“Americans ages 11 to 18 play online for an average of 10 hours per day, according to a study out today by a research team that includes psychologist Jean Twenge, author of ‘iGen’ and ‘Generation Me.’ The researchers surveyed 1,600 Americans ages 11 to 18 in May 2022. On average, the study participants reported using digital media an average of 10 hours and four minutes per day, on such entertainment activities as social media, video chat, texting, shopping, and gaming. This total of 70 hours per week spent on screens also did not include time spent watching TV. Other studies on children’s screen use reinforce this finding–that America’s young people are wasting almost all of their waking free time on entertainment instead of personal growth or service to others. The study recommends that parents keep electronic devices out of kids’ bedrooms at night, limit screen time to a few hours per day, delay smartphone access to age 16 or 18, keep kids off social media as long as possible, and arrange for their kids to make friends with kids in families with similar boundaries about tech use to help their children socialize with people instead of robots. This is another form of societal suicide. Laziness cannot maintain, let alone keep advancing, the United States’ world-class level of scientific and cultural advancement. Nothing worth having comes without strenuous and sustained effort. Internet addictions erase not only willpower but also self-discipline, excellence, and the communication skills needed to work with others and sustain key relationships such as marriages, as Twenge and others’ academic work shows. Parents need to man up and do the hard work of tightly restricting the addictive side of the internet from their kids, for not only their own good but for the sake of our country. Don’t wait for others to do your job for you. Put down your phone, grab your kids, and make your family motto the title of one of my childhood books: ‘Do Something Besides Watching TV.’ If your children enter adulthood having done nothing with 25,000 hours of their lives they can never get back, and with their brains destroyed by internet slot machines, that’s on you. You’re the one paying for their phone and letting them self-destruct. Tell them to get a job or read some books or do anything but sabotage themselves and our society.”
“Outside of School,” The Federalist, Oct. 31, 2022
[For a Bible-believing Christian approach to this danger and for practical suggestions for homes and churches, see Spiritual Safety in the Facebook Age.
