Teen Sexting is Just ‘Healthy Exploration’ Scientific Study Says

After at least a decade of headlines warning of the dangers of “sexting” by teenagers, with dire imprecations that sending and receiving nude selfies inevitably results in devastating emotional and even legal consequences, the lead researcher behind a new, exhaustive scientific study has a different message for parents of teens growing up in the current era where universal connectivity collides with adolescent sexuality on constant basis: relax! “If you're a parent and you find a sext on your kid's phone, don't freak out," University of Texas behavioral health researcher Jeff Temple told USA Today. "It doesn't mean your kid is bad or a deviant." In facts sexting can be no more than a normal aspect of teens “healthy exploration” of their burgeoning sexual side, according to the study “Sexting in youth: cause for concern?” published last month by the medical research journal The Lancet.  Teenagers’ “exploration of their sexual identity is not only normal, but a developmental and biological imperative,” Temple said in an interview with The New York Post. Given that today’s oldest teens would have been born in the year 2000, and the youngest in the year 2006—and the first mass-marketed smartphone, Apple’s iPhone, debuted in June of 2007—teenagers circa 2019 have been connected 24/7 for much of their lives, meaning that norms of behavior for the current teenage generation are sharply different even from those of “Millennials,” who are defined by demographers as people born between 1981 and 1996. Temple’s study was a survey of 39 previous research studies, analyzing data from 110,000 teens, and finding that 27 percent of teens between ages of 12 and 17 have received nude or semi-nude photos on their phones, and 15 percent have sent sexts. But despite the revelation that sexting appears to be just a normal part of growing up in the digital epoch, the study nonetheless contained some cautionary notes. Perhaps most important, Temple noted to USA Today, is that the study’s findings on the relative harmlessness of sexting apply only to sexts sent and received consensually, between older teens in steady relationships. Receiving unwanted, sexually explicit text messages was still associated with psychological distress, the study found, as was sending sexts under some form of coercion. Risks also increased for sexting by younger teens, and for “casual” sexting. "Consensual sexting with two 17-year-olds, I'm not too worried about it," Temple said. "I have a 16-year-old daughter, and I don't want her sexting. There's a good chance that it will happen. So we need to see (sexting) as more of a normal manifestation of normal teenage development and we still need to talk about it with our kids the way we talk about sex with them." One cautionary note: Despite the research finding that consensual sexts, in either written or image form, are relatively harmless, kids are still being busted all over the country as "child pornographers" for sending or receiving such material, or even simply having nude or sexually explicit images of their fellow minors on their phones or home computers. Photo By Pro Juventute / Wikimedia Commons