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christian counseling today
VOL. 22 NO. 1
That is why pediatricians now immunize
children as young as 11 against HPV.
From my perspective, kids who see
pornography during their pubertal years are
not only at risk for engaging in early sexual
behavior, they are also in jeopardy of acquiring
life-altering infections. Needless to say, when
children acquire these infections, many have to
deal with the psychological fallout—depression,
poor self-esteem and even lower self-confidence.
I see this all the time in my practice among
children who are sexually active. Preventing
pregnancy from a medical standpoint is an
easy task; however, what is far more difficult
is avoiding the emotional pain associated with
early sex and sexually transmitted infections.
Sex, Pornography, and
the Growing Brain
We know from the excellent work of Drs.
Joe McIlhaney and Freda Bush that when
children engage in intercourse, hormones surge
in the young brain—specifically serotonin,
norepinephrine, and dopamine, which flow
differently in girls and boys. Together, these
key neurotransmitters are called the “bonding
hormones.” This means that when children
engage in sex and experience the surge of one
or two of these hormones, they “bond” with
their partners. This poses problems for children
because, of course, most of them end up
breaking up with their sexual partner. When
they break up, they feel an emotional “tearing”
if you will. When this happens, they feel pain,
sadness, loss, and grief. The tough part for
them, however, is that they do not expect to feel this way. They learn from
peers and other adults they admire that sex is natural, healthy, and having
multiple partners is good. Children are encouraged to experiment with sex;
therefore, when sadness or grief is experienced as a result of having sex too
soon, they feel something is wrong with them. So, what do many of them
do to erase these feelings? They have sex again so that “this time it will feel
better… the way it is supposed to feel.” Thus, they are set up for entering
an obsessive repetition—compulsion cycle of the sexual experience. This is
especially true for boys who believe their macho peers, or other men whom
they admire, have far better sexual experiences than they do, so they repeat
sex in an attempt to have it feel the way they believe it does for these other
boys.
Sex, Teens, and Depression
As pornography clearly leads to early and high-risk sexual behavior, it
follows that it also leads to an increased risk for depression. Studies have
shown that teens who are sexually active are at higher risk for depression.
This makes sense. If depression in kids is fundamentally about losses that
have not been grieved, we can see that sex can incur many losses in the
adolescent psyche. If a boy has sex with a girl and then they break up, he
may experience loss of trust if she tells her friends that he wasn’t good at
it… or a loss of self-control if he had promised himself that he was going
to wait until he was older or married to have sex. He may lose self-esteem
if he believes his experience was subpar for boys or could feel hurt because
he lost his virginity (and yes, this still counts for boys and girls). As teens
experience multiple losses and fail to acknowledge or grieve them, these
losses dive deep into his psyche. When he has sex with additional partners
(as we know teens who start sex early in life do), he then experiences more
losses… and these simply pile on top of one another year after year. We
can see how this young man may experience some serious issues with
depression by the time he is in his 20s.
Teens, Pornography, and Addiction
Studies show that boys are more visually oriented than girls. If you hold
a picture of a face and a moving mobile above an infant boy’s face, his