When the only thing kids hear from adults about sex is that it’s bad and you shouldn’t do it, they know they aren’t hearing the whole story. When parents fail to give the full picture of sex, kids will go looking for answers somewhere else. The “somewhere else” is pornography.
The internet and smartphones have opened the door to an invading army of porn. It’s infiltrating the minds and hearts of our kids, and the consequences are devastating. Here are 5 ways porn hurts our sons and daughters.
1. Losing Innocence
The culture surrounding porn is reinforcing the idea that kids can be sex objects. This was evident when 8-year-old girls danced in a competition to the song “Single Ladies” with highly sexualized moves while wearing lingerie. The crowd on hand, which included the girls’ parents, wasn’t horrified. Instead, they hooted, hollered, and cheered.
We are teaching our sons and daughters at a young age if they want to be noticed they need to be sexy. It all starts with our pornified culture. And kids have gotten the message loud and clear.
2. Feelings of Shame, Guilt, and Depression
What happens next is tweens and teens play at being sexy. They quickly believe the lie that the best place to learn how to be sexual is through internet porn, which is free and easily accessible in large quantities.
The images of mainstream pornography they encounter within one minute of searching are violent and graphic. The images are burned into their brains forever.
The pornographers are telling them that this is the sexual experience. Deep down, they know they have seen something they shouldn’t have seen, but their brains can’t make sense of it. They are excited and embarrassed, but they don’t know why. They feel ashamed and guilty but too scared to talk to anyone for fear of being in trouble.
3. Addiction
Little do they know, what their developing brains have been doing while viewing porn is releasing large amounts of dopamine. This gives the feeling of pleasure in the reward center of the brain.
The craving for another dopamine rush brings them back to the porn again and again. But the longer they use it, the more of it they need to feel the same amount of pleasure. This cycle causes an addiction, which is more powerfully ingrained the younger they are when they’re introduced.
Since the feeling of euphoria helps them momentarily forget about their problems, porn becomes an unhealthy coping mechanism to distract them from their feelings of shame, guilt, and stress. Unfortunately, it only leaves them feeling emptier so they watch more porn and the cycle continues.
4. They can never unsee the violence.
I was recently speaking to a father who caught his 12-year-old daughter watching porn. He remarked, “I’ve seen plenty of porn during my life, but the stuff she was watching was disturbing.” His experience is the new normal for kids and pornography. One out of every eight porn titles shown to first-time porn site visitors describes acts of sexual violence.
Mainstream porn continues to get more extreme, violent, and degrading. “Thirty years ago, ‘hardcore’ pornography usually meant the explicit depiction of sexual intercourse,” writes Dr. Norman Doidge, a neuroscientist and author of The Brain That Changes Itself. “Now hardcore has evolved and is increasingly dominated by the sadomasochistic themes…involving scripts fusing sex with hatred and humiliation.”
5. It Fuels Disconnection and Disrespect
Ultimately, porn leads to relational disconnection and degradation. They draw expectations of what sex will be like. Rather than sex being about connecting intimately with someone in the safety of commitment, it becomes a selfish pursuit of getting off. Sex gets cheapened to a physical act and people are reduced to objects of fantasy.
The porn culture is leading our sons and daughters far from happiness. The best thing we can do is educate our kids about the dangers of pornography, and we need to start earlier rather than later. On average, a child is first accidentally exposed to pornography between the ages of 9 and 13.
So speak to your children about porn before they ever encounter it, if possible. Help them make sense of what they will run into online. Keep the line of communication open, and engage them in conversation so they don’t go it alone.
Tell us! How do you think porn is affecting our sons and daughters?
