The answer is no. I wouldn’t and you wouldn’t. Yet here is the problem we hand our kids iPhone’s, iPad, Tablets, Game consuls without thinking twice. Whenever you hand you’re a mobile device or allow your kids online you are giving them access to everything. As a parent you can’t just trust that everything will be ok. In fact, 30 percent of all data transferred across the Internet is porn. YouPorn, one of the larger video porn sites, streams six times the bandwidth as Hulu. You have a responsibility to teach your kids to be responsible digital citizens.
I have put together a resource to help you and your parents be better digital mentors to your kids. In the resource is links to helpful websites, articles and a step by step walk through how to use the parent controls in OS7 and Android. I am giving it away for free I am asking that you sign up for my forthcoming digital digest that you will receive weekly that will summarize all my posts.
(If you are interested I did two other posts – one on the urgency of this issue the other on the Theological side of this issue.)
My earlier post covered a shocking stat that 9 out of 10 kids ages 8-16 have viewed pornography online.
The things McDowell says we should do are right and good but they must be based on the foundation of the Gospel. McDowell said that if you think you can keep your kids from view porn online you are fooling yourself. He said that if you home-school your kids and think that by doing that you will keep them from being exposed to pornography you are deceived. Your kids will see pornography at some point as a parent and as a leader must protect our kids yes but we also must prepare them or we will lose them.
Brutal right.
While it is imperative that we as parents take necessary steps to protect our kids, we must never let ourselves fall into the false belief that the measures taken by us would prove sufficient to shield them from pornography. Using tools like Parental Control Apps to police their technology use and online activities sure does help, but it is far from being an absolute antidote to the problem. We must avoid this thinking that focuses us on what we do and how we can control the outcomes and trajectories of our kids lives.
We as parents need to take steps to protect our kids but we must never fall into this false belief that our steps to protect our kids are enough. We must avoid this thinking that focuses us on what we do and how we can control the outcomes and trajectories of our kids lives.
I was recently at an event where Josh McDowell was speaking. He was sharing about the three storms that are converging that are causing our kids to abandon faith.
Those storms are:
1. Epistemological shift
2. The Internet
3. Pornography
“Reading is the creative center of a writer.”
“When you write you tell yourself the story when you re-write your job is to take out what is not the story. ”
Developing yourself begins by serving, by striving towards an idea outside of yourself – not by leading. Leaders are not born, nor are they made – they are self-made
To do this, a person needs focus. Michael Kami, our leading authority on business strategy today, draws a square on the blackboard and asks: “Tell me what to put in there. Jesus? Or money? I can help you develop a strategy for either one, but you have to decide which is the master.”
I do it by asking people what they want to be remembered for – that’s “The beginning of adulthood” according to St. Augustine. The answer changes as we mature – as it should. But unless that question is asked, a person works without focus, without direction and, as a result, does not develop.
