the University of Michigan department of pediatrics, said, “It’s far more common for kids to be doing it as part of a relationship with a boyfriend or girlfriend.” When she is counseling parents about sexting, she said, “I do try to present it as a manifestation of typical adolescent development — sexual experimenting is something kids have always done, and now we have digital media.”