Pornography has been around for a long time, with hundreds of erotic murals and sculptures found in the ruins of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii. With the advent of a new medium, pornography has been transformed, improved and spread more widely.
The evidence is that since the advent of the Internet, the use of porn films has skyrocketed. Pornhub, the world’s largest free porn site, received more than 33.5 billion hits in 2018 alone.
Science is only just beginning to reveal the neurological effects of porn consumption. For adults, these are already devastating consequences for mental health and sexual life. So what about your baby’s immature brain, what are the harmful impacts of pornography on children? This article will analyze 4 severe effects child’s brain on porn.
4 severe effects of your child’s brain on porn
How does porn affect the brain? – Brains get smaller
A 2014 study in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found that porn also literally shrinks the brain. Children addicted to pornography often had smaller brain volume and less connection to the striatum than children who didn’t.
The striatum is the part of the brain that fosters consumption, production or securing a social position in which people are superior to others. And every time we meet these needs, our brain agrees, it sends us more of the hormone dopamine.
Pornography harms children: Dopamine dysfunction
Pornography, like the drug, is a major stimulant that leads to an abnormally high release of dopamine. This can damage the dopamine reward system and prevent it from responding to natural sources of pleasure like eating good stuff, hanging out with friends. Consequently, children will have little or no pleasure in doing what they enjoy.
Changes in the release of dopamine can lay the foundation for depression and anxiety. Some studies suggest that adolescents who regularly access pornography experience more depressive symptoms, lower quality of life, and poor mental health than children who don’t watch porn.
One negative impact of a child’s brain on porn is that children who regularly access pornography are more likely to become teen porn addicts. They will find they want and need more pornography, even though they don’t like it. This disconnect between desire and liking is a prominent feature of dysfunction in the reward system.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, found that higher use of pornography reduces the brain’s ability to respond to conventional pornography. This is probably what explains why more children tend to turn to more erotic and unique forms.
This prevents children from building up insensitivity to women and a distorted view of what constitutes a healthy sexual relationship.
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Underdeveloped/damaged frontal cortex
Early access to pornography is closely related to the erosion of a child’s prefrontal cortex – the area of the brain that contains executive functions such as morality, will and impulse control.
Meanwhile, when watching pornography, children increasingly choose to use more violent forms of pornography. This can be due to the desensitization of regular sex film consumption.
During adulthood, especially in adolescence, the prefrontal cortex is still underdeveloped during this period. This is why your child struggles to adjust to his or her emotions and impulses. Damage to the prefrontal cortex during adulthood is called a decrease in cerebral blood flow in the prefrontal cortex.
It is also a symptom of schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder and depressive disorder, causing your child to behave compulsively and make poor decisions.
Reduce gray matter
There is a part in the brain called vmPFC that has been extensively studied in the literature and is believed to be involved in human decision-making. When your child watches pornography, vmPFC’s gray matter decreases, resulting in a decrease in self-control.
When addiction to pornography affects vmPFC, it can lead to thought impairment, the onset of an addiction phase, where the brain is stimulated by the thought of watching porn and not having it. The pornography increases this thought until your child can realize they have to watch sex in response to a stimulus.
This causes undesirable emotions when viewers experience a stressful situation where the conditional response to viewing pornography is to ease the stress.
How to protect children from the effects of porn on brain?
The effects of porn on the brain of children go far beyond their negative effects on the brain of adults. Therefore, sex education for children should not only be given to schools and teachers, it is important that you actively participate and teach your children about love and sex and healthy relationships.
Due to the vulnerable nature of children’s brains, it’s important to protect your child from pornography and have tools designed to support you. To help harmful impacts of pornography on children stay away from your child, and to ensure your child’s online environment is safe and healthier, many parents have used one of best free parental control software – online content filtering tool to hide 15 types of harmful content on the Internet, including:
- Pornography
- Horrifying content like gore, accidents, ghosts, violence, murder, terrorism, etc
- Content about stimulants, addictive substances such as alcohol, beer, marijuana, drugs, etc
- Content with aggressive elements, hurting others like Hate speech
The special thing is that this extension is completely free, helps to minimize your child’s access to harmful content, ensuring a healthy online environment for your child but at the same time, not invading their privacy rights.
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