There’s a really good chance your child has asked you to get them a smartphone. My first conversation was with my oldest child when he was in kindergarten. His classmate had one and used it to play games during the school day. Whatever age you child, this conversation is fraught with big emotions, a predictable “but everyone else has one” argument, and the difficulty as a parent of threading the needle between being intentional and being out of touch with reality.
It’s not easy, and today’s conversation will walk through the research and practice that will help inform our decisions, as well as practical steps we can take to help get our children on the road to eventual (if delayed) digital independence.
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Transcription:
Purposely. Your life. God’s purpose. Listen at onpurposely.com.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Gospel Tech podcast. You are listening to our seven-episode series that is the Gospel Tech Crash Course. If you have found us through the Purposely Podcast network, if you’ve just found us through friends, who’ve shared it, you want to start here because we have 120 some odd episodes at this point.
And that’s a lot of information. So, what we’ve done is we’ve condensed the the top seven. An op episode on each of the topics that parents ask us about most, this is video games, social media, and smartphones pornography, safe tech at home… just the big picture on technology and the gospel that’ll ground us in this conversation, so that you can then go back and make sense of what you’re gonna hear, but you don’t have to start at episode one and listen to two plus years’ worth of content. So welcome to the Gospel Tech podcast. Thank you for being here. I hope you are encouraged and I’m excited to be on this journey with you.
Welcome to the Gospel Tech podcast. A resource for parents who feel overwhelmed and outpaced as they raise healthy youth in a tech world. As an educator, parent, and tech user, I want to equip parents with the tools, resources, and confidence they need to raise kids who love God and use tech.
Hello everyone and welcome to the Gospel Tech podcast. My name is Nathan Sutherland, and this podcast is dedicated to helping families love God and use tech. Our conversation today is five reasons to delay a smartphone for your child. This conversation is really rooted in the, in the pushback we get as adults, and the poor communication we give as adults about smartphones.
Our kids want them by the time we run into the teenage years, we are dealing with well over three quarters of young people, we’ll have a smartphone. Your kids are not lying when they say I’m the only one in class, cuz they’re probably only one of three or four in, in their class of 30 or so, who do not have a smartphone.
And so, the conversation needs to are we getting you a smartphone? And if we’re not, why? There has to be a reason beyond, well, I just don’t like it go work outside. Because at the end of the day, that’s not doing anything for your kid’s heart. And we talk here at Gospel Tech about how our conversations are going to be focused in the gospel first and then acting out of that truth.
And so, when we talk about that, what does it look like and why would that lead us to delay? We’re going to talk about those five reasons. What can we do instead? And how can we talk this out with our kiddos? Cuz they’re smart. and whether they’re six or 16, our young people are going to understand the bigger picture about what their hope is set in, what this tech will do for them, how it might hamper them, what’s the trade off, and how we can be well prepared for an age when they will have a smartphone, cuz there’s a really good chance they will. So, what, what are we doing to prepare their hearts, minds behaviors, for that time in life? And yeah, how can we do that lovingly in light of the gospel? So, today let’s talk about the five reasons to delay a smartphone for your child, because many of us have faced this.
My oldest is eight, next to six, and both of them have friends who have access to smartphones. And a couple of their friends, eight-year-old friends have smartphones. In fact, when he was in, oh my goodness, it was in kind, he’s in second grade now. So, when he is in kindergarten as a six-year-old, there were kids in kindergarten with personal smartphones. They would come, they’d play Minecraft.
They would play their games. And they had those phones in class. So, I don’t know where you live or how that works, where you are, but that isn’t unheard of here in the Northwest. And we have to have this conversation. Our kids are gonna come say, well, can I have it? They’re not devising anything crazy.
They just wanna know. That thing looks awesome. I want some, they ask you for ice cream. They ask you for Doritos. They’re gonna ask you for a smartphone, right? This is something you didn’t offer me, mom and dad. So, can I have it? And here’s the big picture. The big picture is often we frame the question is adults will, does my child need this thing?
And the short answer’s no. Your kid does not need a smart phone. There are even medical devices that can implement it, but they’re very convenient and they’re often quite affordable compared to other things. So, I know a family whose daughter has diabetes, and they have the blood monitor connected to their smart phone. Right? And so, it actually goes to her smartphone and it’s like linked with the parents. And that’s how they cuz of proximity. The parents don’t want the phone in their room. So, that’s where the notifications will come to the parents. If a blood sugar spike or dip happens in the middle of the night, for example, or during the school day. She keeps it on her and it will notify the parents and that’s a really cool resource. Right?
So, I understand those situations. Let’s take out of those really niche Hypertech situations, where our quality of life can improve and our safety can improve, and let’s just talk smartphone in general. There’s really five reasons we don’t need a smartphone, and the first overarching point, which will tackle all four of our next points, but the first big idea is that smartphones are app delivery systems. That is, that is what they are. So, when a company sells you a smartphone three big ones are Google, Samsung, and Apple. When you purchase that hardware, the physical device, they’re not making money on that. It costs way more to produce that, especially right now with what’s happening with the micro processing chips and all of the technology that goes into it.
And the mining of random minerals that is possible for them to get right now. These, these devices cost a ton. So, how are we still getting them for a thousand dollars, which sounds like a lot, until you realize what’s going into these things. It costs more than a thousand to make one of these.
Why are they selling it for that? Because they’re making money on ads and on apps. These are app delivery systems and the entire premise of all of this is goals get you to engage with a lot of different apps and then sell you ads and licensing rights for your attention. Most of those apps are going to be focused on consumption, not creation, meaning they’re drool tech not tool tech. So, it’s going to help you watch shows. It’s going to help you purchase things that you didn’t know you wanted because there’s an algorithm driving you stuff. Consume content through social media or through reels and snippets and things like that or consume news. And the entire premise is we’re going to direct your attention towards things that we think you need to know or need to purchase.
The bigger picture of engagement in terms of entertainment technology, they’re trying to capture your attention, your time and your money, right? So, they need to, your attention is they need to keep you coming back. So, they don’t just want one big blast out of you. They want, if it’s a 32nd blast, they want three in or three instead of two, 10, instead of eight, right? Like they just want that extra touch or two, and that’s how they’re going to get you. So, it’s your focus. They want you coming back frequently and redirecting your focus often. They want your time. They want that to accumulate over a single day. They’re gonna compete with as many different things as they can to accrue as much time as they can get. And then they want your money at the end of the day when they’re not selling your time and your focus for money.
So, that’s really important to know. App delivery system is not beneficial to basically anything that you’re trying to do as a young person. So, when a kid comes and says, mom and dad, can I have the smartphone? The first question should be, well, let’s talk about that. Why do you want one? Because as a second point to that, so that’s our first is that these are app delivery systems. And the number one thing that that’s going to affect is distraction. When your child, usually when they say, can I have a smartphone? What they mean is mom and dad, I want social media. So, just know that that’s like code. Mom and dad, I want to be on social media. Can I have a smartphone? Because that’s what gives me the independence to be on social media. And that’s really a two-part conversation. The first part is, child of mine, whom I love that’s great that you want a smartphone. Why do you want it? And they’re like, well, I want to be on social media. Excuse me. Social media brings all the worst parts of teenage life, with all the most powerful parts of digital life, it’s constantly there. It’s always available. It follows you wherever you go. And it never ever stops. It does not run out. It does not burn out. It does not sleep. Right.
So, you have now the trauma of being 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and all of the worst parts of technology, leveraging that into this unholy monster that can really beat our kids down, or drive them into rabbit holes of thought or of content that are unhealthful and unhealthy for them.
It can be as simple as they’re just keeping up on global news. But they’re not seeking out the news. They’re not researching the news. They’re not learning how to process information. Instead, they’re getting blasted with really heavy content. If you’ve been following the conflict in Ukraine right now you get blasted with really heavy content. I mean, you can go from dances of, you know, friends of yours to famous people, you know, doing their standup bits. And the very next thing can be bodies lying in streets, somewhere in Ukraine. Or child trafficking somewhere in central Africa. Like the whiplash, you can get, not to mention the, the sexual content that’s on there, but just talking the extremities of things that you might want to know.
But as Neil Postman would say, who wrote amusing ourselves to death, he’d say it’s shotgun, shotgunning with scraps, right. Or machine gunning, I believe is the way he said it with scraps. They’re taking just little bits of really intense information. And they’re just B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B… rapid fire hitting you with it. And if you pause on one or if you scroll back to it, or if you comment on it or you share it, that feeds into the algorithm and TikTok, for example within the first 10 minutes, they can peg you for what your interests are. What you are most susceptible to clicking on and being interested in, and it’s going to drive you to the most extreme ends of that.
The reason I bring that up is when your child says, I want social media, we need to understand this isn’t just a place to hang out with your friends. That’s an open play field. It’s directed, it’s intentional. It’s designed for engagement, in the worst sense of the word engagement can be fine there’s just usability engagement. That it works well, so you want to use it more? That’s not what we’re talking about here. This is algorithm driven and even machine learning driven. Use of technology. So, to give some super specifics, your child says, mom and dad can have a smartphone? You go, Hey, those are app delivery systems. Let’s call ’em what they are.
Why do you want a smartphone, child of mine? If they say I want social media, here’s nine concerns we have with social media for number, this is the second part about it being distracting. First is notifications. So, I brought this up before, but it’s really important to know. That little candy colored app will get a little red circle. Red is important. The circle is important. It tells you that you have things that you need to know. Maybe someone reached out to you. Maybe the program just realized you haven’t done anything in a while, and I just wanted to tell you random facts. Like so, and so that you’ve never talked to in 15 years had a birthday yesterday.
Like it just wants you to know and come back in and maybe catch you up in the feed. And again, take a little of your focus, take a little of your time. So, notifications are a big one. Word processor doesn’t do that. So, social media is gonna be unique in it’s drool techiness. Infinite scroll. The idea that you can always scroll to the bottom of the feed, and it’s always going to give you something new. Swipe to refresh… If you ever reach the bottom of a feed, you. Pull down like a slot machine and it’ll give you the little swirly and pop you up something new, right? That is intentional. That was designed to feel like a slot machine. You can see that in, well there’s books written about this. Hooked by Nir Eyal, and one that I’m forgetting. I’ll post it in the show notes.
Lady did an amazing research on actual the use of slot machine behavioral design in social media. And also in social dilemma, they talk about this, but infinite scroll. So, it, it brings it up followed by swipe to refresh where you swipe down candy-colored apps is intentional. They design those in the colors that draw your attention and focus most. If you wanna fix that you can read our piece on how to make your smartphone a dumb phone on gospeltech.net, but you can take away those colors go gray scale, and you can actually give yourself a little three button click to go back to color, if you need it for maps or something. Cuz there is some functionality there.
You can leave that off for the most part. Likes and follows are all about behavioral design, encouraging you to do things that people will like, and people will follow and discouraging behavior that doesn’t get you that. Which leads us to FOMO. Our sixth one is fear of missing out. There’s always something you could be in the know about, and something you could be finding out. And you’re always checking back in. Cuz what if something exciting happened? I don’t know who wrote me. I don’t know what’s on there. I don’t know what new exciting tantalizing. This is me. I’ve confessed this before. This is me with news apps. I’m just always checking just a little headline.
Just is anything juicy out there right now? And it’s not intentional. That’s not a thought I don’t stop and think, you know what? I bet something happened in that one specific event. And I’m gonna go look that up right now. I’m just gonna go check the app and see if anything came up. It’s a horrible habit and it is not easy to break because it’s natural.
And it’s wired into us to be curious and ask questions. The problem is we’re not asking questions. We’ve been trained to this point to just show up and see if they have anything to feed us. It’s literally why it’s called a feed where our information pops up. That’s your news feed. Seven, it impacts your focus and your sleep. By this point in all of these with notifications and scrolls and swipes and candy colors, and likes and follows in fear of missing out, all of a sudden now you’re not fully present. And in fact, I can tell you the times of day, when I’m most likely to check that news app. It’s when I’m writing, and I wanna just, man, I just need to break, focus for a minute. I’ll grab my phone instead of going for a walk, instead of doing some pushups, instead of reading a book, instead of doing whatever, I’ll pick up my phone and I’ll just be like, great. I’ll just take a couple moments here. And all of a sudden 7, 12, 15 minutes later, right. I don’t remember what I was doing because I was on my phone. Or, my real confession time, as soon as Hadley’s asleep, and I grab my phone to go turn on an audio book through the speaker for the boys. I will check my news app on the way walking up the stairs. Right. Which if anything happens, I will end up stopped on the stairs, reading my news app because I found this interesting and forgetting what I’m supposed to be doing.
Right? Like that’s, that’s not okay. That’s not me going to be informed. That’s me consuming as entertainment. Stuff that’s really important that I should be prayerful and intentional and take action on, but I’m not gonna do that on the way to turn on audible for my kids. Like I’m just doing this as a really bad habit.
So, impacts our focus and then our sleep. Many of us do that before bed or the first thing we get up and that’s affecting the way our brains can rest and be present.
Eight is that we can compare bodies. Both boys and girls have different versions of body dysmorphia from internet images. Not even pornography. Just seeing people filtered and seeing people who are being celebrated with likes and followers. We start to think that our body should look like that. And it’s not just well that person’s skinnier fit. Oftentimes it’s literally how their body looks. And oftentimes it’s filtered or edited. So, their eyes are bigger than are actually possible. Their abs are more profound and pronounced than can actually be possible.
And we start to get this idea of, this is what beautiful is. It’s just like what happened with magazines you know, in the nineties and early two thousand, but now it’s people we know or people that are our age at least. And it’s so rapid, and it’s so diverse that we begin to believe that this is normal when it’s not even possible.
So that’s huge. And then finally, social media is bad for our mental health at the end of the day. Social media has been shown as the Senate hearings have shown with Instagram specifically with young ladies to drive negative feelings about their bodies, and negative feelings about themselves as a result of that.
And then when it comes to cyber relationships that girls specifically, I was just reading this research, nine- to 12-year-olds so that what they would call tweens, are far more likely to bear the brunt of negative online social relationships. So, just friends that say mean things or a, a gamer who says something mean when they’re playing a video game together and they, they rattle off on the mouth and just say stupid things. That girls were actually then to more likely it was 2% for boys and 20% for girls on the likelihood that that would become a personal reflection, that they would then begin to ingest and believe about themselves. And that then impacts your ability to feeling or your, an feelings of anxiety and your feelings of stress and your feelings of depression, because you start ingesting that negative talk as a reflection on yourself.
So, that’s just mom and dad, can I have a smartphone? Why do you want it? Social media. Those are nine reasons to say no. The reason I bring them up and walk you through them is one, I want you to know. It’s not just no social media is bad, cuz like, well you’re on it, mom and dad, it’s true. Mom and dad probably modeled some really unhealthy habits as I just walked you through with some of mine.
But as a young developing brain, as a kid who’s still figuring out what it means to be a friend and have a friend, what it looks like to be loving, what it looks like to live out Jesus’s call to love our neighbors or ourselves and love God with all we are. What does even mean? I don’t know. It gets even harder to know if you can’t focus long enough because the thing in your pocket, that thing on your bedstand, that thing that you carry with you throughout the day is not just distracting, but it’s distracting and intentionally fighting your focus. It’s one thing for me to just get distracted, cuz I get distracted. Way before smartphones, I was getting distracted. But now this thing is designed to do that because that’s how they make a profit. Like that’s important for us to know. And it’s important then for us to talk out with our kids.
Six-year-olds probably don’t need to know all that. To say, Hey, this can be unhealthy for your heart and for your brain. Right? Like that could be enough. And if they say how you can compare it to something like sugar or other content that you don’t let little kids have, right? This is unhealthy. You can have this, when you get older, we’ll talk about how to handle it responsibly. You can choose how you want to handle that conversation.
With older kids, we need to talk about this. Hey, have you ever seen this happen? Have you ever experienced this when you have been online? But that’s, that’s our second conversation, when we’re talking about it being an app delivery system. It’s distracting in social media is that specific focus, but social media’s not the only thing, right.
There are video games as well. So, our third point on why are we not going to give a video game or a smartphone right away? Why are we going to delay longer than maybe would be convenient? Because, well, video games, aren’t maybe what you and I think of with video games. We think many of us grew up playing video games. Many of us play video games right now. We’re like, they’re fine. They’re fun. It’s not a huge deal. My kids are responsible, good kid. So it shouldn’t be that that much for them. And I guess I just wanna set some context. Video games right now are 179-billion-dollar industry, as of just 2020. So those 2021 numbers are still coming out.
But this idea in the U.S. Alone, it was 41 billion. So, here’s what that means. If you took the NFL, their best year of revenue was 2019, 16 billion. If you took major league baseball, their best year, was 2019, $11 billion of revenue. If you took the national hockey league, their best year was 2018 going into 2019, with 5 billion.
So, if you took those three sports and merged them in the, just the us, video games in the us did 28% more revenue than all three of them combined. Okay. And that’s just in the us. That’s not even looking at the growth markets for the video game industry, which is going to be India and Brazil and China, although China did just heavy lockdown.
So, we’ll see how that ends up. But Brazil and India are where a lot of the tech is going and they’re not gonna necessarily be playing PS fives. They’re making consoles that can run off less power, that can run more light in terms of their processing power. And that can run even over some of the like Starlink internet ideas, where they may not have internet in their home, it’ll be more of a general area Wi-Fi. So, they need lots of people to be able to play over a low amount of bandwidth. I only tell you that because video games are not going away. It’s not just something for kids. The average age of a gamer is 38, which means when your kid gets a PS five, when they get their new Xbox one X, when they get their new PC, those top end video games are not actually made for 12-year-olds, 14-year-olds for 16 year olds. They are made for 38-year-olds who’ve played video games for a very long time and who have built up a resistance and are now resilient to that much draw of a video game. And we need that next system.
That’s the reason we keep upgrading. If the original Nintendo was still exciting to us, we’d still be doing that. But the reason we need virtual reality, the, the reason we need augmented reality is we’ve kind of scorched our census to the point where these games are fine, but what’s the next thing, right?
Graphics have kind of peaked at this point. That was, that did for a while. what, what’s the next thing I need this thing beamed directly into my retina, right? To, for this to still feel exciting. And we need to keep that in mind, that when we’re talking video games with our kids there’s really things, three things to keep in mind.
They can be hyperstimulating. So, the rapid pace they’re goal driven. They’re highly replayable, which makes ’em fun, but also makes ’em hard to put down. And if our kid takes that kind of a video game to school, now it’s hard to engage in social relationships and their education and their focus even to sleep at night.
Not cuz they’re playing late, but because their brain is running through that game and reliving that experience and maybe even just hyped up cuz they played games in the last hour or two. And that’s really important because when you run through that list, That’s literally Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Like that’s, you’re talking, sleep relationships, food, and your future in terms of education, like those are really important if we’re giving what we need up to get something we want. Well, that’s the definition of an addiction. So we want to make sure we’re intentional about that and not building unhealthy compulsive habits. But instead, we are giving ourselves space.
We can have our gaming devices and then we go and do our other things, right. That would be the healthiest way in young brains. Don’t need that extra distraction. A second would be just unhealthy content. In terms of video games, this is micro transactions. So, they’re encouraging to buy stuff and making you feel dissatisfied with what you have.
Often, they would be called free to play games where you can join this game at like a base level. But the game’s entire point is to show you how little you have. And how dissatisfied you should be and how for just a dollar 99 or 5 99 or 1599, you could have a way better player experience. And they’ll just micro transact you into doom.
So, Fortnite would be an example where they make billions of dollars on the game, but it’s free to play. And they don’t sell you ads. They just sell you stuff. So, that’s one side of it. And the other side is just some of the content is inappropriate. Video games are massive pathways for big conversations. And so, whether it’s talking about spirituality, in a video game that is talking about, you know, angels and demons and, or those kinds of conversations, or if they’re talking about just existential purpose. There are big time games that talk about what is reality and what is time and what does it mean to exist?
And it could be as, I guess as popular as something like a left or dead, where it’s a zombie game where you kind of tackle those big conversations or can actually be part of the plot where you’re actually talking through time and existence and God. And those are in major what we’d call triple a games. Games that are very popular.
So, just know that that’s out there and we don’t want those just going straight to our kids’ device, straight into their brains. We want to be part of that conversation and help them process some of those really heavy topics. And then the third reason is that games are meant to be fun, and usually a game is it’s based off challenge, competition and storyline, even the artwork.
So, most of us have learned to make not fun things fun by making it a game., Right. I was just doing yard work for my sons this past weekend, and we were working in the garden, and we made a game of, Hey, who can finish their row fastest when we’re tilling the soil with the shovel. Right. Who can find the biggest clump of clay in this dirt because where we live in the state of Washington it’s just clay and rocks. It’s not great soil where we are. And we right, who can pick up the most socks from this pile of laundry and put them away first, right? Like just, it becomes a race, it becomes a competition. It becomes these silly little games. But when we get to video games sometimes, they’re actually program to be unhealthy.
So, term limits would be an example of this. You play a game, but you can only take so many actions and you either have to wait a day or you have to wait an hour, or you have to pay 50 cents or a dollar, right. You buy this many gems and that gets you X amount of extra turns. That is something to build in dissatisfaction into the game. Right. That’s unhealthy when we are talking about developing brains and their inability to control impulses. And that’s a physical thing. Like you do a, you do a scan of their brain while they’re trying to inhibit an action like that, and the front part of their brain, the orbital frontal cortex does not fire like it will, when they’re 25. It just doesn’t work the same. It’s not fully developed. It’s not functioning yet. That’s an unfair advantage towards the game. The only thing you can do then instead of just asking them to be responsible is actually distance that and give them another buffer.
The second is rapid feedback, sound effects and environmental responses are a huge part of game design and it’s to make the game satisfying. Right. I can hear a good hit. I can hear a miss. I can hear where I’m at and that ambient involvement in the game is really attractive because it makes it more real. And things like loot, if I play this level and I beat this boss, then I might get this thing… that’s really a powerful draw to replay it and make plans and to adjust my time so I can have enough to get back to it. And as a non-gamer, you may think that sounds silly, but in game, loot matters, and that will be more true as real world money comes into. In future days, months, and years.
And then the last one really in the video game world that attraction piece we wanna be intentional with is goals, quests, and rewards, right? The game sets up goals that feel important. And we now, as I mentioned earlier, give up our Maslow’s hierarchy of need in order to attain that goal. I’m going to give up my sleep. I’m gonna give up my relationships. I’m gonna give up my money. I’m gonna give up my future in terms of study in order to attain this thing.
And we just wanna, we wanna be really intentional on how we’re handling that. And then, all right, so we’ve said so far, what are our five reasons? We said it’s an app delivery system, it’s easy to get distracted with social media first and with video games second, and we just walked through a couple ways video games can be distracting. And the fourth reason to delay smartphones is stranger. I guess the easiest way to handle this is, bark is a program that helps us see just the concerning content that our kids come across through text messages. Even emails, search history images they come across con conversations they have, but we’re not getting a constant feed of what they’re doing.
We’re not reading through every line of their text or everything on their phone. We’re not looking at every picture. Instead, there’s a very smart algorithm that allows us to just get notified when concerning words, phrases or habits show up. So, that group bark did a study. They made an online profile, they made multiple, but they made an 11-year-old girl, a 15 and a 17 year old girl. And within the first 90 seconds it was on Instagram, it was a public profile, but they did not post anything like anyone in bathing attire or anything where they might be suggestive of inappropriate actions even. It was just pictures of like a mug they painted and flowers and just very basic stuff.
Within 90 seconds, they began getting requests for live video chats, direct messages that were unrequested, unsolicited, and sexual images sent directly to these accounts. Bark says that the stuff that was sent to the 11-year-old was actually the most profane. And what’s important to know is that our children are often quite good in real life at getting a feel for unhealthy people. Right. They, they just kind of have that vibe. They can look at ’em, they can talk to ’em and they just feel something’s off, even if they can’t put their finger on it. But it’s really hard in digital life to read what we might call tricky people, right? We need to have very clear conversations with our children about this. And if, I guess, in order to be able to do that, we have to be able to talk about pornography, sex, sexual abuse, and sexual predators. And so, basically our goal for, or our, our litness, for should hard children have social media, one of those check boxes needs to be, can we talk about this with our kids openly, without shame, without threatening them?
Can we talk about this in a loving manner and saying, this is real. This is on there. Here’s how we’re going to address it. Here’s what it means. And until we can do that, our kids should not have social media. Which means they should not have a smartphone. Cuz the smartphone’s only goal is to get you social media and things like it. Right.
By the way, at this point. Well, I’ll talk in a little bit about what we should do instead. So, that’s number four, is strangers, we need to be intentional. I’ll, I’ll just share this here, I guess. An increase in screen time outside of school comes with this. And so, this is the second part. So, strangers, part, I guess four, a and four B is bullies on this idea that our more time online means we’re more likely to get bullied. So, starting with COVID through 2020 and into 2021, increase in screen time outside of school, so, not your zoom or your teams call for your classes, but outside of that, it went up 17%.
So, those nine- to 12-year-olds average five hours a day on tech that isn’t school work. Teens average eight and a half hours a day. This is common sense media 2021. So, it’s a national study within the United States, five hours a day, not including school; eight and a half hours a day for teens. In that increased amount of time, we’ve seen an increase in cyber bullying. So, in 2021 study done by a group called Light, found a 70% increase in bullying and abusive language among kins and teens on social media and chat forums. A 70% increase. So, the more time you spend on there, the more likely you’re going to wear some of that. And that again, when that was the same research that I was reading when young ladies are more likely to then take that and have that impact their mental health. It did not go into why that might be.
Boys tend to play video games and that’s where they run into their bullying and their negative conversations with strangers. And that kind of stuff is live chat in a game, and girls, it was more on social media, but it happens to boys and girls. It happens to a large number of them. We’re talking upwards of 75% of young people have have witnessed or experienced it themselves.
So, they’ve either seen it happen to someone in a game, in a chat, in a, in a messaging or feed through social media, or they’ve actually experienced it, or they’ve been witnessed to it, excuse me, or experienced it themselves. So, that’s our fourth reason is strangers and bullying. We don’t need to make the teenage years harder than they already are. The tween years harder than they already are. Instead, we need to give our children space. So, again, If we’re willing to talk to our kids about that and we feel we can have these conversations clearly and openly, that’s great. Which brings us to the fifth point is that pornography is out there. The average age of exposure, according to screen strong is 11 years old.
And that boys age 12 to 17 are the largest consumers of online pornography. And that’s Woda 2014 is the study that brought that up. And that was eight years ago. So, there’s a really good chance with the proliferation of smartphones since then, that that age has even dropped. 12 to 17 is intense. 11 years old for just our exposure is intense.
Again, the conversation then is if we’re letting our child online, we have to be both willing to give the support they need, and trust knowing that we love them, and we want them to be healthful. So, we’re going to put something like Bark on that device to help it stay safe, and we’re going to make sure we have a really clear conversation about pornography. Young kids… it’s a good picture, bad picture. It’s just a great spot to start. It basically gives you a story to read through with your child rather than talking at them. And it lets you talk about here’s what pornography effectively is. There’s these unkind pictures of people being unsafe and unloving, and here’s what we do.
We turn away. We go and tell our mom or our dad or our caring adult, right. We go and tell our teacher, not because we’re gonna get in trouble, but because we care about our hearts and we care about these people, right? And that is a wonderful spot to start. And then from there, we have to have all of those conversations about pornography sex predators. Right? We have to be able to do that without shame, fear or threats. And I don’t mean to say, Hey, no shame. Whatever’s good to go goes, but instead, coming at it from that hope focused kindness of, no, this is wrong. It’s okay that mom and dad have these feelings, even if you have these feelings, right?
Like anger’s a fine emotion to have about this. Shame will happen but what we don’t want to have happen is for you to start to believe that shame and start thinking that making a mistake makes you a mistake. Like that is what the conversation of Jesus is actually all about, is that we no longer have to bear our own sins before the Lord, and somehow be good enough to earn our way onto his team, but instead by faith, meaning believing that Jesus gives us his goodness and living out of that, following what God says, where we can see in all of scripture is displaying God’s character and his goodness, understanding that part of his goodness is his wrath and anger towards sin.
And that then in Jesus, we don’t bear that anymore. We don’t kill animals anymore because Jesus took all of that sin. He was the, the lamb that was slain and he’s the great high priest who then offers that regular sacrifice every single day. Every single moment for us. So, that when we’re covered in Jesus, you’ll hear that language in the Bible, it’s like putting on clothes of Jesus. At one point it’s even called the bride garments of Christ. That we put on these wedding clothes. And when God looks at us, he’s pleased cuz he sees Christ. Right. So, what do you need to have that? Will you just put your faith in Christ? You say, what do I get for my purpose today? Christ is my purpose today. What do I get for my value today? Christ is my value today. Not my job, not my goodness, not my family, not my money, not my self-sacrifice. Those things might happen, but that’s not where I’m getting my value. When I do, I repent. Why? Because my value needs to be in Christ. And so, this is wrong.
So, in that we have that conversation with our kids and go, okay, child of mind, pornography is real. Sex is real. Here’s what we say about that. Here’s what we know about that. And here’s what we do in light of the gospel. It doesn’t have to define you. That doesn’t mean you just get a look at porn anytime you want, because who are you putting your trust in at that point?
Well, if Jesus says sex is A, and you go, yeah, but I want B. You’re no longer serving Christ, you’re serving yourself, right? Like that’s, that’s the entire conversation, just iterated into every single thing we do. And we have to be able to have that with our kids before we can give ’em a smartphone.
So, which is why 15 is our max. That’s our that’s the first year you should be able to give a child a smartphone because at 15. Is probably the first time they can start to wrap their brain around that. The first time they’re developmentally preparing emotionally to be able to handle some of those big conversations with you and some of the independence.
And it’s far enough out from them getting total independence at 18, for them to build up that trust that will probably be mistakes made. You’ll have something like bark in place. You’ll have a great router in your home to keep yourself safe. Chris McKenna of protect young eyes does an amazing job of explaining why the router is the best device in your home.
Listen to that podcast with him. It’s coming up in a couple weeks and check out protect young eyes, cuz he does an awesome job on that. So, I won’t delay or belabor that point here. But this is the idea 15 years old is why we’re delaying. We’re not saying no, we’re not saying never. We are saying not yet, because I love you, because of all those reasons we just talked about, it’s an app delivery system.
It’s distracting with social media and video games. Because of bullies and unhealthy people online, right. Stranger danger, and because of porn we’re gonna say no to smartphones. So, then we’re left with, okay, but what, your nine-year-old, your 12-year-old, your 13 year old, 14 year old comes to you and says, Hey mom and dad, can I have a smartphone? Obviously, this is a conversation for you guys to have. You can choose to give it all early. Some of you might be breaking a sweat cuz you just gave it to them, or you already have done this. I get that. I did not share any of this in hopes of making you feel bad. My hope in sharing this is to make it very clear why delay is a really, really good option.
If you’ve given your child a smartphone, that’s great as long as you have a system to know what digital trust is and verify that they are earning that. That’s great. What we are talking then about is alright, if it gets outta control, what do we drop back to? So, there are dumb phones. The two I really like are the Gab wireless phone and the Wyse phone by Go Techless.
Those two are excellent. The Wyse phone is really, for a little bit older age group. It’s just a higher quality device, but it’s also more expensive. The gab phone is hyper accessible, very easy to use. Neither of them have the app store. Neither of them have internet, neither of them can send or receive images. But they have all the functionality. They have GPS, they have calculators, they have a camera that you can take pictures and store them locally on that phone. And so, you do begin to get kind of the training wheels on these devices. And for younger kids there’s even wearables as much as I dislike them, I know that some families are looking for that next little bump. And so, something like a watch that your child can use and tap to call you. Right. So that they have something to discuss transportation or emergencies, those kinds of things. Gab has those as well. But that would be really the first go to. The second is they can begin to use public devices.
So, the public tablet that’s on your home Wi-Fi that does not have cell service, even your own smartphone, hey, this is your tech time. You can check in on the app. You’re gonna log in through my profile. And you’re going to use that to communicate with your friends, cuz that’s where your friends are, and you want to be involved with your friends. And really, if we can’t get our social media being done and under a half hour a day, we’re doing it wrong. So, if we are saying, Hey, social media is how I connect with my friends. It’s how I find my place to belong. It’s how I connect for real world events. That’s cool. You can do that in under 30 minutes a day. And choosing that block of time saying, Hey, we’re gonna have 10 to 15 minutes after dinner or right before dinner, whatever to get that done, that’s now a, a section of time that we are going to our tech, we’re using it and we’re walking away, rather than it stealing our focus, stealing our time, taking our money, right. The things it’s trying to do. So, we are now using the app rather than letting it use us.
So, those are our healthy alternative options. Building up to the point where now we’re getting towards 15 and we’ve proven our digital trust factor, and we’ve had those hard conversations and we have that hedge built up around our personal devices and our home network. And now we can say, all right, son or daughter, we’re still putting accountability on this because we love you and we wanna be there if, and when things go wrong, and we’re gonna start spreading our wings a little bit digitally. We’re gonna have, and as long as they’re earning that and showing they can be healthy and make those big conversations happen, we’re good. Right. And if it’s not, we’re going to the next bump down, say, Hey, we’re gonna take a break. We’re gonna take a month off. Right. We’re gonna get rid of that smartphone. We’re gonna reset our brains. We’re gonna figure out a healthy way to do it. And figure out where, where are things going awry, because they can go awry in a lot of ways. So I’m, I’m being kind of vague, but it’s merely because I don’t want to pigeonhole people into one way things can go wrong. I want you to be prayerful, be intentional and be aware in conversation with your kids. Cuz again, the end goal here, isn’t fix your kid. It’s not, make sure they never make a mistake digitally. It’s help them see the digital world for what it is. Especially with smartphones it’s built to distract you. That is its goal right now. I hope one day we have devices where all they are is tool tech, and you can add drool tech as you go. But right now, these things are designed and implemented to distract you because that’s what makes these companies trillion-dollar companies. And as such, they’re not meant for young children.
In fact, they’re barely meant for adults, but we can manage them because our brains are fully developed. Our emotional health is of such that we can ask for help more easily than young people can. While it’s not wise for all of us to have smartphones and certainly not smartphones in their full capacity, it is something that we can pray through and manage intentionally and model for our kiddos.
So, I hope this conversation is encouraging for you. I hope that it equips you with practical steps for your young ones, and words to say as you, as you talk with them about how to do this. You can reach out to me directly if you have any questions, [email protected]. You can find us on Instagram and Facebook at love God, use tech, and you can join us here next week as we continue this conversation about how we can love God and use tech.
