Less Screen Time
To the Editor:
Imagine a world where children were the chosen target of annihilation. They were the victims picked to be brainwashed and left on the streets of confusion. Children, whose minds are capable of absorbing and retaining information, have become like overused sponges, dry and dirty. Unfortunately, we don’t have to imagine such a world, for we are already living in it. We have allowed our children, from babies to toddlers to teens, to succumb to the addiction of the screen.
According to Psychology Today, nearly half of American teens spend over eight hours a day on technology. USA Today highlights a study indicating that 2-year-olds spend around 2.5 hours a day on screens, and 5 to 8-year-olds spend an average of 3.5 hours a day. Although phones and iPads appear to be a helpful and free babysitter, in the long run, they are destroying children’s ability to build, beautify, and defend. The childhood years of training up their loves and loyalties, running barefoot in the grass, and imagining building or saving a kingdom, are gone. Instead, these beautiful opportunities for growth are being filled with overstimulating video games, making their lives transparent on social media, and escaping from true reality.
The amount of control the screen has on children is almost inescapable. Not only are they sucked into what lays behind the little black box, but so are their souls. Child-like innocence has been taken away. Clare Morell points out that one out of four boys aged 9-12 has been on a dating app. She also explains that on an “innocent” app like Snapchat, your child can access pornography in no more than five clicks. Even though parental controls show what app your child has been spending their time on, it doesn’t reveal the intricate layers of the app that your child can access.
Even if your child is truly walking in integrity, and you have full trust that they are walking in uprightness when it comes to what they are searching for online, there is no hiding from sin. The internet is full of ways to tempt and destroy its viewers. By spending hours on the internet/social media per day, there is a guarantee that disgusting images and graphic stories will show themselves to your children.
The child who is addicted today will become the adult who is addicted tomorrow. You want to train your sons and daughters to be builders, beautifiers, and defenders in a world that wants prisoners, manipulators, and defeatists. The Lord has given children the seed of imagination. Plant the seed, grow their creativity, and watch the flower bloom.
Kamryn Kelly Muldoon