A post I wrote a few years back....
Had
the opportunity to take our three growing children on a spelunking adventure in
Central Pennsylvania this week. A great time away from the normal
day-to-day and the heat for sure! Daddy didn't have the chance to go with
us, so on our return the boys sat down to show him all the pictures Mommy had
taken.
As our eldest snuggled up on the couch in preparation to show
Daddy the pictures we had snapped on the cell phone, Mommy unpacked from our
time away, and Daddy quickly popped Little Princess up to her bed where she
promptly fell asleep. When Daddy returned to the living room to finish
looking over the day of pictures with Little Man, he quickly backed out of
whatever he was looking at on the phone and gave a guilty look at Daddy.
Fear flashed through my husband's mind and heart, as our "Little
Man" is 10 and we have no delusions that he is very quickly becoming a
"Young Man" in a culture where perversions and sex have been twisted
into something ugly and unbeautiful as opposed to what it was created to be.
My mind whirled over what on earth my son could have found on
my phone in mere minutes that would have caused guilty looks. Where had
he gone via wifi in that short amount of time that would have caused him to
feel as if he had done something wrong? Turned out he just felt he had
done something wrong because he was looking at pictures he didn't recognize-he
had clicked out of my gallery of photos into "screen shots" of my
phone that I had taken of silly pictures and crafts I wanted to try for later.
As my heart slowed down its race to beat right out of my
chest and my husband had a talk with his son, who was slightly confused, I
realized that this was a great wake up call and reminder that our son, as
innocent as he is, is VERY quickly becoming a young man in a great big
beautiful world, with very scary, dark corners.
Our three young people were snuggled in their beds with their
new stuffed souvenirs of the day, likely dreaming about all the minerals and
rocks they had panned for that day and were looking forward to identifying and
playing with the next; and Mommy and Daddy had a chat. Our children are
not babies anymore (My Little Princess is quick to remind me of that, while my
sons still adore snuggles and hugs-we just won't tell their friends). One
of our jobs as parents is to protect them as they grow and prepare them to
navigate life and become wonderful, mature, adults all the while learning
ourselves that they are needing to learn to protect and become strong
themselves.
As a young girl, shortly out of college, I recall a friend
who shared with me the struggles he had with porn. Something he didn't
wish to struggle with, and as a young, know-it-all college girl I couldn't
understand why he simply didn't just make the choice to leave it alone.
But as I was thinking about my young sons and the struggles they are
going to face in a dark world, I remembered what my friend had said all those
years ago, "I saw something when I was 12 in a magazine, it made me feel
weird, but I liked it, and I was afraid to tell anyone." My friend
hadn't gone looking for something as a sex crazed high school student or grown
man and gotten sucked into an addiction of porn and perversion. He
stumbled upon it as a child and was afraid to ask an adult for advice, for
help, for explanation as to why he was having perfectly normal feelings for a
man to have, yet they felt weird or wrong. The struggles that our men
deal with in our culture don't just suddenly appear one day out of nowhere.
Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty year old men don't
just suddenly find themselves struggling with something they suddenly became
aware of. They became aware of it as a young, impressionable child,
possibly teenager (which you ask any mom, is still a child!) and without
guidance, help, or direction they very easily spiral into the unknown at the
whim of whatever culture and a sex crazed industry tells them.
My husband and I don't want our young men (or our little
princess for that matter) stumbling around in the darkness of this world,
finding and seeing things that they are afraid to ask about, to question, to
have secret desires for, that they don't understand. In our jobs, we see
a lot of children of all ages weekly, and I have had the opportunity to sit down
next to young men (mostly pre-teen) to have a quick talk with them about
anything and everything only to have them quickly scroll their phone screen
away or tuck it away in their pocket, but not before my heart screams out in
hurt at the type of photos that I see sliding off their screens. Our
children are inundated, surrounded, immersed in a culture of sexual perversion,
porn, and dark, dark lifestyles that are being hailed as more and more
"normal" almost daily! I unfortunately can not make much of a difference
in the lives of these children that are not mine, but my husband and I will
take every opportunity to nurture, inform, grow, teach borders and yes, at
times, protect our young sons as they continue to learn how to navigate in this
crazy world.
I actually thought our house was pretty locked down, but in
the minutes between my son "looking guilty" and the realization that
he simply thought he was in trouble for getting into mommy's phone where he
wasn't supposed to, my mind had raced through all the ways he could have gotten
anywhere "dangerous". I realized that though their Kindles are
locked out of the internet, we don't allow them to communicate with people on
their Kindles, and our computers are password locked; our cell phones are
almost always connected to wifi at home. And though they do not have any
social media accounts of any sort, my phone is constantly synced to my
facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, e-mail, and just basic google.
Recently I have been receiving many invites on my Instagram
app asking me to "follow" them and to be allowed to
"follow" me. These invites' profile pictures are often
provocative and I can only imagine the nature of their Instagram accounts.
What if my sons stumble into my Instagram account and find a new invite I
haven't blocked yet? What if my sons walk into the kitchen as I'm
scrolling through suggested Pinterest boards and something inappropriate pops
up? There are so many "what ifs?", so many places that my
children's innocence can be ripped from them simply on the internet that I
myself am policing, let alone anywhere else in the world! I am under no
delusion that I want my children protected in a box of bubble wrap, rainbows,
and unicorns, but I will take solid stands and even make choices that aren't my
favorite in order to protect them, raise them in a way that we see fit, and
hopefully promote their growth into healthy, mature young adults.
If it means missing out on an Instagram account on my cell
phone-I didn't have instagram three years ago. If it means having to sign
into Pinterest on my computer every time I want to access a board-I didn't even
have a smart phone six years ago. If it means locking up the computer so
google isn't available at the flip of a screen-I graduated college without ever
using the internet! So many of these things that have become such handy
tools, distractions, and sometimes feel like necessities, extensions of our
physical bodies almost......well, they aren't truly. I am the first
person that can immerse myself in Pinterest boards for hours, possibly even
FOUR hours at a time, without a thought. I can succumb to mindless
facebook scrolling for untolds portions of time. A "you've got
mail" notification can pull me from the most serious task. Distractions
that are merely that for me, could become a life changing stumbling block for
my dear children and their futures. I'm not ready for those consequences.
I really want to encourage parents, guardians, teachers,
anyone with children of any and all ages in your care; put up boundaries,
guardrails, hedges, and then take another three steps back and set another.
Will I ever tell our children that Instagram, facebook, twitter, or any
of the next cool social media platforms are bad and evil? Nope.
Because quite frankly, they aren't and making all inclusive statements of
that sort will not gain anything in the trust relationship with my children in
the future. But they will understand the dangers associated with those
apps, just as we have explained the dangers of using the internet to
communicate with people we do not know. They currently understand that
wifi, the internet, is not bad; but what comes through it can be, and some
people use it to harm others.
My husband has begun to explain to our oldest that he's growing
older and changing and he's going to start thinking about girls differently
than he does now. Imagine my horror when he asked me, "Mommy, is it
possible to know now who I am going to marry when I'm grown up?"
Struggling to stuff my heart back down where it belongs, I managed to
calmly tell him that it's not possible to "KNOW" right now, but some
people DO find that when they grow up they end up marrying someone they have
known and been friends with since childhood, "why do you ask?"
(dreading the answer) His simple response before he headed back to his legos,
"Oh, just wondered, because I have a couple I think I'd like it to
be". So thankful for an understanding husband as we begin to
navigate these "pre-teen" years together!
If you're parenting a child of any age, please, please take
steps to help them guard their hearts, their eyes, and their minds. If
you're going at it alone, please don't hesitate to find help in someone you
trust, someone who has a heart for children and their precious hearts and
minds. God has given us our children, precious gifts to grow and nurture
for Him in this crazy world, never be afraid to ask for help. At the same
time, never expect parenting to be easy and "fun" 100% of the time.
But DO expect it to be 100% worth it!