Boys and Porn Addiction: How to Protect Your Child

Many parents I speak with these days are concerned about their boys and porn addiction.

Wondering… Will my son become addicted to pornography?

With pornographic images and videos so readily available and free online, it’s becoming harder and harder to protect your children from unhealthy habits and addictions that can influence their brain development far beyond childhood.

In this post, I’ll share what you should know about boys and porn addiction to best protect your son, how to have a conversation so they actually listen, and ways to create balance and help them grow to lead healthy, happy, and successful lives.

Boys and Porn Addiction: Dopamine Stimulation Is the Problem

Dopamine is the “pleasure” brain chemical and can be very addictive.

That is the basic brain chemistry of addiction: overstimulation of dopamine.

Some of the things that stimulate higher dopamine levels are:

• Being good at something
• Eating sugar
• Doing things that are challenging
• Experiencing danger or the fear of getting in trouble
• Trying something new and different
• Taking drugs and alcohol
• Becoming aroused

Not all of these activities stimulate the same amount of dopamine, however.

You get pleasure from eating a dessert, but you get even more if you do something dangerous, or for a boy, something they wouldn't want their parents to find out about.

Children are tempted by anything that breaks a taboo, and online porn is one of those things.

This is why porn creates such high dopamine stimulation and may be the most addictive thing.

Males are also very visual, so to see a naked woman's body, particularly in a seductive outfit or in the act of sex, stimulates the primal part of the brain that produces arousal, which is a huge boost of dopamine.

A boy can feel this extreme stimulation even if he doesn’t know what sex is! It's literally like taking a drug. 

Today, we're seeing boys as young as 10-years-old get addicted to online porn once they're exposed inadvertently.

The problem with boys and porn addiction is that the long-range effects of higher dopamine stimulation on the brain are very potent, particularly when the child's brain is still developing.

For children, the younger they are, the more this stimulation will rewire the brain to seek out high dopamine stimulation — even later in life.

The Boy Crisis: How Addiction Impacts Testosterone

So how does all of this high dopamine stimulation affect the brain?

For one thing, normal dopamine stimulation begins to have no effect in terms of inducing pleasure.

So normal things become very boring tasks, like doing your homework, cleaning your room, eating vegetables, or playing with friends. 

Those tasks which may have been mildly pleasurable become “not fun at all;” a boy would rather sit at the computer, play video games, and secretly watch porn.

All of this contributes to the phenomenon occurring today, which is low testosterone in males. I talk about this in detail in my book The Boy Crisis.

Testosterone is the hormone that:

• Regulates sex
• Creates a positive mood
• Bolsters motivation
• Gives you energy

And what we're seeing is that in the younger generation of men and boys, testosterone levels are very low. Even the sperm count is half of what it was 20 or 30 years ago.

And some of the long-range symptoms, particularly for boys are:

• Eight times higher suicide rates
• Lower performance in school activities
• Trouble with sexual performance and fertility later in life

Girls are now scoring higher grades in every subject. Twice as many girls graduate from high school, and twice as many women graduate from college.

So, as a parent, what can you do to help your son raise his testosterone levels and avoid being a part of this trend?

How to Talk to Your Child About the Dangers of Porn

There’s no pop culture reference to boys and porn addiction. It’s an issue in the shadows but the consequences are loudly communicated with these statistics. Without your voice, how will they understand the dangers of watching video pornography? They need to know.

This isn’t about shaming them or making them feel morally corrupt for wanting to watch porn. That can just heighten the taboo as well as alienate your child.

You want to share the health impact so they understand and are included in the conversation.

I know this can be awkward as a mother or father.

Here’s what I suggest to introduce the conversation:

• Use another example first, like video games or desserts
• Share how these can affect their brain performance, motivation, energy levels, and happiness
• Explain how it’s actually dopamine stimulation that creates that effect.
• Include the levels of potency for different activities, so they understand.

In order of potency, dopamine is most highly stimulated by:

• Video games
• Online pornography
• Video online pornography

You can explain that looking at pornographic pictures is a little bit better than video pornography.

And you can say:

“If you avoid pornography altogether, it would allow you to enjoy your video games more and also enjoy your homework better.”

It becomes similar to how we would approach giving desserts to our children.

You can use that example, too, by saying:

“We don't have desserts for every meal, but you can have it occasionally as a special treat.”

The goal of this conversation is simply to educate and include them in the conversation of their wellbeing and the health of their brains and bodies. 

Right now, we *know* sugar isn’t good for us so we make choices with that in mind.

But what isn’t common knowledge, or at least isn’t spoken about, are the consequences of watching video pornography. And before we can make choices, we need to first understand the problem.

A conversation, however, is only half of the solution. The ultimate goal here is to regulate high dopamine stimulation with normal dopamine stimulation. Let me explain.

The Two-Step Solution to Restore and Protect Brain Function

The solution to high dopamine stimulation and it’s resulting addiction is moderation — always.

We want to keep coming back to a more balanced lifestyle.

You want to create a plan with your child to help them balance high dopamine-producing activities with normal dopamine-producing activities. 

One idea of how this could look would be setting a limit of doing only 30 minutes of video games after the homework is done, for a maximum of five hours per week.

This way, the brain has a chance to bounce back after its receptor sites have been overstimulated, rather than continue to down-regulate the receptor sites with further high dopamine stimulation.

To help the brain bounce back and free itself from addiction, we need the right nutrients. This is why I created the MarsVenus nutrient program for addictions (see protocol in our free Wellness Guide). Many people associate “addiction” only with extreme drug and alcohol use, but our program is for everyone who has overstimulated their dopamine receptor sites and now finds normal life dull and unfulfilling without extreme dopamine stimulation.

In this program, I recommend easy-to-use, no side-effect supplements that help the brain recover after it's had high dopamine stimulation so you can enjoy normal life again.

Hopefully, this little bit of science helps to back up, I think, an intuitive feeling that it’s not appropriate for our children to be watching all this online porn. 

Now you have a little more ammunition to understand boys and porn addiction, to motivate you to have a good conversation with your children, and to certainly regulate the use of the iPads and computers.

These strategies will help make sure that your children are not being inadvertently overstimulated, which can lead to addiction!

If occasionally there's high stimulation, you don’t need to worry too much.

Because you can balance it with good nutrition, supplements, and normal stimulation.

For more on the MarsVenus program for addiction, you can download our Wellness Guide right here.

Grow in love,