How a Porn Habit Affects Children

Michelle VanLoon:

My father taught me how to ride a bike, the value of a great punchline, and what a woman was supposed to look and act like.

My dad was a great guy with a bad habit.

When we consider relationships negatively impacted by a pornography addiction, most of us first consider the addict’s spouse or girl/boyfriend. It is not just the adult partner who is affected by a porn habit. Even if the addict believes he or she has the habit under wraps, porn’s toxicity leaks into other relationships in an addict’s life.

When I was growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, porn made its way into our home in the form of Playboy magazines on our coffee table, next to copies of my mom’s Redbook and Ladies Home Journal. My parents had come of age in the Mad Men era, when Hugh Hefner’s magazine was a signpost of cool in the same way that other sophisticates of their generation smoked cigarettes in the doctor’s office, slow-danced to Sinatra, and imbibed a dirty martini before dinner.

The coffee table reading was only the tip of the iceberg in our home. I can still remember the shock waves that hit me when I discovered the cheaply printed hard-core erotica stashed in my parents’ bedroom. I was 11 or 12 when I discovered a stash of the stuff in my dad’s dresser drawer and nightstand. Whenever my parents left the house, I pored over each plain-wrapped volume. I didn’t fully understand what I had read, but I knew that I’d been initiated into the world of adulthood at an age when I barely understood the mechanics of how babies were made.

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