Tired of porn ruling your world, running your emotions, wrecking your home?
Tired of addiction consuming you, your spouse, your kids, your friends, and neighbors?
In this and the next few posts – I am going to outline a few simple ways any parent/person can minimize the impact of porn!
I am not offering boundaries or a list of protective measures one might take in this effort. Establishing boundaries and developing guidelines for technology usage is crucial. I have made those suggestions elsewhere on this blog.
These posts will dig a bit deeper into the realities that drive our desires to distortion. I will be considering how crafting healthy relationship and deeply meaningful community can minimize – and potentially eradicate – the impact of porn on one’s life and in one’s home!
We all want to be known deeply and to know others in meaningful and life-giving ways. We long for human connections. The lack of human connections – significant and meaningful human connections – often creates an internal space where our desires are easily distorted. In that place and those moments, we tend to seek out destructive activities to medicate the pain and soothe the angst. Therefore, the bulk of everything I say, write, teach in this regard can be summed up in one simple phrase,
A full-bodied, interior sense of personhood, placedness, and purpose (each of which is God – given) will minimize our proclivity to destructive behaviors and prevent us from developing habitual, pervasive and life-extracting addictions.
With that in mind, here are two Ways Any Parent/Person Can Minimize the Impact of Porn in One’s Life/Family!
Spend Quality Time AND a Quantity of Time with Your Children
Spend quality time and a quantity of time with your kids! I know, it’s not rocket science. We often undervalue the power inherent in the moments when we seize the time we have with our kids. So, practice the art of leaning into their life in life-giving and love affirming ways.
Careful DAD! These moments are not an opportunity for us to relive our glory days. Nor are they moments in which we run them ragged to accomplish all those things we wish we had! If, for some reason, you feel like a man in search of his past then pull out your vinyl LP’s and listen to Glory Days by Bruce Springsteen (https://youtu.be/6vQpW9XRiyM). That should be enough of a fix for you to engage your children’s life on their terms, their time and their ways!
Melissa and I have three kids. Before the last page turns in this calendar year, they will be 18, 15 and 14. I am going to blink my eye, and they will be gone: out crafting the life for which they have been created.
As I write this, we have recently returned from a wonderful weekend with dear friends over on Anna Maria Island. I realized, again, how quickly time flies. The families we were with each have children our kids ages. I remembered several of them playing together as kindergarten students about a dozen years ago.
O how the time does fly. So, moms and dads, put your phone down, turn work off, stop doing the laundry (which is never, ever, done – by the way), turn off that episode on HGTV and go goof off with your kids.
Reflect for a moment: When is the last time you recall spending any meaningful moments with anyone of your children? Moments that take your breath away in which you are overcome with delight in the person they are now and who they are becoming?
Read a book together!
Take a walk together!
Play catch!
Listen to their music!
Do something they want to do, for a change.
Lean in! Lean in! Lean In!
Most of us want to help our children develop a full-bodied and internal sense of personhood, placedness and purpose (each of which is God – given). I am convinced that helping them develop this robust interior core is the only true hope of preventing porn (or any addiction). Doing so means that we need to seize this moment and engage meaningfully in their lives right where they are, in any way you are able.
A Story From My Life
In today’s culture, parents and people are becoming more aware of and alert to porn’s devastating influence. This development is a step in the right direction. I find that most of us neglect the fundamental relationships cable of securing our children in a robust sense of personhood, placedness, and purpose. When we neglect this, then all the boundaries in the world are not able to protect us.
In my personal journey out of porn and into my truest self, I have found that much of what I was medicating stemmed from a lack of meaningful community and vital connection with others.
Recent studies into the science of addiction are discovering – now more than ever – that a deficit of essential and life-giving human relationships is a seedbed for the growth of distorted desire and destructive behavior.
Start where you are.
Take a minute and commit to one simple action step you will take that will open you up and involve you in your child’s life!
If you come up with a wonderful way to engage in your child’s life, then comment below so that your success might encourage others!
If this post is helpful, please subscribe to the feed and share it with others. There are few messages more important for the internal health of our culture than this one!
The following posts in this series will explore Ways 2 – 4 of How Any Parent/Person Can Minimize the Impact of Porn,
- Spend both quality and a quantity of time with your kids.
- Loving your spouse the way your kids like their friends.
- Helping them navigate the lonely places and lonely spaces that life so often affords.
- Keeping hope alive!
Disrupting to Renew!
Biz
Well written post.
Dee
Thank, Dee.