I feel like I need to do a follow up to my blog post
that spread around like wildfire the other day.
It nearly got more hits than my entire blog has for the past eight
years. Between the link to Rod’s post and this website, there were a lot of comments and a lot of
judgment about the fact that my 7-year-old even has an iPod.
For the record, not that it matters really, but my husband
and I did not purchase any of the devices they have. One has an old iPhone (with no phone) and a kindle and the others have very old iPods. They were gifts. Could we have said no? Absolutely!
Do I wish we had? Not
really. The fact that they have the
devices was not the point of my article nor is it the issue here. Having the iPod for entertainment - to play games, to listen
to music, to use the walkie-talkie app they love, to take pictures of their
dogs and make movies of their Lego creations - none of that is the problem. We try to regulate and balance the amount of
time they spend with these things but give me a break….we just returned from a
nine hour road trip to and from Florida and I would have gouged my eyes out had
they not been able to Cut the Rope and Craft Mines in the back of that
minivan. Maybe some other kids entertain
themselves with quiet rounds of I Spy and reading classic novels for hours on
end. Mine don’t. On
that same trip they also ate Lunchables and had some blue box macaroni and
cheese. Send me to mommy jail.
I did experience a parent fail moment and that was why I
posted the article. To maybe save
another parent from the same sad, tearful conversation I had to have with my
little boy. For another point on the
record, we don’t even have cable TV. We
have a subscription to Amazon Prime and we did have Netflix until we realized
it was redundant with the Prime account that I can’t and won’t cancel because I
like having paper towels and coconut oil delivered to my door in two days. But guess where my son heard the word
that led him to the search on YouTube? Cable
television in our condo from the vacation we just returned from. Not even cable with HBO or any other channel
like that - just regular run of the mill cable TV.
I could (and perhaps should) have disconnected it in the
rooms where my children were hanging out but honestly it didn’t cross my
mind. Mainly because my oldest son only
wanted to watch Duck Dynasty and they were all excited about watching Full
House and America's Funniest Videos and Jessie or whatever non-stop. As
far as I saw, that’s all they watched when we were all even there. Was he channel
surfing and heard it? Or was it on a
show he was watching? I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. He heard it, he searched for it, and the rest
is blogger history. It's all over regular TV you know. Porn that is. Let's call it what it is. I was watching Miss America with my daughter last year and the network showed a preview for something that sure enough looked like porn to me.
No, my fail wasn’t in allowing him to have a piece of
technology, even though some may disagree.
My fail was in knowing there was a small crack in the boat and filling
it in with Elmer’s glue. I knew there was
the capability on that iPod to get on the internet through what we believed was
a strong filter. For the last point on
the record, my husband is an IT professional and this was the strongest filter
we knew of. We had tested it and it had
not failed. Until it failed.
My main point of the article and my mistake was in abandoning my responsibility as a parent and entrusting it to someone (something) else. And in saying we need to "soldier up" as parents, I mean that fighting this war starts in our own
homes. Porn is an ugly word. In all honesty my stomach turned just seeing
that word in the same sentence with the reference to my precious little
boy. It’s so ugly that I was shaking as
I hit publish and put that article out there.
And it’s so ugly that no one wants to talk about it.
But it’s the elephant in the room.
It’s the elephant in our living rooms. It’s the elephant in our schools. And it’s the elephant in the pew next to you
at church. Parents, we need to be
talking about it. And if you’re in the
ministry, particularly children’s and student ministry, and you’re not talking
about it, you’re really contributing to the problem. We need each other! Like my friends and I discussed, because we
are neighbors and our children spend so much time at one another’s homes, we
need to be in solidarity. We need to
know what our kids' friends are allowed to have and see at their homes. We need to know how much unfettered access they have to the internet at school and church. Yes church! Because even if your kids don’t have access to any devices at your home, even if you don’t get a single television or movie
channel in your home, even if they have no access to the internet whatsoever -
if they go to school, or to someone else’s house, (or a condo at the beach!), chances
are great that they will have access. We simply can’t escape it because it’s there
and it’s all around us. All we can do is the best we can do. We need to talk about it. And then we need to do.
Keep the conversation going, friends.
Note: I received
many, many emails from friends and strangers in response to this article who
had similar experiences. There are some great resources out there:
