More revealing than the nude celebrity pictures have been our reactions to the theft.

A common response -- "just don't take naked selfies" -- misses the most critical point. Digital sexual behavior is part of the dating and relationship landscape. The criminals who hacked celebrities' accounts, stole private photos, then sold or reposted them violated those women and their privacy. They also sent a loud message to everyone else: Your data is not safe.

And celebrities are hardly alone in capturing intimate moments with a phone.

The way parents talk to their children about this case lays the foundation for how upcoming generations will think about a shifting landscape of intimacy and privacy.

Several studies suggest that your child will, at some point, encounter a sexually explicit phone message. This will probably happen younger than you think. While fewer teens are having sex than in previous generations, they are more likely to use digital devices to experiment with sexuality.

Nearly a quarter (20 percent) of middle school students with text-capable cellphones admitted to receiving a sexually explicit text, according to a study published in Pediatrics in June. A 2012 study in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine found that one-quarter of teens said they have sexted. By college, those numbers are much higher. A 2013 study from Indiana University and Purdue University found that 80 percent of the college students surveyed had received sext messages, and nearly half, 46 percent, had sexted with pictures.

A report from the Pew Research Center released in February found that 20 percent of adults surveyed say they have received a suggestive picture, up from 15 percent two years ago.

If your child has a smartphone or is friends with someone who does, this latest news about celebrity photos merits a conversation. As evident from this and so many other cases that have been in the news, the consequences of virtual sexual behavior can have real-life impact just as damaging to lives and reputations as behavior offline.

The names involved in this particular case, however, are ones your child has likely heard; these are stars they have likely seen on television or in the movies.

When I broached the topic with my own tween daughter, she interrupted me to say that the strangest picture she's taken of herself is of her making a duck face. I was glad to hear that, but there were a few points I wanted to make clear about what had happened to actresses like Jennifer Lawrence.

I told her the basics of how the celebrities' private photos had spread. Despite a few eye rolls and "I already know," I said (again) that there are ways people can get into your phone and computer without your permission and use what they find to hurt you. We talked about ways to try to protect our privacy.

It may be easier for parents to pass judgment on celebrities who are victims of perverts and thieves. But if we want to try to protect our children from being victims -- or perpetrators -- of such crimes, we need to start those discussions from a different place. And the conversation about values needs to go a step further.

It's just as much a crime to break into someone's phone or computer and steal an image as it would be to break into their house and walk out with the china.

It's not OK for this to have happened to Lawrence because the pictures were taken in the first place.

It's not OK for those pictures to be spread around the Internet because people say she's hot.

Harassment is never a compliment.

There is a difference between what someone wants to do with another person and what they don't want to do. It's called consent.

Looking at a private picture that someone does not want you to see is a violation of that person's consent.

There's no shortage of sexually explicit photos on the Internet for those who want to view them. An image becomes more valuable when we don't want others to see it.

These may seem like heavy concepts to discuss with a child, but they can be explained in simple terms. And the younger we start talking about the various ways in which we respect another person, the longer we have to reinforce those ideas.

The best things my son brought home from school during second grade were little pink slips of paper filled out by his classmates.

The notes were often scrawled in crooked handwriting. Each one mentioned a simple thing my son had done: He helped stack the chairs after school. He lent someone his markers. He gave a friend a pencil.

His teacher at the time, Emily Bernstein, encouraged the students to jot down when they noticed a peer was "caught showing character." She handed out the notes and sometimes assigned a "secret friend" to make sure everyone was caught committing kindness at least occasionally.

The notes I often found in the bottom of his backpack were small but powerful.

His friends were affirming what I was trying to teach at home.

When it comes to teaching kindness, we often start too late and stop too young. We think once our children have mastered social graces that they no longer need direct instruction on something so basic.

We are wrong.

It can take years of practice, reinforcement and witnessing small and large gestures of grace to create considerate adults. And even then, we need reminders.

This year, I turned 40. As part of marking that milestone, I resolved at the start of the year to commit 40 random acts of kindness before my birthday. Initially, it sounded easy enough; I prefer to think of myself as a nice person. I started keeping a list as I paid tolls for those behind me, bought drive-through meals and coffee for strangers, gave away free movie tickets to those in line.

But I soon realized that I didn't want my children to see my challenge as a gimmick, nor did I want them to think the only way to be kind was to give other people stuff.

So, I started writing thank-you notes for things I would normally just appreciate silently, like a helpful concierge or a cheerful waitress. I said yes to volunteer events that I felt too tired or busy to do at the moment I was asked. I extended invitations I would normally have talked myself out of. And I didn't say a word or give a sideways glance to the woman who stole the parking spot I had waited several minutes for.

The project forced me to become more intentional about my interactions with others, regardless of how brief. And it embarrassed me to realize how often I missed these opportunities when I wasn't keeping kindness top-of-mind. So many of my efforts for others focus on the usual suspects of family members and friends.

Making that circle bigger turned out to be the best gift I've ever given myself.

Unbeknownst to me, around the same time I started my project, Kimberly Downey, a mom of twins and owner of a dance school in Orange County, California, made the same intention. She wanted to repay the world a giant kindness: One of her twins had undergone open-heart surgery last year, and she had been overwhelmed by the way friends and family took care of her family during that stressful time.

On Jan. 4, her 39th birthday, she told her twin girls, now 4, that they were going to spend the entire day spreading acts of kindness throughout their community. From 8 a.m. until 4 p.m., they took dog and cat treats to an animal shelter, handed out sand toys at the beach, mailed care packages to deployed Marines, dropped off crayons and coloring books to a children's hospital and delivered gift baskets to their local fire station.

At first, her preschoolers wanted to keep some of the treats for themselves and couldn't understand why they were giving away so many things, but they quickly caught on. They felt that intrinsic burst of happiness that we give ourselves when we give of ourselves.

They wanted to do it again the next day.

After a few months of consistently involving her children in small acts of kindness, Downey observed a change in them. They noticed when a child was all alone on a playground; they defaulted to being the ones who would reach out in those situations. I noticed a similar effect on my children near the end of my challenge. They would suggest ideas to me as we went through our normal, hectic routines.

"It's not just a holiday event," Downey said. "We need to be intentional about kindness and be consistent about it."

It led her to start a nonprofit, the Infinite Smile Project, which will look to involve children as young as 3 and their parents in paying it forward.

She wants kindness to be the new cool.

Actor Aaron Paul may have helped the cause by giving a shout-out during his Emmy acceptance speech to his wife's charity, The Kind Campaign. She and her co-founder travel to schools urging girls to stop being mean to one another.

His mention drove so much traffic to the site, it crashed.

What if everyone who has ever benefited from another person's kindness made it an urgent priority to pass it along?

We would crash so much more than a website.

Angela Mitchell-Phillips' predominantly white church had a "come to Jesus" moment on race last weekend.

Her minister leaned over the pulpit and said something like: As God is my witness, I better not ever hear of anybody in this parish calling another human being an animal.

The congregation turned pin-drop silent. Mitchell-Phillips looked around the pews.

"I bet somebody did it," she thought. "I bet he saw it on Facebook. And I bet he was pissed."

The moment points to how raw and tense the issue of race has become in St. Louis, and around the country, since Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown, leading to volatile days of protests.

It can be hard enough when family members are yelling at one another in front of the television, or are met with stony silence at the dinner table. But it can be even worse when you come across a post or comment on social media that leaves you stunned.

It's hard to have a meaningful conversation in a limited, public space like social media. The aftermath of Ferguson has generated a rash of friend fallout.

"If you need to start a comment with 'I'm not racist, but ...' that's probably a comment you don't need to say (or write) out loud," wrote Mitchell-Phillips on Facebook recently.

Mitchell-Phillips, 43, is an eighth-generation Missourian from the southern part of the state, a region she describes as "very, very conservative." She now lives in suburban St. Louis, 30 miles from Ferguson.

She's been watching the news and reaction on social media since the shooting. It's been a heartbreaking week. A friend will post a provocative status, and she will read the comments. "It's like they gave permission for others to say every last nasty, racist thought -- stopping just short of the n-word -- they have ever wanted to vent," she said.

There have been more than a handful of friends and acquaintances, people she knows through her children's activities and schools, who have done this -- ones whom she considered good people and trusts to be in her life, around her children.

"Then, I see this person walks around with a heck of a lot of hate in them," she said.

She's hidden some people from her feed, tried to comment on a few threads and post her own Facebook statuses as rebuttals, but she's walking a fine line.

"I don't want some of these people who interact with my children to turn their hatred on my children because they know I don't agree with them. I'm trying to defend my own beliefs while trying to protect my (kids) at the same time."

She's hardly alone.

A poll released recently by Pew found that black Americans are almost twice as likely as white Americans to say that the shooting "raises important issues about race that need to be discussed."

A white woman in her 30s, who lives in St. Louis and did not want to give her name, had a tense exchange with a sibling over comments made on Facebook since the shooting. She has a very close relationship with her family, and deleted the offensive posts. She called her sibling and said: "I love you unconditionally; however, I can't condone this. I don't want people to think of you as a hateful person because that's not how I see you."

Her sibling became defensive.

"My feelings are horribly hurt," the woman said. "A lot of people are scared." Fear does not lend itself to clear, rational thinking.

The situation in Ferguson has forced race to the forefront for people who normally don't have to think about it. And social media is not the most nuanced place to have a discussion. It has led people to take sides, to spread misinformation, to surround themselves with people who validate racist thoughts.

Until someone challenges them.

"It forces you to be introspective," said the woman who called out her sibling. "You have never been profiled, have never been harassed (for your race). Trying to reconcile that with the fact that there are people who have been, that's a hard thing. It's hard to be honest with, 'I have had a privilege that you have not had.' That is a hard thing."

At some point, you let it go, realizing you can't change another person's personal beliefs, she said. But she had to say her piece.

Vincent Flewellen, an African-American middle school teacher in the St. Louis area, will be teaching a class on Human Diversity and Social Justice at Washington University this semester. Out of tragedy comes such a huge learning opportunity, he said.

It's a chance for people to speak out when they see hatred in their social media feeds.

"They need to call them out on that," he said. A starting point may be, 'I'm not sure you're intending to sound like a racist, but it's certainly what I'm hearing,'" said Flewellen. He said that his white friends have reported seeing a number of "quite racist" comments from acquaintances recently.

"I have friends who have been crying over this, and the fact they have to defriend their friends because they are now showing their true colors," he said.

People, especially in the heart of Midwest Nice, hate conflict.

"There are some things we are just scared of," said Mitchell-Phillips, a writer and part-time educator. There are people in her writing classes who are so uncomfortable with conflict, they have trouble even writing about it in a work of fiction.

There is a fear that power and dignity are somehow finite, she said. If someone gets a little more, someone else loses a little. Mitchell-Phillips has been repeating to herself a verse she read long ago: "Rise so we all may rise."

For now, the things she's read have changed some relationships.

"The next time I see those people, I won't see them the same way."