Should I Talk to My Teen about Masturbation?

The Ask Lisa Podcast does not constitute medical advice and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have concerns about your child’s well-being, consult a physician or mental health professional.

The following transcript has been automatically generated by an AI system and should be used for informational purposes only. We cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided.

Reena Ninan:

Alright, so we’re going to kick off this episode. I’m going to tell my mom, please turn this podcast off. Actually, my mom listens to, this is not for you moms. We appreciate, love your support, but I’m going to give you five seconds to shut it off.

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Reena, are you saying that this is not a conversation you and your mom have spent a lot of time having?

Reena Ninan:

I have never spoken to my mom about this.

My mom, be mortified that we’re actually doing this episode. Lisa

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Reena’s, mom, this is Lisa. Feel free to keep listening. These are important conversations to be having with our kids or to hear, listen to our kids having with their friends.

Reena Ninan:

I put extra bronze on which you can’t see, so you don’t see me blushing because this is such an uncomfortable topic. But I’m going to read you the letter and I want to get right into it because I have so many questions. Read, be brave. We’re doing it. Be brave. I’m actually glad we’re doing it. I really am. Dear Dr. Lisa, my husband and I were raised in a conservative religious community with a lot of fear and shame around masturbation. And now we’re raising three of our own kids, the oldest of witches, a 12-year-old boy. We’re trying to raise our kids in a healthier way and we hear the advice about sex positive parenting. I think we’re doing a good job around having conversations around sex and puberty and even porn, but talking about masturbation is scarier because it’s just a bit more close and real than the other things.

And there isn’t really specific advice out there about it. When’s the right time to talk about being gentle with your body and things like that? I have no evidence that they’ve started masturbating, but then again, I sure knew how to hide it when I was their age. If we talk about it too soon, we’ll trigger them to start masturbating and will that lead them to earlier partnered sexual activity? In short, what’s the worst way we can mess this up? Thank you for your advice on this and all the other topics on your podcast that have been so useful. I want to start with the messing it up. Why are we opening up this door? Is it needed to open this up in the teen years?

Dr. Lisa Damour:

What a great, first of all, what’s the worst way we can mess this up? Which is actually a very good way to think about a lot of parenting. I getting it right can look like a lot of things. Usually you

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Can kind of put the parameters around, but just don’t do this, right? Yes, don’t do this. Okay, totally. So the don’t do this on this is like shame, right? She says the word shame.

Yeah.

And Rena, I will tell you the consensus on all the people who do work on teenagers sexuality, masturbation is healthy and natural. It’s also something that should be private, but there should be no shame, no shame around it. So if you really want to mess it up, I would say get out in front of it and be like, this is a terrible thing. You can do whatever was done. And it sounds like their experiences around it to make people feel bad, to make them feel like there’s something wrong with them. And the distinction we make in psychology between guilt and shame is guilt is I feel bad about the thing I did. Shame is I feel bad about who I’m, and one of the things that makes us up is our human sexuality. And these are normal and natural feelings. And if you are made to feel bad about them, you cause shame. And then the thing that is so awful about it is it gets in the way of being able to enjoy one’s sexual life over time. And so there’s damage done in the moment of making the person feel bad. But then you hear all the time about people who have really struggled with shame in their sexual lives for their entire adulthood and that it’s really interfered with pleasure and it’s really interfered with connection. And so just leave shame out of it and you are already on the path to a good outcome.

Reena Ninan:

Well, I like how this parent says she’s got a 12-year-old boy. Should parents be bringing this up and making their kids aware of masturbation? And if so, what age?

Dr. Lisa Damour:

This one’s trickier, I think, and this I will put more in the category of probably, there’s a lot of ways to get it right if you leave shame out of it. There’s a lot of ways to get it right. I would also though say there should be some real boundaries around this. Adult sexual lives should be private from kids, kids’ sexual lives. They deserve privacy there too, right? So when we say that masturbation is healthy and private, we mean both. We don’t want kids doing it in the living room. We also mean we shouldn’t intrude upon it too much that there’s a boundary to be respected. So there may be some families who never bring this up with their kid and I can see that being perfectly reasonable and healthy and the kid figures it out and it’s not a problem at all. There may be other families who say at some point along the way, maybe on a walk, maybe in the car, people don’t have to look at each other. Hey, you are going to notice as your body’s changing that touching yourself can feel really good. This is natural, this is healthy. This is something that people do to get to know how their body works and to get to know what they like. And you’re going to hear about it, and I just want you to know it’s part of healthy sexuality to explore your own body and figure out what feels good for you.

Reena Ninan:

But then aren’t they confused? What do you mean? What are you talking about? If they’re not there, especially if you might have a late bloomer, does it mean you wait on this conversation?

Dr. Lisa Damour:

I mean, I think some kids will be like, what are you talking about? I have no idea what mom just said to me.

What are you talking about? And either they will go think it over for themselves, check it out for themselves. Some kids may be like, what are you talking about? At which point you can say your genitals are designed to be very sensitive and to feel good. Other parts of your body can be the same. It’s part of natural and healthy and developing sexuality to learn more about that on your own time. But you can hear, for me, I think that’s pretty much up against as close a boundary as I think more would start to feel bluntly to use a technical term. Weird, really. But I think that would be how I would propose a direct conversation about it without violating a boundary that I think does belong between adult and child sexual lives. Yes. Yeah.

Reena Ninan:

I think some parents might worry, what if my kid, this wasn’t anywhere in my kid’s radar and I bring up masturbation.

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Okay, well, so what’s the worst case scenario? Your kid checks it out, right? Yeah. And I think that that worry, and I get it, there’s so much shame around it that we’re like, but what if they do it then? And then you’re like, oh, that’s a very shame informed worry. I think our culture has, especially our generation and older, there’s been so much shame that of course those worries are going to crop up, but let’s interrogate them. Right? Okay, worst case scenario, your kid’s like, Hmm, I didn’t know. Now I do.

Dr. Lisa Damour:

And then they check it out. Okay,

Reena Ninan:

In this letter they talk about the word is positive sexual,

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Oh, sex positive

Reena Ninan:

Parenting, sex positive parenting, sex positive parenting. What is that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:

It probably means different things to different people. Here’s what it means to me is treating sexuality as part of healthy development and not treating sexuality as entirely informed by risk and shame. And so this is what we’ve advocated all the time on this podcast, is that we treat sexuality as part of just natural and healthy and normal development. This is novel. I would also say, and this is sort of the intricacies that I have thought through over time, it may not be how everybody sees it talking or thinking about desire and pleasure as important. I think that that’s probably innate to the idea of sex positive parenting is that desire and pleasure are important. I would say especially for girls, that needs to be part of the conversation. I think often for boys, we presume it, they have wants, they’re going to have a good time. When we’ve looked at the data on how we talk with kids about sex, it’s usually with boys. We say things like, if you’re going to have sex, wear a condom. So it sort of presumes like you’re into this, you’re going to do it. And with girls we’re like, don’t get pregnant. Don’t get yourself in a bad position. It’s a lot of don’t.

When I talk with young people of all genders about sexuality, I will say there’s four things for you to focus on. Number one, what do you want? So putting desire first for everyone in the room. Number two, what does your partner want? Number three, what do you both want? Right? This is where consent comes in, but I think it should be wanting on both sides. And number four, what are the risks, if any, of what you’re considering. So I think that’s to me, what sex positive means. It’s treated as natural and healthy and we center desire and want, which we also know reduces negative outcomes, right? Yes. People worry if you talk with kids about sex being a nice thing, that they’re going to have more and everybody’s going to get pregnant and STDs. And what we see is if you talk with kids about sex being a nice thing, it does not speed up the rate at which they have sex in terms of age or frequency. But when they do have sex, it’s safer and better for all parties.

Reena Ninan:

Lisa, I want to pause and take a short break and then I want to ask you a little bit about the way boys and girls approach this differently and how we should have an outlook on that as well. And then I want to get into some of the data. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Ask Lisa, the Psychology of parenting. Welcome back to Ask Lisa, the psychology of parenting. We are talking about masturbation. Yes, very eyeopening. And Lisa, you were telling us a little bit earlier about the ways that, worst ways that sometimes we can think of messing it up, but you were also talking about masturbation doesn’t necessarily lead to higher sexual activity. Tell me a little bit more about the data that you’re seeing on that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:

So on this one it’s just we don’t see a finding one way or the other. From what I can tell kids who masturbate are not more likely to have partnered sex sooner or less likely to have partnered sex sooner. It seems to be disconnected. What we do see in the data is that girls who masturbate are more likely to have enjoyable sexual experiences when they are with partners. So these two things seem connected. Why do you think that is? Then the flip? I think they probably, first of all, they’re willing to explore their own body and they’ve learned about what feels good for them. And I think it may be explained by, we also have research showing the flip, which is girls who have a negative perception of masturbation also report having more negative sexual experiences. And so for me, the way I read that as a clinician is like, oh, shame has taken over that there’s shame about masturbation and that that is carrying over to partnered experiences. And so when we look at the link between what happens in terms of masturbation and partnered experiences, the link we see is for girls, especially masturbating leads to better experiences down the line.

Reena Ninan:

So this recently in a podcast about how proud you were the parent actually coming, I think it was last week’s podcast, about the entitled parent at least coming to Seek help. You were saying that was so important and I love how this letter writer explains, this, mom, explains that they’re in a conservative religious community which often looks at sex in a very, very negative, shameful, shameful way. When you look at your experience of boys versus girls, what’s some of the messaging that goes beyond how we talk to boys about this versus girls?

Dr. Lisa Damour:

So from what I understand, I actually don’t have sons, but I end up hearing about things clinically and in other ways. Boys joke about masturbation a lot more. They’re much more open about it. And when we look at the data, they do masturbate more than girls. Interestingly, not all boys masturbate, not all high school teenage boys masturbate. And I think that’s a myth that is out there that people think like, oh, they’re all doing it. And when we look at the rates, it’s like 75% of high school boys masturbate, but that means 25%, which is a not small number, it’s more like 50% for girls. So that’s also a pretty stark difference in terms of frequency or engaging in this behavior.

Reena Ninan:

We told our mothers to turn off the podcast at the beginning. How do you think generationally, generationally things have changed from our parents’ generation to our generation to this current generation, which I think some of them are alpha generation Alpha. Exactly.

Dr. Lisa Damour:

I know it’s hard to keep track

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Of the various, so this is fascinating actually. The change seems to be, and I think this is all good for girls in terms of talking more openly about pleasure and masturbation, and I have two data points I’m working with here arena. So one is some friends of mine, some wonderful friends with two sons and a daughter. They’re all well into college age now. The boys would joke openly about masturbation at home. And one day in high school or early college, their daughter called out the parents for being kind of failed feminist for not the topic of masturbation with her, which I thought like,

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Oh, that’s really interesting that she’s like, you’re talking about it with the boys,

Dr. Lisa Damour:

You should be talking about it with me. And when I think back generationally, I’m like, oh yeah, no, that was not where we were

Reena Ninan:

At. No way.

Dr. Lisa Damour:

The other thing that I know to be true is that these days it’s not that unusual for late high school or young adult women to be giving one another vibrators as gifts. What

Reena Ninan:

I mean, okay, women in their thirties, forties. Twenties. Okay, I can get that.

Yeah.

What in your teens, they’re giving

Dr. Lisa Damour:

You other gifts? Late teens, young adulthood, women buying vibrators for their friends as presents. Wow. I know. And it’s funny, Reina, I have kind of a split

Reaction. Part of me, the 53-year-old part of me is like, oh, oh, okay, taken aback. And then the part of me that’s like, oh my gosh, I’ve spent my whole career trying to help girls and young women center desire around sex and

Pleasure both because they should, and secondly because it is what leads to better health outcomes when they have intercourse. This is great and way to go, ladies way to go with

Reena Ninan:

Doing that. Your sense is much of these topics, maybe this is a conversation in the car where you can drop it, not make eye contact, but you talk about it, you open the door to know it’s not shameful and just walk away and

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Leave it be. Yeah. And you can say if you have questions, I can answer them. I think there was something else in this letter that is critical. It just about being gentle with your body. And I think that’s as much as you probably need to say. But I think it’s worth saying because as kids are figuring stuff out, they can sometimes get carried away in a way that’s not so gentle with themselves.

Reena Ninan:

So can I ask you a question? This might seem a little out there, but how does pornography factor into all of this?

Dr. Lisa Damour:

It’s not out there at all. It’s important. It’s really important. Okay. So here, Rena, I will say there’s a little bit of a divide between what we’ve been able to establish from the research perspective versus what we’re concerned about clinically. So from the research perspective, what we have not been able to establish, and you’ll understand why is that pornography may change how people masturbate in a way that then has impact for partnered sex. And one of the reasons it’s hard to establish that is if we want to do good research, we have to do case controlled studies. So we’re having to assign people to groups of what you’re masturbating to and then following your sex life down the line. You can see why these do not lend themselves to large scale research studies. So the research on this is a bit murky. That doesn’t discount the clinical concerns we have or the worries that people have who care for lots of young people. And the worry we have is that first of all, kids shouldn’t even be looking at porn. I mean porn is for 18 and older at least it’s overwhelming. It’s upsetting.

Reena Ninan:

And we have an episode

Very intense

Dr. Lisa Damour:

About what do you do if your kid’s exposed to porn? Right?

Yeah. I mean, and that’s one of our most popular episodes. We should probably run again soon and we can come back to that. But the worry is that so much of pornography is incredibly violent and degrading and dark and it’s not unusual for kids to masturbate to pornography, especially boys, but not just boys. And the worry is that you end up with a pairing, right? That this very, very pleasurable experience of masturbation gets connected, linked to really rough stuff, really violent stuff, really degrading stuff. And then the worry, I mean that’s kind of worrisome on its own level is that that’s going to carry over into partnered activity. And there’s some concern that we’re seeing phenomenal logical evidence of that. We’re hearing about pretty rough sex happening in young people. And so the concern is at two levels. One is that it would shape partnered activity in a way that is violent, integrating and yucky, which nobody wants that. The other is it will become the only way that the person can experience pleasure, but they associate it that way. It gets so tightly linked that they can’t actually enjoy themselves any other way. And that’s not great either.

They’re both not good. So there’s that.

Reena Ninan:

Okay. You mentioned earlier that we should just send the message, masturbation is private. It’s not like it’s out in the open here, but what do you do when you’ve got boys who suddenly leave a T-shirt on the floor that you know what has happened there? What’s your advice in dealing with that in a gentle way?

Dr. Lisa Damour:

So what you’re describing I think is a common scenario in many homes and I think it really, you could probably bring it back under the, they should be private. So just as the kids should have privacy to enjoy themselves in their bodies, other family members should not have to be in any way brought into the child’s masturbatory activity. And so I think that that may be a time if kids are leaving, what do we want to call it? I’m trying to think of a phrase. Time

Reena Ninan:

To do your own laundry era.

Dr. Lisa Damour:

I think you may call that time to do your own laundry time. Just say, you know what, you come to an age where it’s

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Time to do your own laundry and you don’t even have to make it a thing. You don’t even have to say because I am not cleaning these things, but it’s time to do your own laundry. Let me show you how to work the laundry machine. You are now in charge of your laundry.

Reena Ninan:

Think that’s a place to that you’re kind because I want to make it a thing. I’m just like, what is this whatcha doing? But I’m going to be said, I think just keep

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Shame out of it

Reena Ninan:

Keeps shame out it, it’s very important. That’s the

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Big underlining message I’m learning from today. It should be private. Reina. I had one more thought on the porn thing.

Reena Ninan:

Yeah,

Dr. Lisa Damour:

There’s lots of reasons why I really think it’s not okay. Especially kids to be looking at porn. That may an opening into the conversation about masturbation because we should be talking with kids about porn. I think we should be talking with kids about porn.

Reena Ninan:

Yeah, you’ve been very open about that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:

And I think I would say that is an across the board recommendation because they’re going to see it and you want them to have your voice in their heads when they see it. And you want that voice to be saying that very rarely is porn depicting healthy mutual sexuality. It’s usually depicting something pretty violent, pretty unpleasant, overwhelming to you. I think if the child has not thrown themselves from a moving car yet, I think that you could consider advancing that conversation one step further and saying, and it’s not unusual for people to masturbate to porn. You people have to be really careful with that because it can start to associate pleasure with pretty yucky stuff. So should you want to explore your body and enjoy it, use your own fantasy, use your variety. Don’t attach that experience of enjoying your body to a script and especially to a script that you’re not going to feel good about. So I think that that would be a way that you could introduce the conversation about masturbation connected to a conversation about porn that we should definitely be having anyway.

Reena Ninan:

That’s great. So it all kind of links in together and makes it a little bit less painless. I sort of feel like because you’re talking

Dr. Lisa Damour:

About exactly, and then everybody gets to the garage and pretends like none of that ever happened,

Reena Ninan:

Runs for the door. I keep hearing you talk about being careful about in those early years of what stigmas and what pleasurable things you attach to your sexual experiences. What do we know about these sexual experiences we have in our teens and how does it stick with us and affect us through high school? Maybe you had a really horrible, you were not ready for some sort of a sexual experience or situation that you find yourself in. How do you help if not go down that road?

Dr. Lisa Damour:

That’s so interesting. So I think there is extra worry about teens masturbation, pornography in this way, that the teenage brain is highly plastic. It is forming. There are pathways you probably don’t want to lay down that are unique to adolescence and could persist over time. But then there’s also bad sexual experiences and yucky things that happen. And Rena increasingly, and it’s so funny to be in my third decade of practicing, it’s weird to and wonderful to watch things kind of become much more clear. And one of the things that’s become more clear is stuff happens all the time that people don’t want to have happen. They can have a lousy teacher, they can do something dumb themselves, they can have a bad sexual experience. And what seems to make a difference is are they alone with it or can they get loving support around what happened? Support

Reena Ninan:

Can make a difference.

Dr. Lisa Damour:

All the difference. Oh the difference. And it actually goes back to the shame piece that you can kind of, the antidote to shame is sharing and bringing things into the light and being able to feel that it’s not some deep, dark, horrible internal thing that you can’t share with the world. So it’s funny, I hear stories about, oh, this person had this thing happen. My next question is, and did they feel that they had to harbor that privately for years and feel terrible? Or could they say to a dear friend or a parent or a great clinician or a trusted talk someone and process it and work it out. Rena, that’s the great divide. That is what seems to be from just speaking on clinical experience, the game changer here.

Reena Ninan:

Okay, I was so hesitant to have this episode because I just feel like my kids aren’t quite there yet. But this is why it’s so great to have these episodes because even if you are past the mark, it’s great to know. The big takeaway for me is the shame piece that is just such a massive takeaway for me on this sort of topic. When kids are kind of getting into that age where they might be seeing a romantic movie and if there’s a sex scene or something, what do we as parents need to do in that moment? I quickly fast forward and pretend like it didn’t happen.

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Don’t be weird. Don’t be weird. That’s just

Reena Ninan:

Basic. Don’t be weird parents.

Dr. Lisa Damour:

But here’s the thing, Rena, it’s so interesting, and this really gets to the boundary piece. My parents are in their eighties. I’m 53, I still watching kissing on TV with my parents in the room. It’s so cringey. Hundred

Reena Ninan:

Right’s, so cringy, so true.

Dr. Lisa Damour:

And that gets to just

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Something so I don’t know, human. And so I think if you want to fast forward, you can fast forward I white knuckle it through those things you do, you just do. Everybody keeps looking at the screen. Alright, that’s good to know. I’m trying to make it weird. I don’t know, Rena, I don’t know. But

Dr. Lisa Damour:

This is the thing. It should be fun. We should make it clear to our kids that we fully expect and want for them to have happy, healthy sex lives and that we can create an environment at home that treats sex as just a valuable and important part of life while respecting appropriate boundaries of privacy and information sharing in a family.

Reena Ninan:

Well, I love also, it’s never too late to have these conversations. Even if you think your child’s well into this or well past it, it’s never too late. And I love that you always say you can turn things around. So great advice. Now, how are you going to top this and give us a great parenting to go on masturbation?

I have four books I’m going to recommend, which is not to say that people need to go read all four books, but I want people to know about that incredibly good work that is being done in this area because things have changed. And so we do want to inform ourselves as people who care for young people. So the first two are by Peggy Ornstein, who’s a brilliant journalist. One is called Girls and Sex, the other is called Boys and Sex. And she does an incredibly good job of laying out the kind of phenomenological landscape of adolescent and young adult sex now. So that would be a great place to start just to sort of learn where things are. The second two are guidance books for parents. The first is called Sex Teens and Everything in between by Shafi Zaloom brilliant book. She’s a great sex educator. The fourth book is the most recent, and it’s called Yes, your Kid. And it’s by Debbie Herbenick, who is professor at Indiana University. She does great work on adolescents and sexuality and she is just unflinching and honest. I mean, she and Shafi Lum I think really cover this territory incredibly well. And so I would say across those four books, that’s great. Parents can find everything they need, and they’re all excellent, excellent

Resources. That’s great. It’s always great to have extra resources when you feel like you need a little bit more shoring up on that. Well, thank you, Lisa. I’m really glad we did this episode. No one’s talking about it, so thank you. Thank you for your, you’re

Dr. Lisa Damour:

Welcome. Yeah,

Reena Ninan:

No, we did it, Rita. We did it. And I feel Mom can listen again. She can listen again. I’ll tell her next week. I’ll see you next week, Lisa,

Dr. Lisa Damour:

I’ll see you next

Reena Ninan:

Week. Thanks for joining us. Be sure to subscribe to the Ask Lisa podcast so you get the episodes just as soon as they drop and send us your questions to ask [email protected]. And now a word from our lawyers. The advice provided on this podcast does not constitute or serve as a substitute for professional psychological treatment, therapy, or other types of professional advice or intervention. If you have concerns about your child’s wellbeing, consult a physician or mental health professional. If you’re looking for additional resources, check out Lisa’s [email protected].