Heath Lambert: Last week on the podcast, I drew our attention to the article in Time Magazine about adolescent anxiety and depression. And we talked about a way to think through some of those issues, but I promised more practical steps in the weeks and months that follow. This week. I do want to talk about one of those things, and that is the issue of online safety for teens. One of the common denominators in the phenomenon of anxiety and depression that has been reported by Time magazine that is experienced in the life of our teens is the fact that they have so much exposure online. They’re seeing so many things that are harmful to their souls on their phones, on the internet, and on Facebook. And so we want to talk this week on the podcast about how to protect our teen safety online.
This is an issue that I have thought a lot about, and a text that sort of informs my thinking on it is Psalm 119:37, and it says, “turn my eyes from looking at worthless things and give me life in your ways.” This is a prayer from the psalmist that we would turn away from things that are harmful and things that are worthless and we would turn our eyes to the life in the word of God. And so I just want to have that text be a banner over several suggestions that I would give to parents this week as you try to protect your kids online.
One recommendation that we can keep our minds on as we turn our eyes from looking at worthless things is the importance of parents and protecting their own personal purity. I have had the opportunity to talk to so many young men in their teens and twenties who got introduced to online pornography through their fathers —they saw something on their dad’s phone, they saw something on the internet history— and that led them down a rabbit hole of pain for years. The reality is that when we as parents are protecting our own personal purity when we are not viewing things online that we should not view online, it’s going to be that much harder for our kids to be exposed to those kinds of things.
Something else that we can do to protect our kids online is to nurture a close relationship with them. We need to be parents who spend time with our kids. We got to fight against the practice that some of us have to be too busy for our kids, and we need to cultivate an environment in our home of just togetherness. One of the reasons that so many children and so many teenagers get in trouble online is because they’ve been left alone online to do whatever they want. When we are spending time with our kids, and we’re playing games with them, and we’re taking walks with them, when we’re going to the park with them, we’ll be together with them. And we need to, as we’re together with them, cultivate an attitude of being able to discuss anything with them. This means engaging them. It means not freaking out when they have hard things to say, and it means having age-appropriate candor as we talk about hard things that they bring up.
Something else that we can do to protect our kids online is to withhold technology from them for an appropriate time. This is a challenging reality for parents to consider. The inertia is always in the direction of get your child the latest and greatest piece of technology. But just because our kids’ friends have access to technology and access online does not mean it’s necessarily appropriate for our kids to have access online. It could be that the wisest strategy of a parent is to withhold technology for a little while, to not let kids be online. There is, as a matter of fact, no requirement that your teenager has to be online or has to have access to technology anytime they want. In fact, if your child has demonstrated a tendency to struggle in this area, then this might be exactly the kind of decision that you need to make. Jesus says that if your eye causes you to sin, it’s better to gouge it out and live than to have a working eye and go to hell. So we need to be ready as parents to make hard and unpopular decisions and have some backbone for the good of our kids.
Another set of recommendations that we can do to protect our kids online is to have practical protections on all of our equipment. We should have computers be placed in public areas in our house. We should not —I don’t want to lay anything down as a law, but you can just hear this as a very, very strong recommendation— you should not give your teenager a computer to put in their bedroom. You are asking for trouble. You might as well put a stack of pornographic magazines in their bedroom and cover it with a sheet and make them promise not to look in there. You might as well hide bullies in the closet and make them promise not to come out. You should not leave your child alone —whether they’re a teenager or in grade school— with equipment that can get them into a lot of trouble and cause them pain for a long time.
You need to set time limits on your equipment. Children should not be allowed to have unlimited time online or on technology, and you should pay attention to what your kids are doing. You should be able to have administrator privileges on the technology that they use so that you can see what they have been doing online. Another step for online safety is to use technical protections on your equipment. You should have passwords on every television and every computer. You should use Be Safe or Covenant Eyes. Disney has a new device called Circle that filters inappropriate material that sets time limits, that monitors behavior, that can pause the use of online activity, and that has a bedtime so that the equipment turns off when it’s time for bed. That is a remarkable device that I’d like to commend to you. And then, beyond the technical protections on your equipment, you should talk with your kids about the grace of Jesus Christ. The reality is that no matter what kind of protections we implement, our kids are going to get in trouble online sooner or later. They’re going to be exposed to pornography. They’re going to be exposed to the cruel treatment of others. They’re going to see hateful treatment online. And when that happens, the only force in the whole world that is strong enough to help them is the grace of Jesus Christ. It’s important to remember that Psalm 119:37 is a prayer. The psalmist prays, turn away my eyes from looking at worthless things and give me life according to your ways. That means if we’re going to turn away from the worthless things that are online, we need the grace that we realize in Jesus Christ. And so we can never ever talk about the grace of Jesus enough with our kids and point them to his grace and his grace alone.
