As parents it is our responsibility to be aware of the dangers of electronic devices and to be willing to limit the way our children use them. Children simply cannot comprehend on their own the consequences of misusing a simple phone.
How Phones are Like Guns
Let’s suppose that for whatever reason, you want to give your child a gun. Might be a handgun, might be a rifle. You might want to:
- simply teach them gun safety.
- teach them how to hunt game, so that if your child eats meat, he or she knows that hamburger comes from a living thing and is not a root vegetable.
- teach them how to hunt, so they would have an additional source of food in a time of scarcity that you could not predict.
- have a companion with you when you go out into the mountains to shoot cans. I can tell you that nearly all children find this to be great fun, in case you’ve never had this particular pleasure.
In search of a gun, you go to the store and review some of the inventory. One gun is marked with a label that says, “Usually shoots beautifully, but this model has exploded in the past.” You’re curious, so you ask the owner, who explains that the gun is accurate, but there have been explosions maybe one in twenty times this model has been fired.
Would you buy that particular gun? There are potential advantages—listed above—but is it worth handling an object that could explode one in twenty times? Such explosions can blind, disfigure, and even kill. No, of course you wouldn’t.
And yet we buy our children phones and other electronic devices, where the incidence of misuse and harm—explosions—is far higher than one in twenty. The average age of porn addiction is eleven. The incidence of phone addiction is high and growing rapidly. The same is true for video games and social media.
Raising Children in a Battle-Zone
I am not saying that all phones and devices are bad. They have marvelous—even life-saving—uses, but the potential for harm is known to be high. As parents it is our responsibility to be aware of the dangers and to be willing to limit the way our children use these electronic devices.
Children simply cannot comprehend on their own the consequences of misusing a simple phone.
The world is certainly benefiting from an exponential use of electronic miracles, but it is also being inundated by all the unwanted effects. Our children are being raised in a battle zone.
Every time they look at an electronic screen, they are open to being bombarded with misinformation that can distort their perceptions for the rest of their lives. In some cases their brain function and structure can be altered.
We were caught by surprise. The first phone that even remotely resembles the cell phones of today was introduced less than 20 years ago, and since then the growth of their use has exploded.
We must be aware and make wise decisions about these devices whose effects on our children we are only beginning to grasp.
