Our Children and Technology
When I was a child it was Atari. Then along came Nintendo, followed by Xbox, DS, and the Wii. We now have IPads, IPhones, E-readers, tablets, and more. Technology is an amazing thing and only gets better over time. In fact, we are now in an era where almost all of our life revolves around and depends on technology.
I actually have a love/hate relationship with technology. I love the convenience it provides, the quick access to information, and the amazing things we can do with it. But I hate how much it pulls at me and sucks away my time.
The same is true for my children. I am amazed at how comfortable they are with technology and how quickly they learn how to use it. My oldest has even created his own simple games from taking a computer programming course. For us, technology is helpful in our homeschooling and we can’t function without it. But I also have grave concerns about the amount of time my children use technology, it’s pull on them, and the long term consequences on their mind and heart.
I have article over at Today’s Christian Woman this week, called Touchscreens, Apps, and Your Kid’s Heart where I discuss these issues in detail, specifically the impact technology has on the heart’s of our children.
Additionally, here are a few practical considerations for technology that we use in our home:
Because we use technology for homeschool, for research, learning, typing up papers, etc. I want to balance my children’s use of technology for learning and for play. In talking about this with other friend’s, we’ve speculated that technology for game playing may have a stronger pull on boys than for girls, though that is just speculation. Perhaps girls use technology for social networking more than playing games? We limit our boy’s use of technology for play to 20 minutes a day. They also have one fasting day a week where they don’t get to play any games on devices.
We’ve also found that some games have a stronger pull on them than others. One of my boy’s loved one particular game so much, he thought about it all the time. When he played the game and his 20 minute timer went off, he had a strong emotional response to having to stop playing. We talked about the pull the game had on him. He agreed that it did. We decided to limit his opportunity to playing that game to every other day.
For parents, technology needs to be something that we constantly assess and evaluate with our children. We need to be on alert for how it impacts them and monitor their use of it. The amount of time they use it should start out small when they are young (see here for the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations) and change as they get older.
The reality is, as college students and adults, they will use it all the time. They might even be employed one day and sit at a computer screen for eight hours a day. It’s good for our children to know how to use technology, but they don’t need to have full and complete access to it.
But ultimately, as you’ll see in my article, our greatest concern should be how technology interferes with our children’s love for Jesus. We can set all the parameters we want and technology can still be a ruling idol on the throne of our children’s heart. This is where our greatest energy and teaching time should center, on showing our children that their greatest treasure is Jesus and that only he can satisfy all the desires of their heart.
How about you? Is technology an area of concern in your family?
