I agree with David Murray’s 10 Positive Reasons to Train Your Kids in Cell Phone Use, and what I was looking for in the post comes in its last two paragraphs, where David offers advice on what action steps to take to make sure you’re a human using a tool. Here’s David’s advice on how to make sure your phone doesn’t control you, or your family members (enumeration and italics mine):
What can we do? Confiscation is very appealing, but usually a bit extreme.
- We can use parental controls and accountability software.
- We can forbid phones in bedrooms, at study desks, and at meal times.
- I now insist on all phones (including my own) be kept in one central place when in the house and
- I limit the number of times they can be checked in an evening.
- We’re also starting a phone fast on Sundays.
- And let there be consequences for misuse or overuse, yes, even confiscation at times.
- But perhaps the best thing we can do is to talk to our kids about these ten positive reasons for making this wonderful technology a servant rather than a master. It might be the best career move they make. If they master their cell-phone they will stand out in their generation in so many positive ways.
These are good ideas. What would you add or adjust?
Don’t be naive. The devil is prowling around like a roaring lion. If you don’t protect yourself and your family, who will?
“The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it” (Prov 22:3; 27:12).
Best line – “Don’t be naive.”
When I think back on my own upbringing, the thought that haunts me the most is the hard-working laissez faire approach of my father.
This may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s fairly accurate. My parents were the most godly parents I knew. They taught us the Bible, they constantly brought to our attention the work of the Lord in their lives, and they prayed for us night and day, literally. There were few mornings that I did not come down stairs in the early AM and did not see my dad kneeling at the couch with his Bible open, interceding for us.
Besides this, we didn’t have a TV, nor were we allowed to ‘go to the movies’. Everything was set up to encourage godliness and discourage debauchary.
What father has spent more time in prayer for his sons than mine?
And yet, in the formative Junior/Senior High days, I think my dad may have assumed the best, thinking that we had been pointed in the right direction. There was not a whole lot of personal interaction, where we would be molded into the men he wanted us to be. Hugs, YES! Praise, YES! But there wasn’t a whole lot of sitting with us, as a group, or as individual sons, where he would wrestle with our indwelling sin and pluck us out of the fire.
A father who supplies his son with an iPhone, without also setting his face like flint to be ten-times more involved in the lives of his son strikes me as worse than naive, he is a fool. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but we for our flesh and blood, against an enemy who has been at this for 6000 years! We would be fools not to acknowledge that he has improved upon his tactics in that time.