Those numbers jump up toward the end of adolescence. There are plenty of reasons to watch pornography or view pornographic images. Sure, sex — in terms of evolution — is for making babies. Sex is also a way to express love, experience intimacy, and mark the passage from adolescence to adulthood.

Those are different issues. The question I want to explore is how a parent should react if they discover their growing child — typically 12 or older — is deliberately looking at sexually explicit material on the Internet. There are a number of reasons why kids look at pornography. Interest in sex and voyeuristic behavior to satisfy sexual urges are completely normal. Whether the young person makes up images in his head, gets them from television shows, movies, magazines or images on the Internet, the process is much the same.

Harold S. Koplewicz, MD. Parents have always struggled with how to talk with their kids about sex, but in a world where pornography is a mouse click away, the conversation is more complicated than ever. A rather alarming number of adolescents — girls as well as boys — seem to be looking at porn online and using it as inspiration for their own sexting , blithely sending explicit pictures of themselves to their crushes and posing suggestively on Snapchat and Instagram. You can be the reality check for your kid.

The motivation? One of the victims exploited in material he manufactured is known familiarly to him. Earlier this month, the paper reported that the number of photos and videos had grown 50 percent in the past year, with 70 million images and videos reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an agency that works with governments.