trend will continue unless families are better able to address the influence that technology can have on children.
My interest in digital technology and the impact of media on families grew from a unique career path in which I studied radio, television, and film before beginning work in public television. Over time, my desire to contribute not just to entertaining people, but to helping them find healing, led me to pursue studies in clinical psychology, where I had the opportunity to integrate my faith with the insights of the field, developing an approach to the human person and therapeutic care rooted in the dignity of every individual as made in the image and likeness of God, made for relationship and ordered to eternal life. My background in the media, as well as my research in the area of violent video games, has given me an interesting vantage point from which to view our digital landscape. I hope that some of the insights I have gleaned in research and clinical care will help you and your family to navigate it as well.
In the following chapters, I’m going to discuss how digital technology influences the way we understand ourselves, each other, and the world. For our purposes, I’m going to focus on three areas that have arguably the greatest influence on children and families: social media, video games, and pornography. While video games and social media are products of the digital age, pornography and sexual exploitation, age-old evils, have become deeply entangled with technology, increasing its reach to younger and younger children.
Every good parent wants to help their kid lead a happy and healthy life. A Catholic Christian worldview deepens this desire, prompting parents not simply to hope for an Ivy League college or a fulfilling career for their child, but a life of flourishing, a life steeped in a real relationship with God, holy friendships, the opportunity to discern God’s call in their vocation, and ultimately eternity in heaven. That’s a tall order, even in the best of circumstances. Christian parents today face so many challenges in conveying the faith to their children, and the pressures of digital technology do not make it any less complicated.
My intent in writing this book isn’t simply to point out all the dangers of unmonitored, unsupervised forays into the digital world — though these are important things to recognize. Rather, I want you to walk away with an understanding of what influences are operating online, both positive and negative, and how to respond in a way that best supports your family.
To that end I’ve included some reflection questions at the end of each chapter. These can be used to promote discussion in a group or to prompt additional thought for you, the reader, independently. I believe it is possible to live in our modern world in a fairly normal way, but to do so may first involve stepping back to consider how technology has impacted us to this point, and the role we wish it to play in our family’s future. Contrary to what society may want us to believe, this is still within our control.
When I speak to parents on this topic, I emphasize that I’m not encouraging everyone to rush home and take a hatchet to their computers. I do, however, think that we run the risk of losing balance in our lives if we are not careful to identify what expectations we have about the role of technology in our lives and actively prioritize our values in our digital decisions.
My hope is that this book will raise a few questions for you about your family’s relationship with technology and how closely your choices match up with the values that matter most to you. I would like this to be the start of a conversation about how we and our families are living in the digital age and an opportunity to honestly ask ourselves if we like what we see.
Chapter One
The Digital Landscape in Which We Live
Our kids are significantly more aware of their surroundings than we tend to realize. I realized just how aware they are several years ago when I was playing with my son, who was two at the time. He and I had been playing with a small basket of wooden fruit. We were either cooking a pretend breakfast or having a pretend picnic — I forget. But after a few minutes my son picked up a small wooden banana, put it to his head, and started pretending it was a phone. Wanting to play along, I put my hand to side of my head with my thumb and pinkie extended and began to pretend that we were talking to each other on the phone. The conversation went something like this:
Me: “Hi, Son. How are you?”
Son: “I am good, Daddy. We are having a picnic.”
Me: “And are you having fun?”
Son: “Yes. Hold on.”
At this point, my son takes the banana phone away from his ear and holds it out toward me with his left hand, curved side facing him.
Son: “Click!”
Me: “What was that?”
Son: “I just took your picture.”
He lowers his “phone” and starts to swipe his right index finger repeatedly across the curved side of the banana.
Son: “Hold on, I will text it to you.”
Me: “Uh-oh.”
I should probably explain at this point that neither my wife nor I had smartphones at that time. Our phones could best be described as belonging to the “dumb as a rock” category. My cell phone didn’t even have a camera built into it. My son’s only exposure to smartphones of any kind was that he had seen one a handful of times at the house of a family friend. He didn’t play with it. He didn’t hold it. He certainly didn’t text anybody with it. Yet, he understood the technology well enough that he was able to incorporate it into his play by the age of two.
Kids are sponges. In the first years of life, kids learn how walk and talk. They learn what it is like to experience and express a whole range of emotions. They develop preferences and favorites. They learn about friendship and love from their families. They begin to understand their own dignity based on the way they are treated by the people around them. In short, they learn about their world, the people in their world, and how best to interact with both.
When I worked in public television, I had great opportunities to be involved in many different projects — local interest shows, live music, and a high-energy kids’ show. In all of this, it occurred to me that what I was participating in was storytelling. I was helping to transmit a story out to … well, just out. Television is a one-way form of communication, broadcast to an audience we couldn’t see. The audience is passive — receiving the stories sent via television.
For a long time, mass media was entirely passive, rather than interactive. We read books, we watched television or movies, we listened to music. Interactive media has only been around in a widespread form since the advent of video games in the 1970s. But by that time, after many years of being passive receivers of information, we had become accustomed to absorbing just about everything that came our way. Today, children continue to absorb what is presented in their digital environments, but are also involved in the process to a degree unimaginable even a generation ago.
Information: Then to Now
Communication has been growing and changing since the dawn of human history, but two turning points in the advent of mass media stand out. The first, the Guttenberg printing press (1455), heralded the widespread distribution of text in a way simply impossible when books were hand-lettered. This distribution allowed for greater access to the study of faith, the exchange of ideas, and educational opportunities more broadly. The second turning point, Morse’s electrical telegraph (1844), opened up the possibility of almost instantaneous transmission of messages across large distances. From that point on, information could be removed from its original context and shared with persons not intimately connected with its development. This is important as data, facts, and information that do not have direct significance on the life of the individual, sudden are treated with the same importance as the events that legitimately have great significance. Henry David Thoreau, reacting to this new technological development, suggested that just because Texas and Maine now had the ability to talk to each other instantaneously, it didn’t mean that they actually had anything important to