With a right view of the kind of discipleship in hand, our next step is to understand how devices disciple our children. We can think of technology shaping us through its time, form, and content.
Time. Our children are shaped not only by what they do, but by how much of it they do. Habits form us because they are actions repeated over and over, and shape us the way water can eventually re-shape a rock. The question here is, how much of our child’s day is spent behind a screen? From their waking hours, what percentage is spent on a device?
Of course, answering that question is not the whole story. The child could be busy with very edifying reading. What he is watching might be very helpful to the soul. There is no problem with the use of a screen, per se. What we are really after is how much time the child is spending on purely diversionary, amusing and spiritually weightless activities.
Parents have to avoid the use-the-digital-babysitter approach, where a screen is handed to a child whenever he becomes restless. Not that it is always wrong to turn our children to a screen to keep them occupied, but when the device is used for hour upon hour of games, scrolling through social media, watching hours of videos with little serious benefit, the screen is shaping them badly. What time could have been used for service of others, more serious study, education, a hobby, sport or fitness is consumed by the allure of endless visual candy.
Most devices now have some kind of tracking of screen time, and apps such as Qustodio or Disney Circle allow parents to either view or control how much time has been spent on a device.
Form. The form of something is its shape and essence. By this, we don’t mean merely that the device is rectangular and flat. We mean that what a screen is determines what you do with it, and what it does to you. Looking at a screen and touching it is a very different activity to wood-carving, playing the piano, weightlifting, or baking a cake. Think of it this way: imagine filming the screen-user from the other side of the screen, where you cannot see the content of his screen. How does he appear to us if we watched the replay of his actions for an entire hour? To most members of the human race who have lived before our era, he’d appear odd: mostly sedentary, sometimes motionless, a few flicks of the finger or hand here and there, with the occasional smile, frown or grimace while peering into the blue glow of the screen. Hours upon hours simply looking at a little rectangle. The point is, while there are plenty of good things to read, watch and listen to on a screen, it is, for the most part, not a tactile, physical or very verbal experience. It tends towards the passive and the diversionary. With rare exceptions, the child on a screen is not creating, making, meditating, contemplating, or working.
While we cannot change, for the most part, the nature of the activity, we can ask how the activity is shaping the child. Are they learning, loving, and otherwise shaping their world for good? If not, to return to the question of time, what proportion of their day is spent this way?
Content. What our children watch or do online shapes their inner person. If it is vain and superficial, they are absorbing those values. If it is lightweight and diversionary, they are developing an appetite for zero-calorie brain activity. If it is gossipy and scandalous, they are developing a taste for envy and salaciousness. If it is sexually immoral, it is readjusting their consciences to embrace impurity. But make no mistake, every click represents curiosity, interest, and desire.
Filters, blockers, and screen trackers may go some way towards curating the content, but these are only like training wheels on the bicycle. The goal is that the child achieves the balance of good discernment and good taste. For this, the child must be shaped by doing the work of a critic. Guided by a parent, they should analyse and critique music, advertisements, channels, games, and apps. They should learn to ask critical questions of content: what does this mean? What does it do to those who use it? What beliefs are behind this?
Digital discipleship is the work of many years, because our children will be on their screens every day.