Clear and Present Danger
The Instrument of Your Child's Self-Destruction
If you have given your child a phone in the name of their safety, you may need to ask yourself what exactly you are trying to keep them safe from. We gave our children phones when they turned 16—the rationale being that since they would now be driving, we wanted our daughters to be able to contact us if there were problems out on the road.
Our children were outliers in their school, church, and social communities for not getting phones until such an ancient age. But I’m still not convinced it was old enough. Age alone did not protect them from nefarious forces online. We were not immune to problems that arose from phone use—or more specifically, from the content and connections delivered on phones directly to our children.
The age at which phones are given—if they are given at all—is a personal family decision. I urge you to carefully consider the consequences. Even a well-grounded, God-centered child from a good, loving home can be swiftly sucked down the path of immorality, gender confusion, addicting games, harmful social media, pedophilic grooming, human trafficking, and various forms of deviant pornography. This is not exaggeration. This is reality. And many parents I know do not understand the immediacy and the degeneracy of the danger.
You know those commercials on TV where a drug is being advertised and while pictures of smiling, healthy, ecstatic people are flashing across the screen there is a steady narration of possible devastating side effects being read by a serene voice like a deadly undercurrent? Think of phones like that. There may be some significant upsides to your child having a phone and it may solve some problems. But it is very likely that it will introduce brand new problems that are far worse than the issues you set out to fix. Some of them can be debilitating, soul-crushing, or even fatal.
Full access to an internet-enabled device is not “safe” especially for young people whose brains will not fully develop until their early 20s. It is not even safe for some well-adjusted adults. If you do initiate phone use or use of other devices in your home, long before you do so and consistently thereafter, you should have specific and ongoing talks about phone use and online safety, including all the topics I listed above.
The argument that children need to learn responsible phone use is not sufficient. Yes, people need to eventually learn to be guardians of their own media use, but children are not capable of doing this and won’t be for some time. That’s why they have parents to help and mentor them.
A writer named Clare Morrell recently wrote an article called, “Parents, If You Don’t Get A Grip On Your Kids’ Social Media, Trans Activists Will.” She said:
“The truth is that social media apps today are full of pornography, sexual images, and radical LGBT content directly opposed to conservative values and Christian beliefs. Kids are following and listening to complete strangers, many of them grown adults, whose voices bombard them on social media. And some of the loudest voices recently are those of transgender influencers. Parents are the only ones who can protect kids from trans influencers and other harmful content online. You are the ones on the frontlines, and circumstances are increasingly demanding that you ‘go nuclear.’”
I suggest you take her warnings seriously. Here are her specific suggestions:
-Consider completely keeping your children off all social media until they are in their late teens. Delay social media use as long as possible.
-Don’t let your children have a smartphone. The near-constant access smartphones provide to the internet is a temptation too powerful for children to have in their pockets…There are alternatives. Find them!
-Keep all devices password-protected so that parents have to unlock them for children to use. Beware of the “toxic trio” – bedrooms, boredom, and darkness – that increases the chances for digital temptations and harm.
-Consider purchasing a filter or parental control software for all devices.
And I will add this one: Talk regularly and openly (in age-appropriate ways) about pornography—what it is, what we should do if (when) we see it, and why it is damaging to people and relationships.
If we don’t address the issue of phone use seriously, nothing else matters much. We can fight to keep porn out of our libraries and foul, degenerate ideologies out of our schools—and we must—but all these things will be delivered directly to our children anyway if we do not attack and solve the issue of phone use in our own families. This is not a sidenote. The health, wellbeing, and prosperity of our families—and therefore societies—may depend on us addressing this issue with sufficient seriousness and ferocity.
When you hand your child a phone, understand that you may be handing her the instrument of her self-destruction. Too many parents I know see the dangers on the horizon, but either don’t think the dangers will reach their child or they essentially shrug and say, “Well, that’s just how things are these days; kids have to learn to deal with it.” Meanwhile, throngs of parents have depressed, anxious, and even suicidal children who have an increasing need to be taken to therapy sessions for intensive help.
But too often the parents are unwilling to face the fact that phone use (or tablet/chrome book/gaming use) may be one of the root causes of the problems and are unwilling to remove these devices from their child’s life or to significantly modify their children’s media use.
Don’t be one of those parents.
Your child’s very life may depend on it.