I love listening to music. As a music lover, nothing enhances my own listening experience as much as a good set of ear buds and a volume setting that I’m sure is higher than it should be. Lately, my difficulty hearing conversations when there’s ambient noise have me wishing I could rewind to turn down the volume that I’m sure now effects my hearing as I’ve gotten older. The World Health Organization tell us that globally, thirty-four million children have deafness or hearing loss, of which sixty percent of the cases are due to preventable causes. As you might expect much of this could be mitigated if we would intervene when our children are younger, teaching them to practice safe listening habits, such as using headphones or earbuds less frequently, and turning down the volume. Parents, you are responsible for stewarding your child’s health, including their hearing, to the glory of God, so that they might make choices now that lead to life-long hearing health.

Listen to these heartfelt words of warning from Megan Garcia, the mother of a fourteen year-old boy who died by suicide in February: “There is a platform out there you might not have heard about, but you need to know about it because, in my opinion, we are behind the eight ball here. A child is gone. My child is gone.” Her son, Sewell, had logged on to a site known as Character.AI. The site allows users to create and interact with fictional chatbot characters. Kids who are lonely are especially vulnerable to going deep into these so-called relationships with chatbots. But the risks are many, including exposure to hate speech, sexually explicit content, security issues, and privacy violations. In Garcia’s case, she is now suing the company, since in a conversation where he said he was considering suicide, the chatbot did not dissuade him. Parents, shield your kids from these ai companion sites. What our kids really need are healthy real-life relationships with family and friends.

All this week we’ve been looking at the thought and planning that went into the Philadelphia area’s Delaware County Christian School’s establishment of their well-received and highly successful phone free school policy. The school wanted to address a rise in mediocrity. Administrators write, We are far too easily pleased with superficial counterfeits for the good, the true, and the beautiful, mediated through a five-inch rectangular smartphone screen. We are far too easily pleased with half-hearted intellectual effort on school assignments, though we are called to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. The question was then asked, What steps can we take to overcome mediocrity and steward what God has given us, to pursue excellence throughout the day for His glory? We applaud the Delaware County Christian School for thoughtfully and theologically creating a path we all must walk, managing our smartphones, rather than allowing them to control us and our kids.

All this week I’m looking at the thought and planning that went into the Philadelphia area’s Delaware County Christian School’s establishment of their well-received and highly successful phone free school policy. One pattern of life in today’s world that the school wanted to address was the ever-present reality of interruptions. As an introduction to their policy, the school shares these words: the average American checks his or her phone one-hundred and forty-four times a day. Research indicates that there is an addictive component to the dopamine rush in our brains associated with smartphone notifications and multi-tasking. As a result, any deeper learning, critical analysis, problem solving, or creative process that we undertake is almost always interrupted, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. The policy writers than ask this question which we all must consider: What steps can we take to limit these interruptions and increase students’ capacity for protracted focus?

All this week I’m looking at the thought and planning that went into the Philadelphia area Delaware County Christian School establishment of their well-received and highly successful phone free school day policy. The first pattern of life in today’s world that the school wanted to address was noise. As an introduction to their policy, the school shares these words: “The modern age is filled with noise everywhere we turn. Teens and adults alike fill almost every quiet moment with earbuds, music, podcasts, news, doom-scrolling through social media, and even emails. As we encourage young people to carve out even ten to twenty minutes of sustained quiet time with God and His Word in their personal lives, the practice seems arduous at best and impossible at worst.” The school then asked this question that all of us should ask ourselves: “What steps can we take to limit the noise and cultivate windows of quiet in the lives of our school community members, especially our teens?”

All this week I’m looking at the thought and planning that went into the Philadelphia area’s Delaware County Christian School establishment of their well-received and highly successful phone free school day policy. Administrators took seriously the Apostle Paul’s call in Romans twelve to no longer conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. They recognized that the current smartphone pattern of this world was undermining the flourishing of their students in their homes, their friendships, their family lives, their educational experience, and their personal faith. Technology was playing a role in impeding student’s abilities to connect deeply and authentically with loved ones and friends, with teachers/coaches/and other mentors, with the academic curricula and important ideas, and with the person of Jesus Christ, His word, and His will. Come back tomorrow as we look further into the patterns of this world that administrators sought to address.

In his book “The Anxious Generation,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers a series of recommendations for how to stop the epidemic of youth mental health issues. One of those recommendations is straightforward and blunt: no smartphones in schools. Fortuneately there’s a growing movement among schools, parents, and even some students themselves to make this necessary move. I’ve had conversations with administrators at the Delaware County Christian School just outside of Philadelphia regarding the decision they’ve made to take phones out of students’ hands for the duration of the school day. The move by DCCS was made thoughtfully, with reflection on cultural realities along with practical and theological reasons for establishing a phone-free school policy. As expected, this new policy has been widely applauded in the school community, and resulted in several positive outcomes. Listen in all this week as we talk about why we need phone-free schools.

Late last year, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of almost fourteen hundred teens, ages thirteen to seventeen, to come to an understanding of our teenagers’ experiences and attitudes around social media and their mental health. One of the most interesting findings is our teenagers’ shifting attitudes on whether or not social media is harmless, or harmful. Back in twenty twenty-two, thirty-two percent of our thirteen to seventeen year olds said that social media sites have a mostly negative effect on people their age. At the end of twenty-twenty-four, the percentage of kids saying the same thing had risen significantly to forty-eight percent. Parents, when our kids themselves are self-reporting that social media is harmful, we need to interpret that as a cry for help. God has given you the responsibility to raise and nurture your kids to spiritual maturity. Perhaps it’s time we realize that we must take steps to help them peel away from social media harm.