FamilyLife Today®

David Eaton: For all of you first-born moms and dads out there who are listening to this right now and thinking you're going to keep your kid's phone locked down forever, the last thing you want to hear them whisper is, "I can't wait to leave home. I can't wait until I'm 18. I'm going to get out of this place, and I'm going to do whatever I want."

Ann Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Ann Wilson.

Dave Wilson: I’m Dave Wilson, and you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today. When we were parents of teenagers, we thought it was awesome. Every parent told us to look out for the teen years, but when we raised our three boys, there was not a thing called the smartphone. It was just about to come out. Today, it’s a whole different conversation. It’s a game changer for sure.

The smartphone is a gift from God in some ways. It’s wonderful, but like anything, there’s a curse to it as well. We need help helping parents raise kids in a culture that's different than it was in our day. We’ve got the man, the legend, in the studio. David Eaton is back from Axis. Axis is all about helping parents and teenagers navigate this world we live in. Welcome back.

David Eaton: It's good to be back.

Ann Wilson: David's book is amazing. I think every parent should get this: *Engaging Your Teen’s World: Understanding What Today’s Youth Are Thinking, Doing, and Watching*. As a parent of a teen, this is a book you need to have on your bookshelf.

David Eaton: It's a book that you should skim. You should read some and grab a chapter because the first half is all about building that heart connection with your kid. The second half covers smartphones, college, social media, Fortnite, Minecraft, LGBTQ, and all of these big, gnarly conversations.

What's interesting about all these conversations is that they all revolve around the smartphone. The smartphone is the greatest leap of human agency that you will have in your lifetime currently. When you give your nine-year-old or your 13-year-old a smartphone for the first time, it's going to be an entirely different way to be human.

Dave Wilson: David, I was thinking I want to give my kid a smartphone. It's the thing you're supposed to do. How old should my child be before I give it to them?

David Eaton: That was the question I asked you as we left the previous episode. I’m tenacious on this because I’m going to make you answer anyway. This is the number one question: what age is the right age? It's a huge trick question.

Dave Wilson: It’s interesting, as you know, the movie *The Social Dilemma* covers this. The founders of Facebook and the people who invented this stuff are saying, "Wait." They are saying children should be older. They don't have an eight or 10-year-old in their family with a smartphone because they think that's too early.

Ten years ago, I would have said 10 or 12 years old. Now, I know it's probably impossible for parents to think they can keep their 13-year-old daughter from a smartphone, but I would say it needs to be 13 or 14 years old.

Ann Wilson: I think that's early. I think it depends.

David Eaton: Depends on what?

Ann Wilson: It depends on the child's age and maturity. Maybe we have the kids pay for it. Can they afford it? There are a lot of questions I would want to know.

David Eaton: What if your nine-year-old is at soccer practice and they move the field and get out early? Don't you want to know where she's at? It's your little girl.

Dave Wilson: She can text you with a dumbphone. She doesn't need to be on the internet.

Ann Wilson: The phone changes the landscape of your entire home when it’s a smartphone. She wasn't just talking about the kids. Ann and I have had many conversations where she says, "You are so connected to your phone. We're not having a conversation right now." She called it my other wife because I’m looking at it while doing a text or working on a sermon. It can be a divider in your own home.

David Eaton: Let's get into it. It's a trick question because asking what age I should get my kid a phone assumes two things that aren't true. The first thing is it assumes your kid doesn't already have a phone. Your kid already has a phone. If their friends have a phone, your kid has a phone. On the scary side of it, our kids are only as safe as their friends' phones. We have to prepare them to have wisdom to interact with that pocket rectangle.

The second thing is it assumes that when you get your kid a phone, they're going to have 100% access to it. It’s not just, "Hey, it's your 12th birthday, here's a new phone," or "Dad got a new phone, so you can have my old phone." That's where it gets into this marvelous conversation about the smartphone. A lot of wisdom is needed in that space where you say, "No, I'm going to allow you to have a little bit of access to this, and I'm going to slowly release this to you."

I think there are four essential smartphone conversations that parents have to have. We talk about this in the book, *Engaging Your Teen’s World*. At Axis, we have a resource called the Culture Translator, an email that comes out every Friday that talks about what's going on in your kid's world. We're going to talk about what's going on in smartphone land every week because it is such a huge point.

The first thing is that it’s very tempting to think of technology as neutral. We might say, "Everything is neutral. The smartphone is neutral. It's not good, it's not bad, it's just powerful and complicated." Originally at Axis, we agreed. We thought the smartphone wasn't good or bad. Then we took a step back and thought for a second. Did God make a neutral world?

Neutral would be the vantage point of saying it's a random world that we just showed up in. There was a big bang and now we have humans and humans make smartphones, so it's just neutral. No, that's not the story that we believe about the world. We believe that God made the world very good, and then it became cursed. Through Jesus, there's a possibility of redemption and reconciliation.

The first conversation to have with your kid is how anything is very good, how it is messed up, and how we can redeem it as a family. This is especially important if you are the parent who has fear. It's easy to have fear. There was this mom with twin girls. She finally got them a smartphone after they begged and beat her down. She said her daughters weren't looking for the darkness, but the darkness was looking for them.

Her daughters were in junior high, and some junior or senior in high school started texting them immediately and asking them for nude photos. All of a sudden, this mom was wondering what she had done. She snatched the phone away, which the girls hated. That's the empathy that we need to have with our kids.

Dave, you're funny. You like to tell jokes, and you're quite good at it. Can you imagine missing out on half the jokes? Can you imagine just not being able to have that conversation? You're left out of the inside jokes. If you don't get your kid a smartphone, they're missing out on half the conversations. It feels terrible to be left out when you're in junior high or high school.

This is something you can use anywhere. You could say, "How is TikTok very good?" If you can't think of a reason as a parent, do some homework. Figure it out. What can you celebrate? If you don't start from a position of celebrating some of the ingenuity and the great things that are in this world, you're just going to be a huge downer all the time. It's always going to be a culture war. It's always going to be Dad critiquing instead of celebrating.

Dave Wilson: One of the things that worked with me as a musician was walking into my teenagers' room and saying, "I learned this lick on this song that you've been listening to." They were shocked because they expected me to walk in and say, "What are you listening to this junk for?"

When I walked in with a guitar and said, "This is a pretty cool song, let's talk about the lyrics," it was always a cool conversation. We would discuss what the artist was after in the lyrics rather than condemning it. By the end of that conversation, we were both agreeing that he sort of missed the whole thing.

David Eaton: You were celebrating because you could play it. You weren't saying this was bad. You acknowledged it was well-written, even if you didn't agree with the content or the values. Movies are the same. Same thing with a smartphone. Let's have a conversation. There's a lot of good here and there's evil. Just like there's indie music, now there are indie apps and indie influencers. There are so many different versions of that where you can take a position of curiosity.

Let me hit the other three important conversations and one big action step. The big action step is that you have to write down what your family believes about the phone. It has to be written down. Don't feel shame if you haven't done it yet or if you got your kid a phone eons ago. Write down a family pledge or a family contract. You can call it whatever you want. What's important is that it is written down and you start having that conversation. You can beat up the document; it's not like it is in stone.

Ann Wilson: Give us an example. What does that conversation look like?

David Eaton: There are eight smartphone domains. Four of them are purely philosophical and four of them are technical. The philosophical ones start with non-negotiables. It’s really important for you to say to your kid, "You're not going to look at porn on your phone." They're going to be shown porn on the bus to the baseball game. They're going to be shown porn in the locker room on their friend's phone.

Ann Wilson: This is very depressing, David.

David Eaton: It is. But remember, sex is good, so we can celebrate that. God has given that as a gift. The phone is good. We can celebrate that. Then you come back and say, "Because we cherish this and because it is so valuable, this is what I want you to do when someone says, 'Look at this.'" You just have to get ahead of it. As parents, we can handle the awkwardness.

Ann Wilson: When do you think that conversation starts?

David Eaton: Now. It always happens now, and then it keeps happening. What we do is we have a book called *Good Pictures, Bad Pictures*. There's a little kid version of it, and then there's an older version of it. Every now and then, I just come across things that freak me out and I wonder what we can do to get ahead of this.

You talk about how Zion and Shailo are made in the image of God. You hit them with these positive messages about their sexuality on every layer. This is a strange thing we do. I say that when women get pregnant, the baby is not in their tummy because Daddy has a tummy. Everyone has a tummy. The baby's in the uterus. That's a very special thing that women have and men don't, which allows them to have a baby.

The first four domains are philosophical. You have non-negotiables. A very important non-negotiable is that you shouldn't send a nude photo. That's just not a conversation that we had to have when we were kids. What a beautiful place to be as a mom, dad, or grandparent to say, "You are loved, you're important, you're valuable, and you are desirable. This is not the way to express that."

The second philosophical domain is money. Who's paying for this? Who's paying for it when it breaks? Who's paying for cases? Who's paying for data plans? That just needs to be out there. The third thing is location. Can you have the phone in bed at night? Can you have the phone in the bathroom or the shower? Can you have the phone at church or before your homework's done? Can you have the phone on the weekend?

Ann Wilson: These are family conversations.

David Eaton: Every family can choose what they want. You say, "No phone at the dinner table," and they might say, "Okay, Mom. No phone at the dinner table for you either." The fourth one is time. Just how much time do I get to have on that? All of these are philosophical.

The four that are technical are the App Store, social media, internet browser, and texting. All four of those have different rules of engagement and all four of those can take you to the worst places of being a human. All four of those can malform you as a person. But they're also great ways to interact.

You would never say, "It's your 16th birthday. I know we haven't done Driver's Ed yet, but here are the keys to my pickup truck. You turned 16, you earned it." I know exactly where you were the morning of your 16th birthday. You were at the DMV waiting in line because a car represented freedom. Freedom to do what?

Ann Wilson: Whatever I wanted. Hang out with my friends, hang out with boys, go to parties, go on dates, get a job, or go to athletic events.

David Eaton: The smartphone is the new vehicle. That's why you don't see a 16-year-old waiting outside the DMV on their 16th birthday because they already got their freedom. For us, our cars were the greatest leap in human agency for our lives. For that 10-year-old, which is the average age of getting a new smartphone, that's the greatest leap of human agency.

The first conversation is how this is very good, cursed, and how we can redeem it as a family. It invites it into a new narrative and starts with celebration. The second thing is all about the purpose of this. What is it for? If you can come to an agreement that the phone is supposed to draw us closer together, and yet Dad's on email, Mom's on Facebook, and the daughter is doomscrolling on TikTok, you realize this is not what it's for. It can also be cool that I can touch my phone and a pizza will be delivered to my door.

The third thing is Driver's Ed, which is the idea of wisdom. For all of you first-born moms and dads out there who are listening to this right now and thinking you're going to keep your kid's phone locked down forever, the last thing you want to hear them whisper is, "I can't wait to leave home."

You need to have a position where you say, "When you get a phone, we want you to demonstrate to us that you are responsible. We want to have a time when you have no limits that we impose on your phone while you still live in our house." Then you cross your fingers and you hope that they will self-regulate. You hope that they'll say, "I actually do want to be under accountability. I do want to be under authority."

Whether that's inside your house or with a group of their friends, you want them to do that instead of thinking, "Finally, I'm out of here. I'm going to buy my own phone so I can do whatever I want." The fourth conversation is all about trust. You've got to tell your kids over and over again, "You can tell me anything." You need to say that to your three-year-olds, seven-year-olds, and 17-year-olds.

Then you just hope that it hits them and they absorb it and start to say, "Maybe they're actually being honest. I can tell them anything." Then one day, they're going to tell you anything. You’ve got to practice your "I'm not shocked" face and figure out what happened.

Dave Wilson: How do I trust my son or daughter with a smartphone when I don't trust myself? I have boundaries around my own phone use and I have restrictions on websites that I can't get to.

Ann Wilson: Especially if there's not a moral compass in their lives where you think they are not following Jesus. Do I give them that freedom?

David Eaton: It's amazing that you're living the examined life. Socrates says the unexamined life is not worth living. At Axis, we like to say the unexamined faith is not worth believing. You've said there are certain things that are better. Therefore, I am not going to have email on my phone. Not because you can do a whole lot of bad with email, but you can work all day long. I don't want to be the dad who's working all day long.

Dave Wilson: So you don't have email on your phone? Way to go.

David Eaton: I’m not trying to virtue signal, but you just have to figure out what that app is for you. You're modeling that to your kids. That's a great way to lead by example. Multiple stories that I have heard in the past week involve a parent saying their oldest kid was off the deep end with social media, had some hard conversations, and was groomed by predators.

They say their youngest kid doesn't even want social media. You have a whole new generation who says, "I don't want to manage that. This is not life to me. This is just some game that someone else is profiteering from." There's a whole sociological and psychological case that can be made that says this is actually hurting our humanity.

But there's a great balance that can be found in there. You want them to come to you. If they can't come to you, they're going to go to someone else. We want that conversation to happen even when it comes to social media. A great thing you could choose to do is say, "At some point, we're going to let you have one. Why don't you pick one?"

Once they pick one, you say, "I don't want you to post anything yet. I want you to show me what you're posting." You want them to post a picture of their birthday party, which shows everyone who came to the party what a great time they're having and everyone who was left out what they're missing. You might suggest posting a different picture because you don't want other friends who weren't there to feel left out. You'd never get to that point without trust.

There is so much pain in the smartphone space. Axis is here to help you with that, and there are new products being released every single year to try to help remedy this. Axis’s current favorite phone is the Pinwheel phone. There are other devices that are great first steps.

Ann Wilson: It’s driver's training. We're teaching them and equipping them to be safe.

Dave Wilson: If there's one thing I read in your book, it is engage. Engage and have conversations. Parents are often afraid of that step. It's a scary step to walk down the hall at 10:00 at night, open their door, sit on the end of their bed, and say, "Let's talk." But that conversation is going to be a lifetime conversation.

Ann Wilson: Ask our kids, "How are you doing? I want to know how you're doing. What can I do to help you?" Those conversations and especially praying over your kids and for your kids and together as a couple is life-changing too.

David Eaton: Something that's even more exciting is having a teenager in your home is like having tech support that lives inside your house. Just ask them for help. At some point, you want to say, "This phone could be the greatest adversary in our relationship. But I need your help. You're good at this. You understand how it works. Help me with this new thing." There's always going to be something new. They're going to be great if there's that trust and an understanding around what's going on to work together and actually have the phone draw you closer as a family.

Dave Wilson: What a great day with David Eaton. I learn something every time the guy walks in the studio. I feel like I'm 15 again.

Ann Wilson: I feel like this is such good stuff. Again, his book is called *Engaging Your Teen’s World: Understanding What Today’s Youth Are Thinking, Doing, and Watching*. If you have a teen, this is a book you need to get. You can get your copy by clicking the link in the show notes at FamilyLifeToday.com.

Dave Wilson: Listening to this, I'm thinking there are parents going, "Help! Somebody, please help me. I don't know what to do." I’m going to tell you where to go: FamilyLife.com/parentinghelp. It's free, and we put together resources that will help you right now, right where you are.

Ann Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Crew Ministry, celebrating 50 years of God's faithfulness as marriages grow stronger and families flourish in Him.