The Worst Gift to Give a Middle-School Student

Let’s be honest, here; it strikes me that the same kind of jeremiads were in place when Gutenberg invented the printing press, when Marconi invented the radio, when Farnsworth and others invented the television, and when Al Gore (ha) invented the Internet. Kids have always found ways to get into trouble, and the bulwark against that has always been the love and guidance of parents.

And while it is indeed true that a smart phone is marginally more flexible in obtaining media of various sorts than are tablets, ipods, ipads, computers, and the like because you can “get data” without a wireless connection, the same thing allows parental supervision. You can track what kind of media are coming through in your report of data usage, just like you can with other devices. In fact, a smart phone is a lot better than the PC and tablet connections a lot of schools give kids in this regard.

In other words, as always, it’s not the tool that’s the problem any more than guns cause crime, knives cause cuts, or cars cause accidents.

Ask yourself this: When you were twelve, if someone would have placed a stack of pornographic magazines in your room, would you (at age 12) have had the self-control to not look at it? Every night?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtbOmpTnyOc

My niece has a 12 year old daughter who has a smartphone:

• Snapchat not allowed
• All apps tightly controlled
• Texts monitored

The “Find my friend” app on the IPhone is a great way to know geo-location of phone

I find this article shortsighted from reality. We all realize that mobile phones introduce a challenge for us as parents, but the reality is that we can’t hide our kids from this stuff either. Even if you restricted them there are 80 other ways that if they want to find a way is just as easy.

But I’m also not naïve. You shouldn’t give a twelve-year-old unrestricted access to data usage that you can’t monitor, can’t supervise, and can’t track. Which is exactly what you are doing when you give them a smart phone.

So much of the objections that the author has to a cellphone can (I think) be mitigated by two words: “better parenting” or even one word - “trust”.

You don’t need to lock down the phone.
You don’t need to control all the apps.
You don’t need to monitor all the texts.

You just need to know your kids, and be watching over their hearts and heads.

A cellphone is like the internet, a car, a tank of gas, or a gun - it’s all in what the person chooses to do with it. As long as they are kids and young adults, they’re going to need their parents to do their job and raise them in the fear and admonition of the Lord, and that means that if the kids aren’t equipped to handle the challenges of a smartphone, then they get a dumbphone instead that does just calls and text. If the kids and young adults do love their God with all their heart, soul and mind and love their neighbors as themselves, 90% probably shrivels up into dust and is scattered to the winds.

In Bible times, young people walked by the temples of Molech, Asherah, Artemis, Aphrodite, and the like without losing their faith, doing just fine when a real live shrine prostitute walked by with the imprint of her shoes saying “follow me”, but kids today can’t handle a 2” tall image of the same on their phone, apparently.

Do we believe in perserverance of the saints/eternal security, or do we not? Do we believe in the sovereignty of God, or do we not?

Most assuredly. Do we believe that all our young Teens are saved? I hope not. And therein lies the problem.

[G. N. Barkman]

Most assuredly. Do we believe that all our young Teens are saved? I hope not. And therein lies the problem.

OK, unsaved kids in the church in Paul’s time came to Christ after meeting temple prostitutes on the streets of Corinth, but today’s kids can’t come to Christ after seeing a 2” tall image of the same on their phone? Have we forgotten that where sin abounds, there abounds grace all the more? That God is glorified in using the weak things of this earth to shame the strong? That prostitutes are in the lineage of Christ?

I’m no advocate of smartphone porn or porn of any kind, but I think we have to get a grip, Biblically speaking, on exactly what settings God used to help His church thrive in the early days and draw some conclusions from that. God does not tell us to head for the hills to avoid any temptation to sin, but rather chose in His sovereignty to site churches in some of the most worldly cities known to the world, then or now.

When my kids wanted pagers:

• Was opposed to it
• Thought it was a waste

As it turned out:

• Was a great way to call the kids home
• I paid the upfont
• Took the monthly fee out of their allowance
• The deal was … when Dad pages … you’d better call him pronto or else
• Worked out fine

On the book and the radio, the latter has had a far stronger cultural impact (as a cultural change ratio) than the former, but I was raised in a “the only radio is all of us listening together radio” environment likewise with TV. Mostly did the same with our own kids until they were a good bit older than what our culture considers an appropriate age to be autonomous with these things. Less so with books, but growing up, the folks paid a whole lot of attention to what we were reading and vetoed anything they didn’t think was healthy.

There’s a pattern to the technological development:

Book (low impact, but parental control still important) —> Radio (more impact, more parental control required) —> Smart phone (orders of magnitude more impact, extremely difficult for most parents to control, control essential)

Guesstimating the technological leap distance, from book to radio, let’s say the book is at 1, the radio at 10, the smartphone is 500. Just my opinion, but there’s plenty of general evidence.

The Don’t Make Your Job Impossible Principle of Parenting

I see young parents make this mistake all the time: arranging the house rules and kid rules in such a way that maximizes the difficulty for them as parents while relatively minimizing the difficulty for the kids. This is backwards. They have an almost infinite supply of energy, are extremely resilient, think faster than parents do (not better, but faster), and stand to benefit from almost anything that requires them to defer gratification. So… parents should arrange the rules to make them as easy as possible for the parent to operate (and discipline) and not for the convenience of the child. In other words, parenting is hard enough without handing your kids technologies that are going to be a constant struggle to properly control.

Ergo, my advice to parents is don’t give them a smart phone until you plan to pretty much turn them loose with it. (Which I have done with one child.) There are ways to control them, but it’s difficult, and the kids are going to be constantly finding ways around it. This is true even of a desktop PC, and the phone—much harder.

Edit: I should clarify that when I talk about “impact,” I’m talking about the degree to which influence does not pass through a conscious evaluative thought process as a filter. Messages via books demand that you think about them (mostly… less so with dramatic fiction). Messages via radio can largely bypass that. Messages via TV/video far more so. When you combine all that in a device that accesses everything… it’s just immensely potent. We will not know what we have done to ourselves for maybe a century, if then.

[Aaron Blumer]

Book (low impact, but parental control still important) —> Radio (more impact, more parental control required) —> Smart phone (orders of magnitude more impact, extremely difficult for most parents to control, control essential)

I still think we are being naive. I had friends in middle school who would go to the public library to read the in depth pornographic chapters in Stephen King’s IT in the stacks. You could go down to the bookstore and check out the nude photos in the photography magazines. At the Christian School that I went to, kids would bring in Playboys. Kids will find a way. Yes the phone brings in another venue to view this stuff and there is access to more of it, but kids in the 1970’s were doing the same thing. And 20 years from now it will be something else. Not to say we shouldn’t be very careful and setup rules and such, but I think we are naive in saying that if we eliminate smartphones from our kids that we have no restricted access to pornography.

Here is a timely article that links to another timely article: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2017/12/19/parents-grandparents…

The effect of screen time on our lives and particularly on the young are devastating, as many studies are showing.

What is the harm in not giving kids smart phones? Will they really be behind the times when they get to their 20s? Is this just another expectation to keep up with the Joneses?

I basically agree with this article. We might disagree on details, but Jesse Johnson brings up valid points.

Pornography has always been around, but you used to have to go to a little trouble to get it. Now, it is thrown right in your lap by smartphones, internet, TV, etc. While they can, parents need to protect, inform, warn their kids.

David R. Brumbelow

Each parent needs to decide. We’re not giving our teenagers smartphones at all.

Here’s an interesting article, courtesy of the AMA (from links from Larry’s links), that notes that the human response to social media is analogous to that from a hug. Now let’s grant that this may be an imprecise analogy, but we can still run with it. If we say that social media are always wrong, we would simultaneously infer that a hug is wrong. After all, the same dopamine release mechanism is involved, no?

And then we run into the five times that Scripture tells us to greet brothers and sisters in Christ with a holy kiss. I would guess there is a dopamine release with that, and something of the sort with ordinary greetings of the “white bread” variety, and with good music (hopefully we have that), and good meals (same), and…..

So is the problem the smart phone (book, radio, TV, computer, cell phone, etc..), or is it that the presence of the tool is exposing a lack of personal engagement in our families and churches? Again, I’m not giving a cell phone to my kids until they really ought to have one—my cutoff now is when they’re driving on their own for the most part—but the simple fact of the matter is that the entire world is, at some point, engineered to facilitate that dopamine release. Better to teach kids to handle it than to say “no no no” and then let then crash and burn when they leave the home, no?

Picture of this; about 25 years back, I was teaching junior high Sunday School near LA and one young lady was just not connected at all—today she might be the girl on her smart phone doing anything but paying attention to the lesson. Well, at least until one Sunday, when I made a wisecrack referencing the old Motel 6 commercial (we were talking about hospitality), and all of a sudden she was 100% engaged.

Turned out that her “drug of choice”—very uncharacteristic for the LA area—was AM radio and she was the only kid in the class who knew who Tom Bodett was. Leaving the light on for her was what was needed, not the destruction of her transistor radio.