Killing kids with screens. . .

When I grew up the cigarettes competed to advertise how many doctors smoked their brand (Camels, it seemed) and how the L&M filter cigarette was “Just what the doctor ordered!"  It seems foolish now after years of dealing with lung cancer and a host of other cancers connected to those cigarettes the doctors puffed on right along with the rest of us.  At some point, we realized the obvious.  Smoking was dangerous to your health and even second hand smoke.  So dangerous, in fact, that we had to shield children from them.  Remember that there was a time when young people were prominently figured in cigarette advertising.  My mother smoked and drank all during her pregnancies and no one thought anything of it -- then.  But now we know better.

We are still harping on the dangers of smoking for teens although now we have vaping to contend with.  We are still restricting access to things considered dangerous -- everything from alcohol to sitting in a car without a child restraint (car seat).  These things are so dangerous they come with warning labels and with laws requiring even those who disagree or do not care to comply.  A generation or two after the fact, we look back on our history and wonder what we were thinking -- at least with respect to cigarettes, drugs, vaping, drinking, etc...  Will the day come when we decide that the heady days of the internet were the tip of the iceberg?

The U.S. Surgeon General issued a major warning this year about an “epidemic of loneliness.”  Now the same office has now issued a warning about young people and social media.  Suicide and depression rates among young people are skyrocketing.  Fifty years ago we were just beginning to see the need to warn our young people about the serious threats to their physical health.  Now it is commonplace to hear these health warnings about everything from smoking to vaping to sexually transmitted diseases to obesity -- all with the powerful voice of the Surgeon General to give credibility to such warnings.  

Now it is not merely the physical threats to the health and well-being of our youth that we need to be concerned about.  There is a major threat to their mental and emotional health and it comes with  screen.  Christians will recognize this as a threat not simply to mental and emotional health but to the very souls of our youth and the prospect ought to be terrifying to us as parents, grandparents, educators, and mental health professionals.  As the Surgeon General's warning was sent out about these threats, we ought to be encouraged but it is still quite a ways away from admitting the role the internet has played in these ills.  Our children's mental and spiritual health is profoundly threatened by their unrestricted and unsupervised use of social media and apps which have been proven to be at least part of the source of the threats so far identified.  When will we do something about this?  I am not so much talking about the Surgeon General here as much as I am addressing parents.  Do not give your child a smart phone and expect that the use of this screen will not affect their spiritual and mental health.  Do not presume that a smart phone is benign and that third party apps and parental controls are a substitute for knowing what your child does on the internet and with whom.  We live in a world in which plenty of voices are raised against their use of tobacco or in support of gun control or against vaping or alcohol.  When will the same folks awaken to the dangers posed to our children by their unfettered access to the internet and their unsupervised use of social media platforms?