Teaching Our Children to Turn Away from Unhealthy Content
My family enjoys watching a show together at night. We parents are vigilant for unhealthy content that can appear during commercials. Recently, a preview has been running for The Nun II. The images are terrifying and likely to take root in young minds. We teach our children to turn away from scary content and we change the channel. Our children have learned that ugly content can affect their mood, sleep, and can lead to nightmares.
Our children will inevitably be exposed to unhealthy content inside and outside of our homes. We cannot shelter them enough to fully prevent this. A balance we can strive to achieve is to limit exposure to terrifying content in our homes as much as possible while modeling how to turn away when it appears unexpectedly.
There was a time (pre-children) when my husband and I, along with a small group of friends, watched horror shows for entertainment. I like the feeling of a good scare. But I realized that when I consumed dark content regularly, I experienced more anxiety, discontent, and disrupted sleep. It was awkward when I informed our group that I was no longer going to watch with them. It is always difficult to be the one to say “no” to an acceptable practice. I worried that they might laugh at me and criticize me. The opposite happened and they all accepted my decision! Over time, my husband began to follow suit and has since eliminated all dark content from his digital diet. Becoming parents helped to increase our sensitivity to what we allow on screen.
Over the weekend we went out to a restaurant where football was playing on the big TV’s. I didn’t pay much attention to it. When we left, my 11 year old son told me, “Mom, that scary nun preview played a couple times during our meal.” My heart clenched. “What did you do?” I asked. “I turned away from it.”
Hallelujah! He is learning from my mistakes. Oh, what a glorious result after years of modeling and teaching. And what an important part of parenting, to teach our children to turn away from unhealthy content! So how can we all practice this in our own homes?
We parents must evaluate and clean up our own digital content. Children are expert hypocrisy detectors.
We must model turning away from unhealthy content. It helps immensely if both parents can be in agreement about this. But it may have to start with just one.
We must ask our children to avoid it.
Then we praise our family when we see them practice turning away.
Would your spouse tackle this with you? Which one of the steps would be most difficult for your family?
For more practical tips and for scripts to use with your spouse and children, take a look at our book, Understanding and Loving Your Child in a Screen Saturated World, written with Steve Arterburn. https://amzn.to/3O10Vy7
