Recent research coming out of Hong Kong assessed twenty-six hundred school children regarding video gaming and mental health. The research looked at what’s called binge-gaming, defined as spending at least five hours in a row playing computer games. They found binge-gaming to be associated with poor sleep, anxiety, stress, loneliness, and depression. Three in ten kids surveyed reported spending so much time on video games that they would classify as binge-gamers or to be dealing with what’s called internet gaming disorder. Specifically, this applied to four in ten boys and around one-quarter of the girls. Researchers also found that these habits result, not surprisingly, in a drop in school performance. Parents, we have been entrusted by God to care for the spiritual, emotional, and physical health of our kids. Our parenting must bring glory to God by setting screen-time limits for our kids, and by teaching them to steward everything they and have to His glory!

Earlier this year I ran across an opinion piece written in The Sydney Australia Morning Herald by author and mother of three, Kerri Sackville. The title of the piece was quite blunt, but it does capture our need to rethink how we as parents are using social media. Sackville’s title reads, “Nobody wants to read those posts about how brilliant your kids are.” Sackville goes on to remind us that nobody likes to read a boast. Still, we are living on a social media landscape where we are prone to use pictures and text to boast about how smart and talented our kids are, especially when it comes to athletics, academics, and extracurricular activities. Christian parents are by no means immune to this, and I’ve even seen some boast about their evidences of their kids’ faith. Parents, teach your kids to let their actions speak for themselves as they pursue excellence. And, with the Apostle Paul in second Corinthians ten seventeen, we all must say, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

For the last twenty or so years, educators, parents, and researchers have lamented what they believe is a decline in reading for pleasure among adults. The concern is that the increase in daily screen time, including time with TVs, computers, and smartphones, would cut away at the practice of reading. A new study published in iScience found that leisure reading, also known as reading for pleasure or fun, had declined by forty percent from 2003 to 2023. More specifically, the percentage of people who daily read for pleasure dropped from twenty-eight percent, to sixteen percent. We can assume that adults who are not readers will mostly raise kids who aren’t readers. We applaud the growing movement to get our kids reading more, which requires that we adults be reading more as well. Reading improves literacy skills and prevents cognitive decline. For the Christian, reading the Bible, both alone and together, feeds our spiritual growth. Is your family reading?