You know, there's one conversation that I remember having with my dad that was really poignant. It's probably one of the few conversations I almost remember word for word. My dad said at the end of it, you know, I guess you just hope better for your kids. It was a challenge to me at that moment. I didn't think that anything was wrong, and I did not know what he was talking about. But now as an adult, I know. And I wonder if that's actually what's happening here
with technology, with cell phones. And we look at cell phones as if They're really an evil. But a new study right now shows that while kids might understand that they're bad, they don't want to give them up. And it might be because the world doesn't let
them. Today in the Celebrate Kids podcast, in this daily segment, Facing the Dark, Dr. Cathy has some really important insights to walk us through regarding cell phones, technology, and should we just ban things or do we need to fill it with something? Before we jump into the conversation, Dr. Cathy has an important thing that she wants to highlight, and that's that we have some incredible partners here at Celebrate Kids. And one of them is Summit Ministries. Summit Ministries pays us
to produce this podcast. They give significantly to us to help us make sure that you hear from Dr. Cathy, whether she's on the road or also speaking here on the podcast. Summit Ministries does a two-week deep dive worldview camp. It's incredible. My kids go to it, and they hear from people from around the world who study different dynamics of what makes culture flourish. People like John Stonestreet talk about marriage, and Dr. Cathy talks about identity and
technology. It's really important for kids to have places where they can wrestle out an understanding, maybe even for them to build an ethic of what their life should look like and how they should use these different aspects of what it means to be human to really flourish. I encourage you to check it out. Just go to summit.org forward slash celebrate kids. That's summit.org forward slash celebrate kids. Use the code celebrate 24 for a special discount if your kids
Don't be afraid of the dark. Be careful with stars. Not every light is gonna guide you, baby. Not every So, Dr. Cathy, in a recent survey of 2013 to 18-year-olds in England, young people were asked about various aspects of
life, including mental health and their smartphone habits. The findings of the survey, carried out by a polling company called Survation, suggest that 23% of smartphones should be banned for kids under 16, that 35% think that social media should be banned for kids under 16, that 50% say not having their smartphone on them They feel really anxious. And last year, that figure was just a little bit higher, 56%. 74% of the young people polled said that they would not consider swapping their
smartphones for a basic device. So the BBC challenged 10 students to really give up their smartphone for one of those old Nokia handsets that we had in the early 2000s. They were supposed to do this for five days. Some students couldn't bear the anguish that something might happen online that they weren't a part of after spending more than 31 hours in social media apps the previous week. And so they dropped the
whole program. Others had to find new ways to navigate their classes and really locate directions and listen to their favorite music. But some kind of commented that they rekindled loves that they had when they were children, things like riding their bicycle and going out with friends. This comes really as England's parliament wants to make the new ruling party that will be elected shortly to create an outright
ban on smartphones for kids who are under 16. You know, Dr. Cathy, sometimes we fix the symptom and we really avoid the problem. And I want to know, from this kind of standpoint, are smartphones really the problem for kids today? Or are there different concerns with other technologies or the way that we look at technology that we need to be mindful of lest we, you know, exchange the smartphone for another device that really ends up being harmful for our kids and we never solve this problem?
That's a good question. You know, if we take away a smartphone that gives kids access to the world, so they have the worldwide web and they have social media and they've got the app store and they've got access to people we don't know they have access to and, you know, shopping and movies and so many things. If we take that away and we give them a, you know, a quote about a dumb phone that you can call and text on, we've, we've taken away something, but
we haven't replaced it with something. And I really believe that what would happen to so many of these kids would be that fear of missing out and the loneliness and the lack of navigation of a complex world when the majority of their peers would be on a device and they are going to feel left out. I think the real problem is a skill set that's lacking because they haven't needed it because we introduced smartphones too early. As an example, friendship skills. Before smartphones, we had
to have conversations. We had to bravely call a friend on the landline and say, hey, a mom and dad said I could invite a friend over on Friday night movie night for pizza. I'd like that friend to be you. And we had to courageously make that decision of who to call. And mom and dad taught us phone etiquette. We called, and we knew what to do if mom answered and the kid wasn't home. I mean, that might feel like a really silly
example for today's parents. But that's really true, that we who are older learned how to navigate relationships with people eyeball to eyeball, and facial feedback, and body language. It wasn't all about us. And it wasn't about our happiness. It wasn't about every minute filled with something new and entertaining and about us and wonderful and colorful and quick moving. No, I think what's lacking is the way that kids think the world should work and training them to understand how it
Yeah, I like that, Dr. Kapp. That's really insightful. I think there is something to that too. When you take something away, you need to really replace it or build habits or muscles that you want to see, you know, engaged in and drive those kids toward what we're hoping to have them work towards. You know, after the great war, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien really reported struggling
with any, I would say kind of any machine. They really felt like it, uh, machines inhibited their relationships, that they were really like formed before the war. They had seen technology in the war as really something that enabled people to dehumanize each other. They killed better and they killed faster and
they broke relationships. So when they came home from the war, they really wrestled with much of what would be at the time modern culture's obsession with machinery to do things that remove us from some of the finer points of life and really the humanizing points of life. What does it do for kids' sense
of security? When we pull back from technology and really assess kind of our affinity or maybe even our captivity to technology, is it helpful when we pull back and say, we're going to take an assessment period? How does that impact kids in their security when we do That's a great question. It certainly affects identity as well.
If a child has their security and the toy in their pocket, because that's their information center, that's their relationship center, they feel like that's their everything, and I feel secure and comfortable, I feel known in my social media, hosts, we take all that away, then the lack of security, right? They don't know how to behave now. They don't know who they are. So that's a linkage again, I think between security and identity that is so telling. We have to teach kids to be secure in
themselves and their capability. We have to teach kids to be secure in themselves and their capability, but they don't know their capability if they rely on their phone to do everything for them. And I'm going to give you a foolish example, perhaps. No, I don't think it's foolish. I, as you know, Wayne, you know, I make the bank deposits at the ministry. I happen to live where we do our banking. And so I will come home from a trip and there'll be cash from a convention
and occasionally a rare check. But then I also have checks that arrive in the mail, contributions. We are so grateful for people who contribute. We'll
occasionally get a check from a partner. um you know a church or uh an organization that supports who we are and what we do and i make the bank deposit and i choose to add the deposit in my mind i have a calculator on my phone i have a calculator on my desk drawer and i choose to use my mouth because i don't i want to believe i can do it right i want to believe i can still you know add in my head um That's just maybe a silly example, but I wonder if kids who
have always had access to the ease of the apps on their phones lose so much confidence in themselves that when we take it away, not only are they addicted to the lies we teach and addicted to the adrenaline drop, and so that freaks them out, but now they lack confidence in the very basic skills of life. And of course, we take away a smartphone. Nobody has any phone numbers memorized anymore. So really, when you think about it, we're taking away a whole lot that's going
Yeah, I love that, Dr. Kat. It's a great example. As you were talking, it kind of made me think of the way that we relate to the world, right? The way that we relate to the world is the way we experience or participate in the world. What you talked about there really is you are trying to relate to the deposit slip, right? You're working to engage your mind and helping you say that this is not just a technology or a transaction that happened out there without any responsibility
to you. You're also relating to it. by acknowledging that exists. And I think we kind of do that a little bit with kids sometimes. I mean, I would say even as parents, we do that in our home. We try to help everyone relate to each other in a way that's healthy, right? So brothers quit hitting your sister. And sometimes the way that we want to do that is just by giving them a technology or
a technique to get them to stop that habit. And then we almost break their, I would say, you know, relationship to their sister. or to their brother or maybe even to us. You know, we're going to sit down because we're all stressed out. We're going to watch a movie and at the end of it, we're all going to feel better about it because we've introduced this technology that now has solved the problem, but it hasn't helped us relate to each other better. What if we see
this happen in our homes and we want to do something about it? How do we engage that influence that technology might have that might be inhibiting us from really relating to each other? How would you recommend that we go about maybe making some big I think it would be appropriate for us to talk with the kids about it in advance and to say that, you know, and ideally this is the mom and dad on the same page, obviously
mom and dad on the same page, dad does the talking ideally. And, you know, we're concerned that we're being sad, we're satisfied with less than the best because of technology. And we are. We're not connected like we would like to be. We're not as supportive of each other as we would like to be. We send each other an emoji, you know, thumbs up and that we're family and we're created for more than that. So we're going to be
making some changes here in a little bit. And we would invite you to begin to analyze what you believe we could do differently. I think it'd be very interesting. I think there are some kids, I mean, I know what's happened in our ministry is that I'll recommend speaking at a church or Christian school and homeschool convention. I'll make some recommendations and I make them for the benefit of the kids. You know, that there's a Wednesday, Sunday Sabbath from tech or, um, no, you know, less
fun use only educational use, whatever. And, um, I've, I've heard from so many people that within a week, the kids have said, thank you to their parents. Because the kids don't know what they don't know. They don't know that they can be actually happier without the phone in their pocket. And parents have lost sight of the fact that they, too, could be happier without being attached to the phone. So many men have said
to me, Kathy, you're right. I'm not paid after 5 p.m. Why do I have my phone? you know, on my belt. I'm going to take it off and put it on my dresser and I'm not going to look at it. You know, the emergency number is always my wife anyway. So I think we're good. And I don't think we know what we don't know. So let's take
a break, but let's involve the kids. And then I think parents take the lead, you know, mom and dad take the lead on how often you have your phone in your hand and how many movies you watch and how many social media posts you think you have to look at in an evening to make sure that you're comfortable not being left out and all those kinds of things. You know, where the tech is used, how much it's used, what we use it for, what we
do instead. You know, do we get outside and go to the park and do we teach a little kid how to swing on a swing set? That's like, that's a memory As Dr. Kathy was talking today, I was reminded of a passage that comes out of 1 John 2, and I'll begin reading at verse 15. Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes,
and the pride of life, it comes not from the Father, but from the world. The world and its desires will pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever. John, earlier in this passage, actually writes about why he's writing. He tells the people that they have been really people who've been living in darkness, people who've been maybe shrouded or had the goodness of God shrouded by things of the world. And his call here ends up being that we can't just love this dim light of who God is,
this shroud that we see. Sometimes with technology, it's such an amplifier of all the things in the world that it actually amplifies the darkness of the world. And when we don't step into it and kind of call balls and strikes, so to speak, with what's happening inside of technology, it makes kids think that really the shrouded light is the best they're going to get. So maybe we do need to pull it
back a little bit. Maybe we do need to maybe put restrictions inside of this a little bit more, and maybe do something that might be a little bit audacious, especially this summer. But inside of that, we can't just pull it away. I think what Dr. Cathy's talked about, and actually what John has talked about, is that we need to fill it with something, to fill that void that technology had with something. Do something different. Maybe you do like a
friend of mine did, and you live as if it's 1987. And there is no technology. And we take a trip using a map. And we watch maybe a movie on a VHS. Some of those things really get back to the heart of what really our family is about, which is relationship. It's actually the heart of, I think, most
everything in life. Faith is really relating to the world and relating to the God that created the world in a way that actually acknowledges that God created the world and that he sent his son Jesus into the world to save the world, to redeem the world, to restore the world, and that by believing in Jesus, we have life in
his name. I think taking the time to pause and maybe pull back some things and refill them, those spaces with the truth of God, that can be a bright light that's going to shine and cut through some of the dark times that might be right around the corner or even just dimming the beautiful light that God's created for us to enjoy in the world. You know, I want to thank you for listening to the Celebrate Kids podcast, this daily segment facing the dark. I encourage you to go to Summit Ministries
and check out what they're doing. Summit.org forward slash Celebrate Kids. That'll give you a picture of some of the people that sponsor us, support us, and encourage us in the ministry that we do every day. If you decide to have one of your kids go to Summit camp, Just use the code CELEBRATE24 at checkout. It'll give you a special discount, and it's their way of getting behind what we're doing here at Celebrate Kids. Thanks for listening to the
Celebrate Kids podcast, this daily segment facing the dark. On behalf of Dr. Kathy Cooke, my name is Wayne Stender. I'm thankful