Feral Children in a Digital World

Over the last several decades, our church has grown significantly in our numbers, and we thank God for it, but during the same time period, the world has been undergoing a technological and cultural transformation. And the frontier of that transformation necessarily runs right through the teen years. Now a moment’s reflection should tell you that nobody should want kids to have smart phones and dumb parents. Not a good combination. It would be far better the other way around.

Young teens need parents. They need shepherds; they require guidance, and so I would exhort you to be most concerned for their supervision, and most active in it. For example, you really do need to be concerned about their ownership of smart phones—it is not wise to put a young child within two clicks of most of the porn in the world. Another issue would be entertainment standards for the musicians they think they adore—do not allow a thin oak veneer of Christian profession to cover over the cheap particle board of eff-bombing, whiney rap, millennial puddle artists. But enough about Jon Bellion. Or say your kids want to be swept away by the world’s passion for an incoherent and savage, ancient, evil force tricked out as a creepy clown. Call us old-fashioned, but let us think about it, no.

So I wanted to exhort you as Christ Church parents to be about ten times more attentive.

It is much better to have a fence at the top of the cliff than to have an ambulance parked at the bottom. The brave new world your children will inherit is not the same place your parents grew up in, or even the place you grew up in. The world has many more digital traps set to ensnare their souls than it used to, and now is not the time for children to be allowed to run feral in such a world. Do not only give parental oversight to the basics like food, clothing, and a good formal education. Also pay attention to the digital dirt, to the catechesis being offered by the world, all the time, 24-7. Please pay much closer attention.