Porn: A most unfortunate parenting issue

“Fuckin’ porn. It drains me in every way. It drains any faith I have that I can control my urges. It drains my sense of attraction to girls. It drains the clock every day. And it drains my life force completely. Porn leaves me empty, and I have no idea how to stop.

When I finish, I hate myself. Every time.”

Josh, 24

Well, this should be fun.

It was my sincere intention this week to write about ways to keep your kids occupied over the course of the summer, a nice, light read. But as often happens here in the dynamics of the therapy room, a theme or topic just takes over the week and becomes, quite undeniably, that thing I need to dialogue with you about right away.

This week, porn is that thing.

So, make sure your kids get outside, away from their screens, as often as possible this summer. Get them involved in something that will build their confidence and sense of self, test their resilience, expose them to other people. Be available to them emotionally. Do all the good parenting things. More on this another week.

But this week, it’s all about porn. Porn porn porn. Let’s get used to it, the ick of it.

Porn is that thing that’s not spoken of often enough because of how wretchedly uncomfortable it makes us feel, we adults and our kids alike. But it’s also taking up their time, distorting their points of view, affecting their every relationship, and has become a powerful determinant of their self-worth.

So for the next ten minutes or so, let’s go all-in on porn. I assure you I’m no more pleased about this than you are. But for the sake of our kids, let’s put our discomfort aside and get real.

If you read my latest book Rescuing our Sons, you’ve gotten a feel for the degree to which porn has been infiltrating the lives of our young people, especially our boys, in the last ten to fifteen year or so. We know how readily available it is to them on any screen, behind any door, right next to us on the couch. But over the course of the past few weeks, thanks to some very courageous, open, vulnerable young guys, the picture has come into clear, stark focus. I’m more aware now of the impact porn has been exerting on our kids.

The news is not great.

First, our kids are watching a lot of pornography, far more than I thought. Some of our girls are watching moderate levels of porn, a few minutes once or twice a week. But so many of our boys are watching for many, many hours, every single day. This, from a 23-year-old man I’m working with:

“Duffy, if you just told me I couldn’t watch porn, I’d leave, find another therapist. I cannot imagine a day without it. I hate it, but I’m a junkie for it. Honestly, it’s all I look forward to.”

How brutal is that?

For some of these young boys in particular, porn has become part of their regular daily routine, ordinary as brushing their teeth. Honestly, it’s actually more routine than brushing their teeth for many of them. Hygiene is expendable. Turns out porn is not. These guys protect time for porn and masturbation. Often hours of time, every single day.

And there’s a cadence I’m starting to recognize in these guys. Because of the easy access and thrill, they start watching early in their lives, sometimes as young as 8- or 9-years-old. Read that line again. Alarming, but true. They stumble upon a porn site or find one on someone else’s device. The starting point is usually PornHub, highly captivating and intriguing and overtly taboo for the pre-teen boy. A surefire dopamine rush.

By the time they’re actual teenagers, they’ve clocked hundreds of hours of porn, and seek out more hardcore stimuli to elicit something close to the same physical and emotional response. At some point, the good feeling that accompanies that physical response fades away, leaving kids with, effectively, an addiction without a payoff, a dopamine desert of a brain chasing oases of exhilaration and connection that no longer exist. By their mid-teens, a lot of these kids overtly resent porn, but they sincerely feel they cannot drop the habit regardless.

How awful for them.

Has porn really changed that much?

I’ve gotten this response from parents quite frequently, most of them dads, many of them reflecting on their own early experiences with pornography. But these guys were looking, by and large, at stills in Playboy and posters of Farrah Fawcett (we all know the one), all but quaint relative to their sons’ dark, ugly, misogynistic fare. These men weren’t watching actual sex acts every single day of their lives. They may have adopted a distorted view of gender dynamics just by virtue of the fact that the material existed for their pleasure. But what boys and young men are taking in today is beyond next level, and affects their thinking about most every aspect of their lives and their relationships, or lack thereof.

In fact, what our kids consume today is dark, insidious and, several have told me, outright traumatic to them. But for these guys, they tell me the darker and more sexually troubling the material, the bigger the dopamine kick, and the more likely they return to that awful online space again tomorrow. And the next day.

Until they engage in the porn and masturbation routine and feel nothing at all. Nothing but emptiness and self-loathing.

I am going to spare you details here to avoid accusations of poor taste and possible violation of Substack standards. But I can tell you that some of the stories I’ve heard, just kids describing their daily porn habit, are among the few things I’ve heard at work that keep me up at night.

Truly, truly horrifying stuff.

What you were looking at as a kid was what one 13-year-old I work with called Disney porn. And I know a lot of you were talking through bravado, often making up your exposure to Playboy and Penthouse for the cool factor. Trust me, your kids aren’t making any of this up. And their exposure is far more a point of shame for them than a point of pride.

What porn takes from our kids

This increasingly outsized exposure to pornography exacts no small toll on the lives and psyches of our children. I’m going to apologize to you in advance for this section here. I’m about to flood you with awful stuff no parents wants to hear about or envision, but you absolutely, without question, need to know. Otherwise, I promise I would spare you.

Okay, here goes.

We’ve all read or heard stories about how our young people are in the midst of a relational crisis. They are not drawn to one another physically or emotionally like kids were just a few short years ago. The rites of dating, courting, asking each other out, going to the dance, first kisses, those moments that carried us through adolescence and excited us and scared us and occupied our minds, those are off the table for far too many of our young people. Most of what I’ve read about this phenomenon suggests none of it bodes well for the future. Fewer long-term intimate relationships. Fewer marriages. Fewer children. Fewer healthy connections.

But I can tell you with certainty, it also creates a depressing impact on the present.

As a result of all these hours of watching pornography, our kids are effectively desensitized to not only the sexual acts themselves, but everything surrounding sex and close relationships: the thrill, the excitement, the anxiety, the connection, the electricity. All of it extinguished.

Because they’re exposed so early, many of our kids never experience some of the greatest joys in life. And this joylessness has legs. It carries over into all aspects of their lives. They feel generally lifeless and hopeless and depleted. You can see it in their eyes, the weight of it all.

The dearth of youthful vigor is jarring.

Here’s more bad news while we’re at it. If you’ve got a boy influenced at all by the ever-growing and deeply disturbing incel culture, he will readily be able to locate female-humiliating porn in the recesses of the dark web. And he will discover countless ways to support that toxic thinking that men deserve more, that women deserve less. This is space where the ideas that women are objectified, disrespected property are born, nourished and wholly supported. It’s where Andrew Tate thinking can become solidified in a pliable mind. As one insightful eighteen-year-old guy put it to me recently:

“My porn intake is like a hate crime against women. And against myself I guess.”

Porn also takes up a ton of our kids’ time. I’ll repeat that many boys are more likely to vigorously protect hours of time for porn and masturbation daily, more so than most any other activity: schoolwork, extra-curricular activities, friendships, family. They’re losing their adolescence and young adulthood to this life-draining, mind-numbing toxicity.

Finally, but importantly, porn exerts a powerful impact on the way our boys, and as a result many of our girls, think about themselves. A lot of young guys compare themselves to the men on the screen, and conclude that they lack the prowess, the physicality, the masculinity to be a powerful, authentic partner in a relationship, sexual and otherwise. The lecture that those are actors playing roles hardly lands at all, diluted by all the hours ingesting the opposing message. So, guys come away from porn-watching assuming they are not strong enough, potent enough, male enough, or masculine enough.

They just don’t feel good enough. At all.

And that feeling doesn’t end in the bedroom. It generalizes to most every area of a boy’s life. He’s not good enough to do well in school, in a sport, in the play, at work. He’s not good enough for his own investment of his time and energy. Many of you are likely nodding along here, seeing your guy in these words. Be patient and thoughtful enough to think through the origin of that thinking. It runs deep in his mind. He’s going to need a lot of support to change that thinking style.

The counterpoint: a guidepost

My client Jason watches porn on occasion. By his estimation, he probably logs on once or twice a week. Sometimes a little more often. Some weeks, not at all. He says it releases tension and anxiety for him. He says it’s fun once in a while.

But he knows guys who spend their lives online watching porn. He notes the erosion in their thinking and well-being. So Jason goes out of his way to ensure porn doesn’t interfere with his relationships. He recognizes it for the performance it is, and doesn’t allow it to make him feel insecure about himself. He also doesn’t let it affect the way he feels about girls and women. At eighteen, he has a girlfriend and a robust social life. He’s an athlete and a good if not great student. He’s a pretty happy and well-adjusted guy by his own estimation. He’s aware of the problems porn can bring, and makes sure to steer clear of them.

I asked Jason why he thinks he can hold such a healthy position on porn when so many of his contemporaries are so very negatively affected. The first thing he said, the most important variable he cited, was striking and crucial:

“My family is weirdly open about stuff like that. We talk about porn and sex and power and politics and drugs all the time. Maybe it’s bad, but we joke around about this stuff, a lot. My mom caught me watching porn once, and we even laugh about that. We’re weird like that.”

Maybe we all need to be a little more weird, like that. Maybe we need to make conversations around pornography ordinary, playful, frequent. And remove the grimness and anger. Maybe that’s the lion’s share of the answer here.

Jason told me he has friends who’ve been caught watching porn, and they’ve been punished in some way: having phones taken away, or video games, or time with friends. He doesn’t understand this at all.

“It doesn’t make sense! You can’t hang out with your friends because you were watching porn? Like, are those even connected? I think if my parents did that, I’d sit in my room and just…. probably watch porn!”

And herein lies the point. As parents and other caring adults in the lives of our kids, we cannot avoid talking about porn. We cannot look the other way on this one. The potential risks and costs are simply too high.

The only reasonable approach is Jason’s family’s method. Forbidding porn is folly. Kids will find a way to watch it. Punishing it is confounding, as Jason suggested. The only reasonable approach is to talk to your kids about porn, what it is, and what it is not. Talk to your kids about the messaging they’re receiving. More importantly, ask them what messaging they’re receiving from porn. Ask what watching it is all about for him. You might be surprised by his willingness, perhaps even eagerness, to finally talk about this hold porn has on him openly with someone who loves him and is willing to listen. He may benefit from saying the quiet, most shame-inducing part of his life out loud.

He may be so relieved.

Pause and listen. This may be the most important single thing you can do to counteract the negative impact of porn in the life of your child.

Now, if you find that, like so many of our kids and especially our boys, they’re spending far too much of their precious time watching porn, seek out professional help for them. But be clear about why you’re doing so. If it reads like punishment, or treating an uncontrollable addiction, you’re suggesting your child suffers from an illness over which he has little or no control. This is not the empowering messaging we want our kids to hear from us.

Instead, talk to them about the balance and joy porn may be stealing from them in their lives, the dynamics and relationships and connections you want to help them create space for. Give voice to the dynamic, bright, lively part of him that has been lulled away by porn over the years. Create a collaborative approach to this issue with your guy free of shame – he undoubtedly carries enough of this by himself, believe me.

And remember that this is a secret but heavy, life-draining issue for your kids. Keep your conversations light, ongoing, even funny and weird. This approach will help remove some of the taboos so that they can talk with you about porn, what it offers and what it steals, openly.

That’s mighty parenting. That’s how you can help your child through some of the darkest, ugliest parts of adolescence and young adulthood intact.