I have six kids, ages 9 to 21. So when I talk about what today’s culture is teaching children about sex, this isn’t an academic exercise for me—it’s the water my own family swims in.
And as a marriage coach, I see the downstream result constantly: adults in their thirties, forties, and fifties still trying to unlearn what the culture taught them about sex when they were fifteen.
The short version: The dominant message of our era is hyper-individualism—that your sexuality is entirely your own, disconnected from relationship, commitment, or consequence. That message reaches kids through hookup culture framed as empowerment, through pornography acting as a substitute sex education, and through a broader shift toward treating sexuality as a core identity rather than a relational expression. Meanwhile, the church’s well-meaning purity movement often pushed back with fear rather than values, causing its own harm. Parents can’t opt out of this. But you can out-teach it.
The core message: “your sexuality is entirely your own”
Strip away the surface debates and one idea sits underneath nearly everything our culture tells young people about sex: you belong to no one but yourself.
Some of what produced that idea was genuinely good. The push for women’s equality challenged real and unhealthy patriarchal patterns, and I’m grateful for that. But the version that filtered down to teenagers is thinner: I don’t need anyone. My body, my choice, my pleasure, full stop. Add widely available contraception, and the culture quietly decoupled sex from consequence in its messaging.
The result is hookup culture, marketed to young women especially as empowerment. But that framing has drawn serious criticism even from within feminist scholarship—the “empowerment” story doesn’t match what many young women actually experience (Meenagh, 2017).
When the solution to a relational problem is more individualism
Here’s a telling example. Laurie Mintz’s well-known book Becoming Cliterate honestly acknowledges that many women don’t experience orgasm in hookup sex (Mintz, 2017). Good—that’s a real problem worth naming.
But look at the prescribed remedy: more individualism. Know your body better, advocate harder for your own pleasure. Now, understanding your body is genuinely valuable—I teach that. The trouble is that the answer never questions the context. It may help a woman climax with a stranger, but it leaves untouched the deeper question of whether sex severed from relationship was ever going to deliver what she actually wanted. The emphasis lands on performance, and intimacy stays off the table entirely.
That’s the pattern in miniature: our culture keeps trying to solve relational problems with individualistic tools.
Pornography is now the default sex education
This is the one that worries me most as a father.
Access is effectively unlimited, and use surged during pandemic isolation (Lau et al., 2021). For a lot of boys, porn arrives long before any meaningful conversation about intimacy does—which means it becomes their sex education by default. And it’s a terrible teacher. It distorts body image, warps expectations, breeds performance anxiety, and—this is the part that haunts me—normalizes objectification before emotional maturity has a chance to develop.
The research bears out the cost: pornography use is associated with lower sexual satisfaction for both men and women (Poulsen et al., 2013). Kids raised on it struggle to tell the difference between genuine intimacy and performance-based sex. I go deeper on this in the real cost of pornography.
Sexuality as identity
Another significant shift: sexuality has moved from being understood as a behavior or a relational expression to being treated as a core marker of identity.
Researchers describe a set of contemporary cultural currents—gender understood as self-constructed; sexuality as plural, fluid, and playful; monogamy reframed as a cultural imposition; and intersectionality as central to sexual experience (Hammack & Manago, 2025). Social media accelerates all of it, making once-rare arrangements and identities feel ordinary and expected to a fourteen-year-old.
These currents run counter to a biblical understanding of sexuality, and many Christian parents feel genuinely unequipped to talk about them—particularly around gender identity, which has become one of the most contested subjects of our moment, with real disagreement among researchers and clinicians about how best to care for young people. I won’t attempt to settle that debate here. What I’ll say is this: silence is not a strategy. If your kids can’t bring these questions to you, they’ll take them to a search bar, a group chat, or an algorithm—and those will answer with far more confidence than care.
And then the church swung too far the other way
It would be dishonest to pin all the damage on secular culture, because our own house has done harm too.
The purity movement of the late 1990s onward wanted to protect kids—from disease, heartbreak, unplanned pregnancy, and sin. Those are good aims, and abstinence before marriage with fidelity within it is the biblical standard. But the movement largely taught it through fear rather than values (Morgante, 2024). And fear leaves marks: purity culture beliefs have been associated with higher rates of sexual pain among women and lower marital and sexual satisfaction (Sawatsky et al., 2025).
So our kids are caught between two bad options—a culture that says sex means nothing, and a subculture that made sex terrifying. Neither one is the gospel. The way through is a positive vision, which is what I lay out in what the Bible actually says about sex.
What parents can actually do
You can’t build a wall high enough to keep this out. But you can be the loudest, warmest, most trustworthy voice in your child’s life on this subject. That’s not a small thing—research consistently finds parent–child communication to be a key factor in adolescent sexual health.
Three principles I live by:
- Many small conversations, not one big talk. Values are absorbed over years, not delivered in an evening.
- Lead with the positive vision, not the fear. Fear teaches kids what to avoid; it doesn’t teach them what to want.
- Your marriage is the curriculum. What your kids observe between you and your spouse will teach them more than anything you say.
For the practical, age-by-age version of this, see my guide to how to talk to your kids about sex. If you want to go deeper, my How to Talk to Your Kids About Sex workshop walks through it in full.
And if reading this stirred up something about your own relationship with sex—that’s worth paying attention to. The best gift you can give your children here is a healthy marriage. You can join our Next Level program or work privately with a coach.
Frequently Asked Questions
It teaches that sex is a purely individual pursuit — that intimacy is optional and autonomy is everything. The trouble is that sex is inherently relational, so a framework that strips out the relationship tends to leave people performing liberation rather than experiencing connection. Even within feminist scholarship, the ‘empowerment’ framing of hookup culture has drawn serious criticism.
It becomes a substitute sex education — and a bad one. Porn presents sex as requiring no emotional or relational work, which distorts expectations, body image, and confidence. Research links pornography use to lower sexual satisfaction for both partners. For a teenager, objectification can get normalized before emotional maturity has a chance to develop.
The intent was protective, but the method often backfired. When chastity is taught through fear and shame rather than through values, it leaves marks. Research has associated purity culture beliefs with higher rates of sexual pain in women and lower marital and sexual satisfaction. The biblical value holds up; the fear-based packaging doesn’t.
Start early, talk often, and stay calm. Small, ongoing, age-appropriate conversations beat one big ‘talk.’ Don’t avoid the hard subjects — pornography, identity, hookup culture — because silence hands the conversation to someone else. And remember your kids are watching your marriage; it teaches more than your words do.
References
Hammack, P. L., & Manago, A. M. (2025). The psychology of sexual and gender diversity in the 21st century: Social technologies and stories of authenticity. American Psychologist, 80(3), 375–388. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001366
Lau, W. K., Ngan, L. H., Chan, R. C., Wu, W. K., & Lau, B. W. (2021). Impact of COVID-19 on pornography use: Evidence from big data analyses. PLoS ONE, 16(12), e0260386. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260386
Meenagh, J. (2017). Breaking up and hooking up: A young woman’s experience of “sexual empowerment.” Feminism & Psychology, 27(4), 447–464. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353517731434
Mintz, L. B. (2017). Becoming cliterate: Why orgasm equality matters—and how to get it. HarperOne.
Morgante, C. (2024). Recovering from purity culture: Dismantle the myths, reject shame-based sexuality, and move forward in your faith. Baker Books.
Poulsen, F. O., Busby, D. M., & Galovan, A. M. (2013). Pornography use: Who uses it and how it is associated with couple outcomes. The Journal of Sex Research, 50(1), 72–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2011.648027
Sawatsky, J., Lindenbach, R., Gregoire, S. W., & Gregoire, K. (2025). Sanctified sexism: Effects of purity culture tropes on White Christian women’s marital and sexual satisfaction and experience of sexual pain. Sociology of Religion, 86(4), 519–543. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srae031
