Regardless of where you are on your journey, it’s never too late to help them. No parent has ever looked back and wished their child spent more time in the virtual world. Your children need the gift of your leadership now so they can be leaders tomorrow. Stand up for them to help them stand out from the crowd. 

The most effective solutions to significant problems are sometimes surprisingly simple and yet strongly resisted. Take, for instance, the case of handwashing in 1847—a doctor’s groundbreaking discovery that handwashing could effectively prevent the spread of germs was initially met with skepticism and rejected by prevailing cultural beliefs. In fact, handwashing remained controversial for four decades before finally gaining universal acceptance as a cornerstone of medical practice. Today, the adolescent screen crisis is our newest problem with a surprisingly simple and effective solution. That solution is to delay smartphones until the end of adolescence—period. Like handwashing, this solution sounds simple in concept and will one day seem like common sense, but right now, it is considered countercultural.
Many of us following the After Babel Substack can agree that smartphones and social media negatively impact adolescent mental health and classroom learning and that spending more in-person time with friends and family is a healthier choice. Moods and grades generally climb when teens trade their phone-based childhoods for free play in nature, physical activities, creative hobbies, and smartphone-free study time. Teens are likely to be more content and less anxious when days are spent on something other than digital media platforms that are designed to be addictive. Best of all, family relationships tend to become calmer and more enjoyable when screen conflicts aren’t present in the home. Kids and parents long for the stress-free days when they aren’t constantly arguing over screen time. It’s not that we aren’t motivated to fix the problem; we sense there is a solution but don’t know how to break free from our biases, fears, and habits and go against the cultural wave. We don’t know how to practically delay the age kids get smartphones.
In this post, I will share valuable insights from my experience working with thousands of families over the past decade, utilizing the educational programs at the nonprofit organization ScreenStrong. While Jon and Zach emphasize the crucial step of collective action, my focus will provide specific actions for families to implement the simple yet powerful solution to skip smartphones and social media through adolescence. Drawing from principles of child development, we can be empowered to confidently take a new approach to what seems to be an unsolvable problem. Let’s look at how we can create a smartphone-free childhood to give our teens the most advantages without losing the benefits of technology.
Tip 1: We seek knowledge.
The first step is to set emotions aside and learn the basic science around teen brain development, mental health, and addiction. The “why” reinforces the “will” to delay smartphones. When we embrace the fascinating potential as well as the limitations of the teen brain, we see clear evidence for why skipping addictive screens through adolescence is the best solution.
Data shows that access is the underlying risk factor for every addiction, so removing access will decrease risk. Since the pull of some screen activities is stronger than others, we must focus on screen platforms that use powerful, persuasive design elements—video games, social media, and pornography. We don’t need to worry as much about delaying digital technology platforms that are genuinely educational. We don’t have data supporting an epidemic of kids visiting counselors because they can’t stop using spreadsheets and typing essays.
It may take some effort, but learning about kids’ brains and screens is necessary to stand strong under societal pressure. It is also essential to educate our children. Please don’t skip this step; staying on course and delaying smartphones without the necessary foundational knowledge is difficult.
Tip 2: We strengthen our parental role.
When we treat our teens like equals and try to be their best friends, we lose our ability to coach them. In fact, teens in this relationship structure often end up telling their parents what to do! Some take begging to a new level and create elaborate presentations to convince us they are mature enough for a smartphone. We often give in, despite our own better judgment. When we lose our ability to coach our kids, we easily fall into a trap where we begin parenting out of fear. We fear our children will be upset with us and also fear that our friends will judge us for being too strict. The fear of being labeled “overprotective” paralyzes us from protecting our teens at all. This defensive parenting approach, rooted in fear of external judgment, leads to unnecessary pain and ultimately to a dead end: disconnection from our teenagers as they shift their home base from family and attach to the virtual world instead.
Here is the key point: Social media was not created with the best interest of teenagers in mind. Instinctively, we know our kids shouldn’t invest time engaging with social media platforms because we, as adults, can see the dangers—the social comparison, constant judgments, and endless drama. Many of us are so thankful we didn’t have social media when we were their age because we know that having social media during our teen years would have been a nightmare filled with anxiety. We reminisce about everything we did as teenagers—including the negative things we thought or said about our friends and parents—and are exceedingly grateful that permanent highlight reels of our stupidity do not exist. (Suggestion: get your kids a journal to write their private thoughts in instead of giving them social media for them to broadcast those thoughts to the entire world.) If we think back for just a minute about our dopamine-craving brains from high school or the pain of rejection we suffered in middle school, we would stop reading this and retrieve our teen’s smartphone right now.
Embracing our role as a loving coach—instead of the role of best friend—allows us to protect our teens and, like a good coach, not overreact if they disagree with us or even say they don’t like us for not giving them a smartphone. Remember, this coaching role will be filled by someone, either you or their peers. Have the confidence to fill this role in your children’s lives and lead them well.
Your kids need you as a firm but loving life coach right now. Make the necessary decision to replace smartphones (and social media) with basic talk/text devices throughout adolescence.
Tip 3: We look past our biases.
We gain clarity when we look past our own biases and blind spots and stop believing that our kids are immune to the screen “infection.” They are not. No one is. One common blind spot is that parents often confuse intelligence with maturity. While our kids may be brilliant, they are not mature enough to handle the persuasive design elements of smartphones. Maturity is a slow process. Science shows that the development of neural pathways in the judgment center of the brain is not complete until around 25 years of age. Nothing you can do can speed up this physical process. Teens are not adults, and the journey of gaining experience, wisdom, and maturity is a gradual process that unfolds over time.
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Written by J. V. Fesko |
Saturday, June 4, 2022
You can all too easily get into a mentality of worrying about trying to top your last sermon rather than faithfully preaching the text and relying upon the Spirit to empower you and apply it to the hearts of your congregants. By no means am I advocating slothfulness in the pulpit. Work hard to prepare your sermons, but be yourself in the pulpit, and most importantly, preach the text—preach the gospel of Christ.

When students cross the threshold and enter the hallowed halls of seminary, those who enroll in the Master of Divinity program usually have one big goal in mind—they want to be preachers. This is a perfectly natural and understandable goal, one to which all MDiv students should aspire. Seminaries, therefore, invest a good amount of time in the curriculum training students how to exegete the Scriptures, prepare, and deliver a sermon. Preaching courses, for example, focus upon whether the student was faithful to the Scriptures, whether his sermon had a clear structure, whether his illustrations were appropriate and helpful, and whether his delivery was smooth. All students struggle with different elements of sermon delivery, and this is to be expected. While the ability to preach is a God-given gift, this doesn’t mean that the gift can’t be honed or improved.
Be Yourself
One of the ways that students try to short-circuit the learning process is by listening to sermons by well-known preachers. I know of ministers who do this as well. On the one hand, listening to sermons isn’t a crime and can be a spiritually beneficial thing. On the other hand, if you’re listening to a sermon as a substitute for your own necessary exegetical spadework, or because you don’t want to meditate upon the text to develop your own material and illustrations, listening to a sermon can be a bad thing. I was once at a meeting of presbytery where a fellow colleague was delivering the opening devotional. One of my colleagues sitting next to me leaned over and whispered in a concerned tone, “I heard this very same sermon several weeks ago at a Banner of Truth conference!”
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If God chooses to add a little extra beauty, shouldn’t I? In those matters God calls me to do, shouldn’t I go beyond merely getting them done and instead add an extra bit of effort? Wouldn’t I be most closely imitating him if I went beyond merely completing the task and chose instead to do it with joy, with excellence, with a desire to in some way make it beautiful? 

The sky was still dark as I left the house this morning. When I went overseas just three weeks ago the sun had already risen by this time and I was walking in dawn’s early light. But summer has given way to fall and the nights have quickly grown longer. I press “play” in my Bible app and set out.
I round a bend and in the corner of my eye see an unusually bright star in the southern sky. I make a note to look it up when I return, though I know I’ll probably have forgotten by then. I realize my mind has wandered and while I still hear David Cochran Heath’s voice in my AirPods, I have lost track of chapter and verse. “Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD,” I hear him say, “when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch…” Ah yes, Jeremiah 23, one of the sweetest chapters in the whole book. “And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The LORD is our righteousness.’”
My plan prompts me to skip ahead to Jeremiah 26, then to Psalm 77 and James 2. When I’ve heard “for as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead” it is time to pray and, as it happens, to turn to the southeast. I begin to thank the Lord for giving me the precious gift of faith and to ask him to help me be diligent in showing my faith by my works. As I glance toward where the sun will soon rise, I see that the sky has begun to turn shades of pink and purple.
I spend some time confessing sin and making requests on behalf of family members, and while I do so the sky continues to brighten.
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