Kids Know Pornography When They See It
“This stuff comes barreling down the generations like a locomotive.” So said a man I’ll call Ted. Because so many sex addicts lead a double life, a “secret” life, they may believe (and their partners may believe) that their younger school-age children are not directly affected. Ted knows better. He’s a tall, good looking, successful 45 year old recovering sex addict. He remembers that when he was a kid growing up his father had a second home down the street from where the family lived which the father used to house his “girlfriends”. Kids know what’s going on, even young kids, and they know when something isn’t right. It affects them and skews their sense of what constitutes normal relating in ways they can’t understand or verbalize at the time.
A client of mine, call her Shannon, is a lovely 32 year-old sex addict. She remembers seeing her father openly looking at pornographic magazines when she was 4. This was when she started to see females, including herself, as sexual objects. Christian, a 30-something gay addict I know remembers his parents walking around the house nude at times when he was growing up. He brushes this off even today and cannot see the how this inappropriateness may have contributed to his compulsive sexual behavior as an adult. Ted, Shannon and Christian weren’t sexually abused per se, their physical boundaries were not violated but their generational boundaries were.
Exposing kids to inappropriate experiences, such as experiences surrounding adult sexuality, blurs the boundary between the generations and in so doing transmits the adult’s sexual hang-ups directly into the psyche of the child. Many sex addicts report that their first sexual experience was with a parent’s print pornography. Unfortunately internet porn is accelerating this process and leading to porn usage in younger and younger children. Does this mean parents should revert to a moralistic, rigid, old-fashioned view of child rearing? I think not. But we need to spread understanding and awareness of the issue.
A good example is “Kathy” who is graduating from University this spring. She is a smart, serious and delightful young person who is in excellent recovery. She had a rampant sex addiction which began in childhood with compulsive masturbation and progressed until she entered treatment a couple of years ago. She recently said that she is so focused and diligent in her own recovery because she wants to marry and have children some day herself. She’s 21. Impressive.
-Dr. Linda Hatch