- Children are a precious gift. Parenting in an era where the world wants their attention and is able to get it with relative ease is no easy task.
Three cheers for a $189 million win for the state. But…those multi-millions will not teach your kids right from wrong. That’s up to…you.
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch announced this week that Mississippi will receive around $189 million from Meta Platforms to settle a 2023 lawsuit. The suit maintained that the parent company of Facebook and Instagram intentionally designed its apps with features that were addictive and psychologically harmful to children and also violated their privacy by collecting their data.
I’m thankful that attorneys general across the country banded together to rein such activity in. But if you are a parent or guardian, don’t rely on the government to look out for your child’s well-being. God is calling YOU to provide an environment where your kids can best develop—physically, emotionally, intellectually, and especially spiritually. A necessary component to doing that is intentionally saying “no” to some things and “yes” to others.
Years ago, I was in Memphis presenting a seminar ondiscipleship in the home. I mentioned that our home has no television. The content of television was bad enough, but my primary concern was studies which show that watching it actually has a deleterious impact on the way a brain works. So, 44 years ago (before marriage and kids), I tossed mine and haven’t owned one since.
One man in attendance approached me afterwards, offeringto buy breakfast so we could chat about what he’d heard. Over our eggs, he told me that TV was hardly the problem any more with most kids. “It’s this,” he explained, holding up a smartphone. “Man, they can get things a whole lot worse on this thing than any television you might have in your home”…which was an excellent point.
He recognized the detrimental effect of digital overexposure—and this was a decade or more ago; it’s only gotten worse in the interim! But he felt trapped in a parental conundrum: how to protect his teenager from harmful influences when the phone felt like a necessity. He wanted my counsel. So, I breathed deeply and asked, “Who pays for that phone that your kid carries around?” He thought for a second and said, “I guess I do.”
“Well,” I responded, “there’s your answer. Don’t pay for it. He won’t have access to his own personal device and…social media, porn, opinions from who knows where.” Then something happened that I wasn’t expecting. He looked up at me with tears in his eyes and said, “Thank you, man, you just changed my family’s life.”
He had never before considered that he controlled the smartphone habit of his child.
Parents need to be parents. They have the last word regarding what their child ingests mentally, emotionally, and spiritually via the latest technology.
There are real-life antidotes to the digital immersion that has invaded all our lives. When my wife and I present family discipleship seminars, we talk about a lot more than televisions and smart phones. We emphasize the powerful influence of a family mealtime, worshipping together, Scripture memory, chores, creative endeavors (music, art, etc), service to the community — basically creating a compelling and satisfying life off-screen to counterbalance the allure of electronic devices.
Our children didn’t have their own phones or computers until they left for college. It was our responsibility to raise them…not Silicon Valley’s. Interestingly, there is plenty of research showing that the people who create these technologies are very careful about their own kids’ exposure to them.
We were fully aware that if we decided upon this course of action, our children would be seen as “different.” But we were OK with that, because God has called His own children to do the same: Be holy, set apart.
Children are a precious gift. Parenting in an era where the world wants their attention and is able to get it with relative ease is no easy task. Nonetheless – we are called to it. Make the hard choices, be different, do the work to safeguard them and get them ready for a life of God-abundance.
