How does it effect your parenting?

I don't have young children any more, but I can tell you that I would become irritable and lost patience when I was using porn. I think it bothered me that responsibilities like parenting detracted from my selfish moments of personal enjoyment with porn.

It's not at all hypocritical to teach your child not to watch porn. In fact, it's a parental duty to keep a child away from porn! If an ex-criminal has a child, is the ex-criminal a hypocrite for telling his child not to commit crime? Certainly not!

Telling someone not to do something you've done is NOT (necessarily) hypocrisy. It's speaking from experience. Since I know from my own painful experience the downside of porn, I consider it my loving duty to warn other people not to use it so they don't end up in the same situation I'm in. The same goes for drug users, criminals, really anyone who does any regrettable behavior.

 

Porn affected me as a dad to my kids HORRIBLY. I was irritable and angry all the time. My wife and kids thought of me as a ticking time bomb. If I didn't get my "fix" I was impossible to be around. Of course the porn gave me brain fog so I either don't remember those times or I don't think I was that bad.

If I saw my son looking at porn, I wouldn't yell at him, I would just have a talk with him about porn and how it rots your brain while at the same time, it dehumanizes people, usually women in it.

And to me, no, that would absolutely NOT be hypocritical of me to talk to him, or anyone else, about the dangers of porn unless I'm actively engaging in porn.

 

I just had my daughter and it instantly hit me. I’ve objectified women so much that I can’t get close to my daughter as I should already. Only 1 day old!!! That’s so sick and disheartening. But it’s inspired me to come back to NoFap to really tackle this. So that when I DO get to those teenage years, I will be porn free and raise my daughter up to be a dignified and gentle spirit, guiding her to become the best that she can be. No more of this twisted thinking. I know it will take time. I know it will take patience. But her life is sooooo worth it. So worth it. Nothing has ever been more worth it in my mind than right now. I have a LOT of work to do. But I WILL do it this time. I’m speaking this into existence and going to put the work in to prove it. She is worth more than cheap gratification and moral deterioration. I love her.

 

Driscoll’s own sex theory is as objectifying as porn and frankly I don’t like him, so I’m biased and perhaps a little too obstinate toward him. My oldest daughter is still not a teen so I can’t speak to the mechanism Driscoll describes, but can confirm what the others here have said; reduced patience, shortened temper, prone to outbursts, not to mention foggy memory/reduced self-awareness that many addicts report. Ask the SOs, they’ll tell you their addicts are dumber and meaner when they’re using, and that’s not conducive to parenting. Dealing with kids is frustrating enough without complications like porn.