Next Generation: Porn Is Destroying Your Child's Brain

It’s 10 p.m.  Do you know what your kids are watching? 

There’s a good chance they’re watching something that’s causing massive amounts of damage. There’s a good chance they’re watching something you and I have seen ourselves. And there’s a good chance your child is watching porn.

The first time I saw a porn movie I was at a friend’s house.  We wanted to watch the 80s classic “Red Dawn”.  My friend found the tape and put it into the VHS player and pushed the play button.  The movie fired up and we settled in to watch a group of high school and college age kids defend their country against the hated Communists.

It was a favorite of ours and just as the movie was starting to pick up, the screen went to snow.  It scared us to death!  We looked at each other in horror as our favorite movie looked to have gone up in smoke.

Then an image and the sound of a moan flickered on the screen.

Our curiosity was peaked and we inched closer to the grainy images that were beginning to take shape.

And soon enough there it was. 

BAM!

Two people rolling around in some barn, doing things I had never seen. There was a flush of embarrassment when I realized I was watching people having sex. 

Then it hit me. I was watching people having SEX.

That was a pivotal moment in my adolescence. I didn’t realize it then, but there was a reshaping of my brain that was taking place as the images washed my brain in a heroin like rush of dopamine. 

And your child is no different.

Your teen’s brain is still forming and has what many doctors and researchers are calling plasticity, meaning that their brain is capable of rewiring itself to certain stimuli. And if that stimulus is a prolonged exposure to porn, the rewiring is drastic.

Unfortunately, we all too often sweep this topic under the rug and never mention it to our kids.  Most of us not realizing the harm it causes our children. Porn strips healthy relationships down to naked bodies and orgasms. When that takes place the brain will spike then plummet with pleasure causing chemicals leading to addiction like behaviors.

Your kids can and will become desensitized to what they are watching and soon begin to seek darker and more perverse forms of pornography. This causes a twisting of their sexuality and can alter how they interact with the opposite sex.  I can’t speak for everyone but I will speak for myself.

During my teen years of watching porn many times, I stopped seeing girls or women as people.  There were exemptions to that, such as any female relative. But other girls became sectioned into body parts.  This girl had the best butt, that girl was really hot and that girl over there looked like she would be good in bed. It caused me to see these people as things. 

And not just things, but things for my pleasure.

Pornography will chip away at all the positive relationship images you’ve built up in your child. Pornography takes your student places their adolescent brains cannot handle and teaches them that sex should be outside of emotions and feelings. It shows them men and women that hump like rabbits at the slightest inclination without worry of consequence. And over time it will show them that they are not good enough.

When a developing young man compares himself to that of a full grown well-endowed porn actor he’s going to realize that he is nowhere as big as the man on the screen.  The average male porn actor is over 2 inches larger than the average male. And a young woman will see how exaggerated a porn actress is compared to her. The majority of actresses have had plastic surgery to fit a Barbie doll stereotype of the “fantasy” woman.

A teen mind that is still years away from fully developing will have difficulty distinguishing between reality and the illusory world of porn. 

As I continued to watch and search for the perfect scene or image I was slowly isolating myself. I knew plenty of guys that watched it and have watched it with people present. But it wasn’t until I was alone that I could spend as much time as I wanted looking for whatever I wanted. As time went by, my lust could not be quenched for what I had seen before and the images I now sought after served to isolate me further.

Here’s just a snippet of another man’s story of addiction to pornography:

“Even though at times I shared aspects of my struggle (including going to counseling), no one, including myself, understood and realized the extent to which this sickness was consuming my soul. But in 1991, I became desperate; I saw clearly that I was being destroyed and was no longer able to hide my secret life. I disclosed all to my wife, parents, selected friends. For the next few months, I tried to change my life through counseling and accountability relationships.

However, I did not really understand how deeply embedded the addiction was in my soul, nor did I or those around me have a clue about the recovery process. And, in retrospect, I never really stopped addictive behavior. While I’d cut off the worst forms of acting out, there were many “minor” concessions I was continuing to make to lust. Soon, I was in full relapse. And too frightened, proud, and self-deceived to admit it.

One summer morning in 1995, my wife confronted me after I’d stayed up all night surfing online for pornography. In many ways, that morning, my life ended. In an instant, I went from being a superstar in my community, the ideal husband and father, an admired leader in the church, even the model recovering addict, to being a moral failure, a visual adulterer, a liar, a porno junkie.”

What you, mom and dad, need to understand is that your teen has most likely watched, looked, or at least stumbled upon online porn. And if they begin to watch it more and more (as is the case most of the time) it can spell bad news. 

A study by Australian researchers at the University of New South Wales and the University of Melbourne indicates an association between internet pornography and the sexual health of teenagers, with a review of literature in the area finding a strong correlation between teenage consumers of online porn and risky sexual behavior.

The study was based on a review of research in the area and on experiences in a number of countries, but primarily the US.

“Young people who reported having visited sexually explicit websites were more likely to have higher numbers of sexual partners, engage in a wider diversity of sexual practices, and use alcohol or drugs in association with sexual encounters,” according to the study. These factors have been associated with higher rates of STIs.  (http://www.techworld.com.au/article/425409/internet_porn_bad_teen_health_/)

So what do you do as a parent? Jennifer Austin Leigh, Psy. D., is a life coach for teen girls and a parenting coach for their mothers.  And in her article entitled “Your Teen’s Porn Brain” she offers this advice;

• Be open to the fact that pornography may be harming your teen. Whether or not they watch it, forty-five percent of teens surveyed said their friends do.
• Be willing to listen to your teen about how they feel about porn. That means you have to ask calm questions. The majority of the boys interviewed about how the media affects their relationship with girls claimed porn had a negative effect on our culture. How does your teen feel? Ask.
• Find ways to think about, and talk about pornography with less emotional charge. Your teenager will instinctively know how to push your buttons and get you worked up so that conversations about the topic will become fruitless.

Please here me parents, watching porn does not make your child bad.  It just makes them feel bad.  Your baby boy or girl is growing up, they’re searching for what it means to be a man or woman and that includes sexuality.  Porn offers them a glimpse of something that should be held to the confines of the bedroom, not a worldwide audience.  And while the images on the screen appear to be pleasant we will see next week that many times what we are watching could and should be considered rape.

I know the pain that porn has caused in my life growing up.  I know the look of disappointment in someone’s face when they heard my words.  I have felt firsthand the overwhelming heartache it causes in the ones you love.

Please allow me to ask a favor; talk to you teen lovingly today.  Allow them to confess and unburden themselves and then be ready to smother them with love.  If you’ve never struggled with this you can’t imagine the prison like chains that comes with it.  Please don’t berate or punish them, they’ve gotten pretty good at doing that to themselves- believe me.

Porn tears and mauls and rips and eats away at the very thing that makes your child human. Love them enough to fight with everything you have!  Porn will destroy their lives but you, Mom and Dad, can make all the difference if you’ll just say something. 

SO PLEASE… say something.