Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It's a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute, supported by listeners just like you. I'm Dr. James Dobson, and I'm thrilled that you've joined us.

Roger Marsh: Well, welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Roger Marsh. Most of us have fond memories of elementary school: learning to read and write, playing with friends at recess, and celebrating the seasons with fun activities. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, here comes middle school. Puberty begins, and suddenly every kid is trying to figure out where they fit into the world.

It's a season of enormous change, and in today's environment, it's even more challenging than ever before. Everything is connected through the internet. Most kids carry cell phones, and bullying is no longer confined to the schoolyard or the proverbial bike racks after class. So how do we protect our middle schoolers through these turbulent years?

Well, on today's edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, we're going to explore the big issues and offer some practical solutions. Dr. Dobson will be sitting down with his guests, Dr. Brenda Hunter and her daughter, Kristen Blair, to discuss their book called From Santa to Sexting and how quickly kids are being pushed out of childhood.

Now, since this program was first recorded several years ago, Dr. Brenda Hunter has stepped into eternity. That was back in 2017. She was a gifted author, a psychologist, and a longtime friend of the ministry. So here now is Dr. James Dobson to introduce today's edition of Family Talk.

Dr. James Dobson: I was thinking in preparation for this broadcast that the junior high years for me were terribly difficult. I'm not unusual in that because nearly everybody goes through that, but I've had such a happy life. I had great parents and I just did not suffer much all the way through, and then married well, so things have gone well for me. But those two middle school years were horrendous. Just the social pressure of the whole thing and a lot of stuff I don't want to remember real well.

But it's nothing compared to what today's middle school students are going through. And it seems at times like the culture is determined to warp and destroy those children and to keep them from being kids, force them into adolescence and beyond. And so we really do need to talk about this subject. And fortunately, we have some folks here who know a lot more about it than I do.

A longtime friend of mine, Dr. Brenda Hunter, with whom I've done a number of radio programs through the years, is back with us. You have done a lot of great work through the years, and I have admired you and am delighted to have you here. Your daughter is here with you also, Kristen Blair, and the two of you together have written a book on the subject From Santa to Sexting: Helping Your Child Safely Navigate Middle School and Shape the Choices That Last a Lifetime. Kristen, it's good to have you here, and you collaborated with your mom in writing this book.

Kristen Blair: That's right. Thank you. It's great to be here, and we did work on this quite a large project together and learned a lot about writing a book as a mother-daughter team.

Dr. James Dobson: Now, you're a columnist. You write on this subject.

Kristen Blair: I write about education for the K-12 years. That's right. And I've written a number of articles about technology and that interface with kids in the K-12 years, too. And I'm the mother of a 10-year-old and a 15-year-old, so I am living it as well. I am in the trenches with all those moms and dads out there.

Dr. James Dobson: And Brenda Hunter is Dr. Brenda Hunter. She's a psychologist, got her PhD from Georgetown University. She is also a psychotherapist and has a wonderful perspective on home life and on marriage and raising children. It's been a wonderful career for you, hasn't it, Brenda?

Dr. Brenda Hunter: Well, my life has never lacked a sense of meaning and purpose, I tell you. Our first show together was Where Have All the Mothers Gone? I met you in Washington, D.C., and then you commissioned my publisher to pay my way, and I think I was in California. That's the first time I ever was on one of your shows.

Everything I have read, the work I do with people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, I'm absolutely convinced that the attachment relationship a child establishes with mother and father in that first year of life puts them on a trajectory to be emotionally secure or insecure. And we found research when we did this book in connection with bullying, actually.

Dr. James Dobson: Well, that's a subject that greatly interests me. In fact, I wrote about it in my book Bringing Up Girls because the attachment either occurs or doesn't occur early. And it's why I really regret the fact that many young mothers who would like to be home by choice, especially for infants and one and two-year-olds because that attachment is so important from that foundation, but they don't have that choice because of financial reasons and so on.

I want to read something that is from your book From Santa to Sexting, and this is what you wrote: "Not long ago, these kids were in elementary school and some believed in Santa Claus. They were fresh and free. They rode their bikes, they brushed and braided their dolls' hair, and stacked Legos. They doodled, consumed delicacies from their easy-bake ovens, and memorized their math facts. Barely on the cusp of adolescence, they are now thrust into an adult world, stripped bare of the parental protections afforded to previous generations. Marketers have coined the term age compression to describe the brevity of contemporary childhood. Sadly for some, childhood ends at age nine." Is that actually true?

Kristen Blair: That's what we are learning in the research and in talking to some parents. I actually attended an internet marketing summit and the keynote speaker commented, "The gatekeepers of society have lost their keys." So I think from there, what we are looking at is a situation in which in too many homes, the walls that protect children have been dismantled.

And we returned over and over again to this motif of the Book of Nehemiah. As you know, Nehemiah, who was cupbearer to the Persian king, went back to Jerusalem and assessed the damage and found that the gates were burning and the walls were broken down. But what we loved about that was that he brought the people together to rebuild the wall, and people were stationed by family to rebuild these walls. And so it's our hope through this book that we can shed a light on what is going on for this age group, this pivotal time of life, but also to encourage and empower parents to begin to rebuild in those homes where the walls are dismantled.

Dr. James Dobson: You know, that's one of my favorite passages in scripture because the Jewish people had been taken into exile and they'd been there for 70 years. And finally, King Cyrus began letting them go. Nehemiah and Ezra were two of the first that came back to Jerusalem and immediately began rebuilding. And the passion of those two books, Ezra and Nehemiah, is extremely meaningful for me.

Because they were rummaging around in what was left of the temple and they found the old scrolls from Moses telling people how to live their lives, righteousness and the principles that had been in scripture. And it so moved them that they pulled everybody together. They had all the people who had been returned to Jerusalem to gather and Nehemiah stood on a large stand and began reading the commandments and God's word.

And they were all weeping because they saw again what had happened to them as a culture. And I wish there was a parallel today where more pastors and more schoolteachers and more parents would understand those old principles still apply. And we should weep before the Lord at what we're doing to our own kids.

Dr. Brenda Hunter: I agree. And the thing that came to us so clearly is the gates of Jerusalem are burning. The gates of the family are down. And we just feel that it's so important that the gates be rebuilt because when the gates are down, anything can go in and out of the family. And that's what we have in so many American homes. We interviewed, for example, a principal of a Durham, North Carolina middle school who said that she buses all of her kids home to empty houses.

And the empty house is something we don't talk about in our culture. It's sort of the elephant in the middle of the living room. But the empty house, at the very least, is a lonely place. At its very worst, it's a place where sex can occur, where drugs can be taken, or where just endless time can be spent using social networking devices. So we are asking kids to raise themselves without parental availability, emotional availability, and physical availability.

Dr. James Dobson: And they can't do it.

Dr. Brenda Hunter: They can't do it. They never have been able to do it.

Kristen Blair: What we are looking at is just a revolution in terms of how kids consume media, and this has been brought about by this explosion in mobile devices. Just to provide a little bit of context in terms of time, we wondered how much time do kids in this age range use? How much time do kids in this age range spend with media each day? And the answer is that kids in the 11 to 14 age range are actually the heaviest media users of any group of children along the K-12 continuum, and they spend on average nine hours per day.

Kristen Blair: So we're seeing a real sea change in terms of both the accessibility of media and the amount of time that kids are spending with it. And of course, when you bring mobile devices into the equation, those are often used outside the parameters of parental guidelines or off-site at school, in the car, at sports practice, etc. So there's been a huge change.

Dr. James Dobson: And isn't it true that on average, kids send 3,700 texts per month? Is it per month?

Kristen Blair: Well, almost. I would say half of teen cell phone users send between 3,000 and 6,000 text messages per month, so it's quite a bit of time.

Dr. Brenda Hunter: And you notice our title has the word sexting in it. Just an ordinary cell phone can be used by a child to send a nude image to a boyfriend or to a girlfriend. And there have been two very sad suicides, one of a 13-year-old in Florida because what happened, she sent a nude image of her breasts to her boyfriend and he sent it to other people in the school and it went viral and she was shunned in her middle school and she couldn't handle it psychologically. So she hanged herself.

Dr. James Dobson: You talk extensively about cyberbullying in your book. Talk about that to parents and what its implications are.

Dr. Brenda Hunter: I think we both can address that. We interviewed one principal of a middle school who said that when she arrives at school on Monday morning, she will find a line of parents complaining about cyberbullying, about the accusations, the hurting words that their children received through the internet over the weekend. Cyberbullying is constant according to the school personnel that we interviewed.

Kristen Blair: That's right. They said it's the biggest problem that they deal with. This is a middle school. And it's really not all that surprising when you think about the fact that bullying peaks in middle school because of where kids are developmentally. And then so many of them have the tools of technology.

So you have this volatile combination coming together, and it is as we heard, something that administrators are dealing with all the time. And even if it doesn't rise to the level of cyberbullying, one father told me that his daughter was going online and she was always hearing about things that she wasn't invited to. And she was always feeling left out constantly. So that didn't even rise to the level of real name-calling.

Dr. James Dobson: Kristen, I'm sorry to interrupt, but there is an example in the book of you talking about your own childhood. You went through a tough time, too, didn't you?

Kristen Blair: I did. Seventh grade was pretty painful. I was a student at Sparta Junior High in Sparta, New Jersey, and I actually had this enormous orthodontic appendage called a bionator, which was a top and bottom retainer all in one, so that certainly didn't help matters.

But one day as I entered the cafeteria, I noticed that a piece of paper was passed around the table of girls with whom I ate lunch. I discovered as I asked the ringleader of our group that they had voted me off the lunch table, that they had circulated this piece of paper. That was extremely painful. I still remember it. I resonated with what you said at the beginning of the broadcast that this can be a really difficult time.

Dr. Brenda Hunter: I think the middle school that we called it junior high, it's always been a painful period. It's a pivotal age, but it's a time of physical changes, hormonal changes when kids don't value what their parents say as much as they used to. So it's always been that kind of experience. But then you add onto it the layers of home invasion that we're talking about here today, and then it becomes potentially really awful.

I just want to say something that came across my desk recently. It's part of the recent CDC, the Center for Disease Control, study on youth risk and surveillance study. And it says that 25% of middle schoolers—and this is in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County area in North Carolina—had thought seriously about suicide the preceding year and that one out of nine said they had attempted suicide. We're having mood disorders, depression especially, escalate among kids of this age in America today. And that's of great concern.

Dr. James Dobson: In my book Bringing Up Girls, I wrote extensively about the hormonal changes that are taking place, that the brain is assaulted by estrogen, speaking of girls, and testosterone, speaking of boys. And if your kids seem a little crazy, they are. They are. The brain has not developed yet, and it is being bombarded by these hormonal influences, and not only estrogen and testosterone, but many others as well.

And so you really do have to kind of hang on during that time. My advice to parents is just get them through it. You're not going to straighten them out. You can sit down and have a little conversation about not being so goofy, but you've got to wait.

Dr. Brenda Hunter: That is true. And my little mantra when my girls were in middle school was "Hang on, Snoopy, hang on." There was a little song for children at that time. You do. It seems to me as an older parent that parents really have lost their whole sense of authority in their children's lives. This is what we heard repeatedly, that parents now want to be friends. They want to be buddies. And that role reversal lives, that parents ask their children what they should do about certain things and that children sometimes rule the roost.

And then the consequence of that is that a lot of children have no respect for their parents. And what we heard repeatedly is they don't respect their teachers or the principals in their schools. They walk into the school and they say, "These are my halls. These are my classrooms. I don't have to do what you tell me to do." So there's been this sort of loss of authority in the home.

And we urge parents to reclaim their God-given authority with their children and to remember that they're shaping hearts and minds and souls. And as one mother we interviewed said, "I'm going to have to stand before God someday and talk about the parenting that I've done." That's pretty heavy. That's pretty serious stuff. And it's more important than "Is my kid going to be cool on Monday morning because he played a certain video game?"

Dr. James Dobson: Kristen, let's go back to what you said about not giving cell phones and other advanced technologies to kids very early. Let them get into high school. Is that your position?

Kristen Blair: That's my position personally, and it's the position that the two of us take in this book. And the rationale for that is not again that these are bad things—these are great tools—but that kids in the 11 to 14 age range, they're just not there developmentally. I think it was Dr. Walsh, a psychologist, who said that in those early years of adolescence, they're ready for a NASCAR-paced adulthood, but they have the brakes of a Model T.

And unfortunately, the internet is not very forgiving for someone who has the brakes of a Model T. Once it's out there, it's out there. I came across a survey by TRUSTe, which is the top provider of online privacy seals, and they tell parents the internet never forgets. It's very difficult once you have put something out there to get it back.

One of the things that concerns me as I write about education is safeguarding a child's digital footprint. Because some of these things for kids who overshare may come back to haunt them when they're looking for a job and even earlier when they're applying to colleges. And we see now that about a quarter of admissions officials at colleges are now looking at applicants' social networking pages. And for some kids, I think about 12%, this is negatively affecting their chances of getting in, which is pretty devastating if you've worked hard on your GPA and your overall resume and have made some bad choices online.

Dr. James Dobson: You're telling me that what a child has done on Facebook is available there and can be accessed by admissions officers?

Kristen Blair: That's true. Now, some kids use privacy settings, so they're restricting the audience that can view their information. I think we see about two-thirds of kids use privacy settings. That means about one-third of teens do not use them at all. But here's something that got me, which was 60% of kids use a privacy control to conceal information from certain friends, including their parents, and that about 42% accept friend requests from strangers.

Dr. James Dobson: Well, our time is gone. We are going to have to end the program today. The title of the book is From Santa to Sexting, and it is written by Dr. Brenda Hunter and her daughter, Kristen Blair. And the subtitle is Helping Your Child Safely Navigate Middle School and Shape the Choices That Last a Lifetime. I do hope that our listeners will get a copy of this. If you have a child in that age range, you owe it to yourself to get this book and read it, understand it, and apply it.

Thank you all for writing it, for being with us. There are going to be a lot of folks out there who will really be appreciative of what they've heard. So thank you so much.

Dr. Brenda Hunter: Thank you.

Kristen Blair: Thank you for having us.

Roger Marsh: Our kids are only young for a season, and these middle school years seem to pass by faster than many of us expect. It's such a gift when parents can step in as gatekeepers, rebuilding the walls of the home so their children can grow up protected and secure. You've been listening to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, featuring a conversation with Dr. Dobson, Dr. Brenda Hunter, and her daughter, Kristen Blair.

Now, if you'd like to hear today's program again, or if you'd like to share it with a parent or grandparent who really needs these words of encouragement, visit JDFI.org. And once you're there, you'll also find information about Brenda and Kristen's book. It's called From Santa to Sexting: A Practical Guide for Helping Your Child Navigate These Turbulent Years.

And if you're raising boys especially during these pre-teen years, we have a free resource for you that will help quite a bit. Parenting takes all the intelligence, wisdom, and determination that you can muster. And if your family includes one or more boys, well, you know they come with their own sets of challenges. Our Bringing Up Boys email series is a 10-day email journey based on Dr. Dobson's best-selling book with that same title.

It's designed to inform and equip you as you lead your sons through even the toughest trials of childhood and adolescence. To sign up, just head over to DrJamesDobson.org or JDFI.org—they are one and the same—and search for that title, Bringing Up Boys. Again, you'll find that information at JDFI.org.

Strong families are the backbone of a strong culture, and building them is at the very heart of what we do. Every day here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we work to preserve the institution of the family, to introduce people to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and to champion biblical truth in a world that desperately needs to hear it. But none of this happens without friends like you standing alongside us.

So we invite you to partner with us today. Your gift in any amount helps keep these broadcasts coming to families all across the country. And you can make a secure donation when you visit us online at DrJamesDobson.org. If you prefer, you can speak with a member of our constituent care team. That number is 877-732-6825. That's 877-732-6825.

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Well, I'm Roger Marsh, and on behalf of all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for joining us today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love.

Dr. James Dobson: The very early space probes launched from Cape Canaveral in the 1960s created anxiety for the safety of the astronaut, especially when the spacecraft was re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. Inevitably, negative ions would accumulate around the heat shield and interfere with all radio contact for about seven minutes. Finally, the reassuring voice of Chris Craft would break in to say, "We've made contact with Colonel Glenn again."

In a very real sense, adolescence can be like that. Something like negative ions begin to interfere with communication just as the adults want to be assured of the child's safety. Why won't he talk to them? Why has he disappeared behind a wall of silence?

Fortunately, the negative environment will gradually dissipate and splashdown during the early 20s can be a wonderful reunion for both generations. For more information, visit DrDobsonMinute.org.