How To Protect Yourself And Your Kids From Porn – Simple Methods

Many people think that it is hardly as dangerous as other addictions like substance abuse are, and they are quite right. However, porn addiction affects your life in a way that other things do not.

It harms your relationship with your partners or family members, and it does have long-lasting ill effects on your mind that should be avoided at all costs. But more important is protecting your kids from getting exposed to porn.

Why Is Porn Addiction Bad?

There are many reasons why getting addicted to internet porn is worse than you might have thought:

1. Your relationship with your partner can deteriorate quickly as you feel distant from one other. If you are the one with the addiction, you don’t feel aroused or attracted towards your partner. Your partner can feel alienated due to your addiction
2. Your brain secretes chemicals in unnatural amounts, giving you a high that is beyond all proportions. However, the brain quickly fatigues and stops secreting the chemical, making you more addictive as you desire that high more
3. You find it difficult to focus at work because of your addiction
4. The chances of suffering from erectile dysfunction or libido problems in the long run increase manifold

How To Protect Yourself From Porn

Now that you know some of the dangers of internet porn addiction, you should learn how to overcome it. The first step, of course, is the desire to beat your addiction. Having that conviction is half the battle. Going through the steps outlined below will be meaningless if you don’t have the will to change yourself.

# 1  Delete All Porn From Your Devices

The first thing to do is deleting all files related to pornography in all your devices. It is important to cleanse all your devices from your porn collection. If you don’t have it on your system, you won’t go there. It’s a small step, but significant nonetheless.

# 2  Use Filter Services

There are some services you can use to block all pornographic content out of your browsers. Services like Covenant Eyes are a great way to overcome your porn addiction. This service will send your internet usage statistics to someone you trust.

This person can see everything you do and can control which websites you can and cannot visit. There are a number of services like this, and they offer support across a number of devices for people looking to overcome their porn addiction.

# 3  Talk To People Close To You

Coming clean with your situation can help relieve the situation to some extent. You can reveal your problem to a friend, your partner, or maybe your parents if you are a teenager but want to change your life. It can seem difficult at first, and the people you talk to might get surprised by the revelation. But if you have someone to help you in this endeavor, then the job becomes a lot simpler and more fool-proof.

# 4  Block People Who Send You Porn

When you have made the decision to quite porn and stay that way, you should inform your friends and colleague who might send you such content through IM services or email. Treat this just as you would treat quitting smoking or drinking. If your colleagues and friends don’t buy it, block them. It’s important to keep this stuff out of your life. If there’s no reminder, you don’t have moments of weakness; not many of them at least.

# 5  Try Other Hobbies

You might have other hobbies apart from getting lost in the world of internet porn. You might have once had them before you started on the dark road of internet porn. It’s time to start practicing them again or try new ones if you don’t have any.

A big reason why people get entranced with internet porn is too much spare time. If you have things to fill your day apart from work, then you not only tackle the issue of your internet porn addiction but also use your time constructively. It’s a great way to protect yourself from porn, one that makes you feel good.

# 6  Seek Help From Therapist

If you think that your addiction is beyond your control, and you don’t have or don’t want to share your problem with someone close to you, then this option is worth trying. Therapists are professionals who know how to help people overcome all sorts of addictions.

You’ll be surprised how many of their patients come to seek help overcoming internet porn addiction. They know the methods that can help you and use professional advice helps better than other ways in any area of life.

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Protect Your Kids From Porn

While it is important to protect yourself from porn, it is a lot more important to prevent your children from getting involved in this practice at an early age. It is surprising how early children get exposed to internet porn these days.

With the near ubiquitous availability of internet-connected devices for small children, it is really simple for them to get exposed to this world much sooner than they can comprehend its full gravity. It is vital that as a parent, you keep this from happening to your kids. You can try a few methods to achieve this.

# 1  Make All Devices Porn-Proof

Most parents have parent locks on the computers in their homes to prevent their children from accessing content they should not. However, many forget that children no longer need a computer to access the internet.

On the contrary, children start using the internet much sooner than before, because they have access to smartphones and tablets. Therefore, it is of supreme importance that you set up filters and parent locks on all the devices your children might use. Smartphones and browsers come up parent locks. You can learn about them to protect your kids from porn.

Alternatively, you may have a look at parental control services like Net Nanny that have been especially designed to protect kids online.

# 2  Manage Messaging And Media Sharing Apps

There are many apps today that have the functionality to send pictures, videos, or graphics to others. You should make it a point to find out what kinds of apps your kids use on their smartphones. If you know that they are using an app that is not meant for people their age, then talk to them about it and make sure they delete it and don’t use it in the future.

Also, it is important to manage how your kids use media sharing apps. Talk to them about the kind of files they get from others to make sure such content does not make its way into their devices. Here you can find a complete guide on how to help your kids to use the internet safely.

# 3  Educate Your Kids

If you are a parent to a teenager or someone who is old enough to understand these things, then you should talk to your child at the first opportunity. Tell them what kind of websites they should not access, and why it is so.

Tell them how people get addicted to internet porn, and why it is something they should definitely avoid. Addiction of any kind is dangerous for an individual, and internet porn is no different. Its signs and symptoms are not as apparent as with other addictions, but it’s as potent a force of self-devastation.

# 4  Ask Them About Their Friends

A primary source of your child getting exposed to porn too early is through friends in school. This usually happens when kids are young, and there’s no way you can prevent someone else from sending such content to your kid. However, maintaining a healthy, friendly, and open relationship with your child from an early age can help you to discover this threat right at the beginning.

Talk to your kids about their friends, what they do when they’re together, what kinds of apps they use to stay in touch, etc. Doing so can reveal if your child has received dangerous content from a friend. If this is the case, make sure you delete those files from your child’s device in front of them and give their friends an earful.

# 5  YouTube And Browser Safe Search

Enabling safe search on your browsers as well as YouTube is important if you want to protect your kids from porn. Your children can accidentally look up something not meant for them, or do so out of curiosity themselves. Having a safe search in place will keep the dangerous results from getting displayed.

# 6  Put The Computer In A Common Place

If your kids don’t have other devices to access the internet besides the home computer, then it’s a good move to place the computer in a common area of the house. Doing so will make it much easier for you to keep an eye on their browsing.

# 7  Separate Accounts On Devices

All smartphones and computers have the functionality to have multiple user accounts. Each of these accounts can have its own set of filters and permissions. This way, you can control what sort of websites your kid can access through his or her account.

You can also control which apps they can access, effectively making your kid’s life porn-proof. Of course, an important part of successfully executing this method is to keep your password out of your kid’s reach and make it difficult to guess.

# 8  Airplane Mode While Mobile Gaming

An appalling source of your child getting exposed to pornography or graphic material is through advertisements in free mobile games. Free games earn revenue through ads, but the kind of ads you sometimes see on games like Angry Birds or Farmville can surprise you.

It’s incomprehensible why there should be ads showing half-naked women in such games. The only thing you can do to in these situations is to instruct your kids to put the phone or device in airplane mode before they start the game. If there’s no internet, there can be no ads.

# 9  Games And Books

Internet browsing isn’t the only point of entry for pornographic material in your kid’s life. There are many games that have visual and graphic content not suitable for minors. Of course, these games come with an appropriate rating, which is why it is important that you are with your kids when they buy these games.

If they get them from elsewhere, make sure you know what those games are about and check their ratings. It can also be helpful to tell them not to download games or get them for free. You could be guilty of downloading a couple thousand songs or movies yourself, but just like an alcoholic never encourages his kids to drink, so should you not encourage your kids to indulge in digital piracy.

There are also some books that have content not suitable for kids. This is much simpler to handle, though, since you can see the books they read and learn about them just by going through the blurb on the back. You don’t want your eleven-year-old reading Fifty Shades of Grey now, do you?

Conclusion

Internet porn addiction is something that 46% of men and 37% women suffer from. It’s a lot more common problem than you might think, and a lot more dangerous. Faltering relationships and poor quality of life are some of the effects of internet porn addiction.

To overcome it, you should have a strong will, and it is always better to seek the help of someone close to you. As for protecting your kids from internet porn, it is important that you keep them away from porn until they are old enough to understand right and wrong and make their own decisions.

Talking to your kids about these issues goes a long way to handling them well. It helps instill a wariness from such content and maintaining an adverse nature towards internet porn from a young age.