The Devil Lives in Our Phones

The following is excerpted from “A Dark Consensus about Screens,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 2018: “Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them. A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a region-wide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K. ‘Doing no screen time is almost easier than doing a little,’ said Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer. ‘If my kids do get it at all, they just want it more.’ Ms. Stecher, 37, and her husband, Rushabh Doshi, researched screen time and came to a simple conclusion: they wanted almost none of it in their house. Their daughters, ages 5 and 3, have no screen time ‘budget,’ no regular hours they are allowed to be on screens. Athena Chavarria, who worked as an executive assistant at Facebook said: ‘I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.’ Ms. Chavarria did not let her children have cellphones until high school, and even now bans phone use in the car and severely limits it at home. She said she lives by the mantra that the last child in the class to get a phone wins. For longtime tech leaders, watching how the tools they built affect their children has felt like a reckoning on their life and work. Among those is Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now the chief executive of a robotics and drone company. ‘On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine,’ Mr. Anderson said of screens. ‘We thought we could control it. And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand.’ He has five children and 12 tech rules. They include: no phones until the summer before high school, no screens in bedrooms, network-level content blocking, no social media until age 13, no iPads at all and screen time schedules enforced by Google Wifi that he controls from his phone. Bad behavior? The child goes offline for 24 hours. I didn’t know what we were doing to their brains until I started to observe the symptoms and the consequences.’”

CONCLUDING NOTE FROM D. CLOUD: These people are exercising more wisdom in this matter than the average parent in a Bible-believing church. Pastors must take the lead in this and inform and warn and exhort the people about how to protect the children and youth from the great spiritual danger of modern communications technology. We have been publishing material on this subject since 1998, including The Mobile Phone and the Christian Home and Church.

(Friday Church News Notes, November 9, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, [email protected], 866-295-4143)

---