addiction | Children's Jubilee Fund

In last week’s post, we looked at three dangers of excessive exposure to screens:

Content offered on screens is meant to be addictive;
Content offered on screens can be dangerous because it can manipulate the way content consumers think and act; and
Excessive screen use can lead to emotional, social, and mental health problems.

Each of these dangers is particularly problematic for children and adolescents, who lack the self-awareness, self-control, and discernment to protect themselves.

What can parents, guardians, teachers, and other caregivers do to help children understand and control the images and messages they see online? This week, we’ll look at how to help kids understand. In our final post in the series, we’ll look at ways parents and caregivers can take control of the situation.

Understand

Here are some talking points to help your kids understand what they’re being exposed to online.

1. Nothing on electronic media is morally neutral. In other words, kids need to understand that the content to which they expose themselves will do one of two things: it will either make them wise and more godly, or it will lead them away from God and the safety he provides.

The Bible tells us in Psalm 101:3 to avoid even looking at anything that is “worthless,” or that would lead us astray (actually, the entire psalm deals with the topic). The reason? We become like the things we expose our eyes, ears, minds, and hearts to. That’s why the psalmist says in this verse: “I hate the work of those who fall away; it shall not cling to me.” He knows that whatever he sets his eyes on will literally cling to him and either lift him up, or drag him down.

Electronic media is like that, too. Staring at content designed to shock, scare, sexually arouse, anger, or even entertain (yes—too much entertainment is bad for you, too!) will have a subtle effect on the viewer. We wind up thinking the very ways that we’re taught to think in the media we consume. We wind up speaking and acting the ways patterned for us in that media. Help your child understand that he or she is literally being programmed by the things that he or she watches or listens to—and that isn’t always good.

2. Self-control is good. This is a concept that seems to have fallen by the wayside in our modern era. Artificial intelligence (AI) is at work to keep feeding content to us content consumers. When the algorithms determine that we enjoy watching content that has certain tags, it will automatically feed us more, and more, and more. It’s like being at an all-you-can-eat buffet…there’s so much good.

And the reason why it’s so hard to just put the phone down and walk away is that the pleasure centers of our brains have been reconditioned to crave more and more content that we find enjoyable. It literally takes a force of will to close the app or turn off the phone and to focus on something else.

Kids often end up consuming endless hours of AI-curated content because they don’t know how to walk away. They don’t know they are able to exercise self-control. Talk with your kids about the importance of taking control of their own minds and bodies by setting limits on the time they spend on apps and in front of screens. If they sit passively before a screen filling their minds and hearts with content, they’re being shaped by whatever they watch. But they can take responsibility for their own bodies and minds, and get up and walk away. Sometimes, just being told they have the ability to do this can empower a child to make different choices.

3. Your kids have an enemy, who is trying to destroy them. That enemy is Satan, the devil. Satan’s mission is to destroy the fruit and joy of salvation in the lives of all God’s people. He is after your children, and can use media to infiltrate their hearts and minds.

Satan does not tend to tempt us by exposing us to extreme, implausible thoughts or circumstances. Rather, his habit is to put otherwise good and appealing things in front of us and ask us: Why don’t you just go ahead and take it? You know you want it.

He can do that through entertainment, humor, good-sounding music, and even using the words of someone else we might admire or trust to entice us. Friends sharing links to content they might find funny or provocative might provide a vehicle for that temptation. So might AI offering your child a virtually limitless menu of entertainment.

Don’t get me wrong: not everything is a vehicle for temptation. But kids need to be aware of the fact that there is someone at work behind the scenes to expose them to harmful ideas, worldviews, and behaviors. They need to either be wise enough to avoid those traps, or they need a parent, guardian, teacher, or caretaker to steer them away from danger.

In the third and final installment of the series, we’ll look at how parents, teachers, and other caregivers can actually help kids set boundaries or even change behavior regarding screens and media.

Tim Geiger (M.Div.) is Executive Director of Children's Jubilee Fund. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Tim has lived in or around the city most of his life. His undergraduate studies done at the Community College of Philadelphia, Tim went on to earn a Master of Divinity Degree from Westminster Theological Seminary. He is ordained as a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. Prior to serving at Children's Jubilee Fund, Tim worked for the Internal Revenue Service, The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, and Harvest USA, where he also served as Executive Director and then President from 2012-2019. Tim lives with his wife and daughter just outside of Philadelphia.

Children's Jubilee Fund is a 501(c)(3) organization established in 1997 to provide tuition grants to Christian schools in the Philadelphia metro area that serve lower-income students. These grants are then awarded by the schools as scholarships to students who meet income and residency guidelines. Each year, Jubilee provides hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants that, in turn, help hundreds of students in Philadelphia, Delaware, Montgomery, and Camden Counties achieve their God-given academic and personal potential. Children's Jubilee Fund is an entirely donor-supported organization.

Is excessive exposure to screens (phones, computers, tablets, television) dangerous for children’s physical, emotional, and social health? Many experts say it is.

I’m old enough to have had the experience of a single screen in the house while I was a child and teen: the family TV. I remember sitting, virtually comatose, as I watched an unending parade of TV series reruns from the 1950s and 60s on summer afternoons. And then there were the Warner Brothers cartoons, some of which I can still quote from memory. My mother would tell me to get away from the “boob tube,” as she called it, because it would kill my brain cells. Ah, the good old days.

Certainly today, children and teens have a far wider array of options for entertainment and escape than I did in the 1970s. A young person today has access to more entertainment and social media content than they could possibly process in his or her lifetime.

An Internet services company, PwC, estimates that the amount of data stored on the world’s collective Internet servers will reach 44 zettabytes (ZB) by the end of 2020. (Full disclosure: I was unaware what a zettabyte was prior to researching for this article. If you’re interested, a zettabyte is a little more than one trillion gigabytes.) That 44 ZB of data is comprised of videos, audio files, images, websites, social media, and so on. It’s a veritable overload for the senses.

In addition to the static data already on the web, immense amounts of new content are added to the Internet each second. For example, among top apps used by children and teens, What’s App, the texting app, is most prolific, with 752,314 new messages sent each second. Snapchat users share 34,722 new Snaps each second. Instagram users post 1,099 new photos each second. And YouTube, the world’s largest repository of video, adds 500 minutes of video to its servers each second. The world’s data is projected to grow to 175 ZB by 2025.

That’s a whole lot of content for today’s young people to grow up on. And it doesn’t come without risk. Here are three big dangers for young content consumers:

First, the fact that so much content is available to watch isn’t what makes screens dangerous. Rather, it is the nature of these videos: short, stimulating, and colorful. Such content is meant to be addictive. Each time someone views one of these colorful, dynamic videos, it subtly and permanently alters brain chemistry to desensitize dopamine receptors and to create a dependent pattern (an addiction) to similar content. In essence, the reward centers of the brain are reprogrammed to crave more content. And artificial intelligence (AI) is employed in certain apps to detect user patterns (which videos they like and dislike), and to automatically feed the user more content that they have shown they prefer.

Perhaps the gorilla in the room for young people right now is TikTok, an app dedicated to “short form” (15 seconds or less) mobile videos set to music. I have a sixteen-year-old at home who has used TikTok for over a year now, but I’ve never watched it myself. For the purposes of this article, I invested a few minutes looking at the sample video feed on tiktok.com’s home page. The videos were fast, colorful, creative, entertaining and engaging. Before I realized it, a few minutes had grown into an hour. I must have looked at a couple hundred videos during that time, completely unaware of the passage of time.

I was also completely unaware of what I was exposing myself to. A second danger of excessive screen time is the lack of awareness of the content you’re feeding your brain. What subtle messages, behaviors, and attitudes are part of the content you’re watching? They all work to desensitize the viewer, change his or her own attitudes and preferences, and sometimes, introduce him or her to overtly harmful content and ideas. As a matter of fact, this week TikTok was in the news because they were finding it difficult to trace and take down all of the shared versions of a video originally aired on Facebook (and later picked up and spread by TikTok) which apparently depicted a man’s suicide. Young viewers can be exposed to a lot of scary, harmful, and negatively impactful content in a very short period of time.

A third danger of excessive screen use is that it often leads to secondary emotional, social, and mental health problems. Studies have found a strong correlation between internet addiction and anxiety, stress, and depression. These conditions present themselves not only when the viewer is deprived of additional content that is craved by the chemically-altered brain; they persist even while the viewer is looking at such content. Desensitization of the brain’s dopamine receptors is progressive. Consequently, the viewer develops a tolerance for the level of input he or she experiences, and needs more—or more exciting—input in order to achieve the same feeling of pleasure, relief, or escape that they previously attained.

In our next article to be published this Friday, we’ll discuss ways that parents and guardians can help children understand and control the images and messages they see online.