style="font-size:15px;"> Have you ever heard someone say the following?
“When I try to talk to my kids, they just ignore me and keep staring at their tablets!”
Or maybe:
“It’s such a fight to get my son to turn off his video game and do his homework.”
Or even:
“This is the third time this week that I’ve found my daughter on her phone hours after she’s supposed to be in bed!”
These are all comments I have heard in my clinical practice from parents who are concerned about their kids and the role technology plays in their lives.
You might have made one of those comments yourself, or one like it. Over the years, an increasing number of parents have brought similar concerns into my office. I suspect this trend will continue unless families are better able to address the influence that technology can have on children.
My interest in digital technology and the impact of media on families grew from a unique career path in which I studied radio, television, and film before beginning work in public television. Over time, my desire to contribute not just to entertaining people, but to helping them find healing, led me to pursue studies in clinical psychology, where I had the opportunity to integrate my faith with the insights of the field, developing an approach to the human person and therapeutic care rooted in the dignity of every individual as made in the image and likeness of God, made for relationship and ordered to eternal life. My background in the media, as well as my research in the area of violent video games, has given me an interesting vantage point from which to view our digital landscape. I hope that some of the insights I have gleaned in research and clinical care will help you and your family to navigate it as well.
In the following chapters, I’m going to discuss how digital technology influences the way we understand ourselves, each other, and the world. For our purposes, I’m going to focus on three areas that have arguably the greatest influence on children and families: social media, video games, and pornography. While video games and social media are products of the digital age, pornography and sexual exploitation, age-old evils, have become deeply entangled with technology, increasing its reach to younger and younger children.
Every good parent wants to help their kid lead a happy and healthy life. A Catholic Christian worldview deepens this desire, prompting parents not simply to hope for an Ivy League college or a fulfilling career for their child, but a life of flourishing, a life steeped in a real relationship with God, holy friendships, the opportunity to discern God’s call in their vocation, and ultimately eternity in heaven. That’s a tall order, even in the best of circumstances. Christian parents today face so many challenges in conveying the faith to their children, and the pressures of digital technology do not make it any less complicated.
My intent in writing this book isn’t simply to point out all the dangers of unmonitored, unsupervised forays into the digital world — though these are important things to recognize. Rather, I want you to walk away with an understanding of what influences are operating online, both positive and negative, and how to respond in a way that best supports your family.
To that end I’ve included some reflection questions at the end of each chapter. These can be used to promote discussion in a group or to prompt additional thought for you, the reader, independently. I believe it is possible to live in our modern world in a fairly normal way, but to do so may first involve stepping back to consider how technology has impacted us to this point, and the role we wish it to play in our family’s future. Contrary to what society may want us to believe, this is still within our control.
When I speak to parents on this topic, I emphasize that I’m not encouraging everyone to rush home and take a hatchet to their computers. I do, however, think that we run the risk of losing balance in our lives if we are not careful to identify what expectations we have about the role of technology in our lives and actively prioritize our values in our digital decisions.
My hope is that this book will raise a few questions for you about your family’s relationship with technology and how closely your choices match up with the values that matter most to you. I would like this to be the start of a conversation about how we and our families are living in the digital age and an opportunity to honestly ask ourselves if we like what we see.
Chapter One
The Digital Landscape in Which We Live
Our kids are significantly more aware of their surroundings than we tend to realize. I realized just how aware they are several years ago when I was playing with my son, who was two at the time. He and I had been playing with a small basket of wooden fruit. We were either cooking a pretend breakfast or having a pretend picnic — I forget. But after a few minutes my son picked up a small wooden banana, put it to his head, and started pretending it was a phone. Wanting to play along, I put my hand to side of my head with my thumb and pinkie extended and began to pretend that we were talking to each other on the phone. The conversation went something like this:
Me: “Hi, Son. How are you?”
Son: “I am good, Daddy. We are having a picnic.”
Me: “And are you having fun?”
Son: “Yes. Hold on.”
At this point, my son takes the banana phone away from his ear and holds it out toward me with his left hand, curved side facing him.
Son: “Click!”
Me: “What was that?”
Son: “I just took your picture.”
He lowers his “phone” and starts to swipe his right index finger repeatedly across the curved side of the banana.
Son: “Hold on, I will text it to you.”
Me: “Uh-oh.”
I should probably explain at this point that neither my wife nor I had smartphones at that time. Our phones could best be described as belonging to the “dumb as a rock” category. My cell phone didn’t even have a camera built into it. My son’s only exposure to smartphones of any kind was that he had seen one a handful of times at the house of a family friend. He didn’t play with it. He didn’t hold it. He certainly didn’t text anybody with it. Yet, he understood the technology well enough that he was able to incorporate it into his play by the age of two.
Kids are sponges. In the first years of life, kids learn how walk and talk. They learn what it is like to experience and express a whole range of emotions. They develop preferences and favorites. They learn about friendship and love from their families. They begin to understand their own dignity based on the way they are treated by the people around them. In short, they learn about their world, the people in their world, and how best to interact with both.
When I worked in public television, I had great opportunities to be involved in many different projects — local interest shows, live music, and a high-energy kids’ show. In all of this, it occurred to me that what I was participating in was storytelling. I was helping to transmit a story out to … well, just out. Television is a one-way form of communication, broadcast to an audience we couldn’t see. The audience is passive — receiving the stories sent via television.
For a long time, mass media was entirely
