Screens and Teens (3 page)

PHILIPPIANS 4:8

A
rriving at Purdue University as a freshman and getting to know other students, I was able to connect with many other students. It was clear we had much in common even though we lived throughout the United States and in other countries, too. Some of us ordered “pop” while others ordered “soda,” and some of us thought the others had an accent when they spoke. But for the most part, my generation had a strong set of similar expectations, beliefs, goals, and experiences. Most of us were there to study, and most of us enjoyed the competitive athletics and rivalries between colleges. It didn't matter what dorm someone lived in, similar music could be heard coming from different rooms.

Fast-forward a generation or two. A generation spans about twenty years—from birth to young adulthood. Those in the Millennial generation were born from 1982 to 2002. During those
years the personal computer was invented and the Internet was launched. In that same era, cable television became widely available, video games were more affordable, and the first crude brick-sized cellphones became available. If you're thirty-two or younger, you've never known life without technology. You've incorporated it as naturally as those of us who are older incorporated turning pages while reading books and changing television channels by getting up and physically rotating the dial.

Young people don't think about their technology. Some use the analogy that it's like breathing air. They just do it. Alan Kay, a visionary computer scientist, declared, “Technology is technology only for people who are born before it was invented.”
¹

Those of us who've been around for these decades of rapid change have accommodated to technology. We've made adjustments to add it to our lives. We've learned to Google search and download and email and surf the Net and finger swipe to turn digital pages. At first we had to think about what we were doing—and now these actions are beginning to be reflexive.

Some of us are more motivated to accommodate our lives to technology than others. My brother and I were so proud of our mom many years ago, when, at the age of seventy-two, she chose to learn how to use email and websites. It was a huge adjustment for Mom, who was content with her landline
and encyclopedias. But she found purpose to motivate her: My brother and I both traveled internationally and she wanted to stay in touch with us.

Whether technology is something you've always known or something you've adapted to, there's no denying that technology has transformed communication. It's also changing our brains.

For proof that God is generous, we don't need to look any further than our brains. He created us with 100 billion neurons, cells that are the brain's conduits of information. At the time of birth, each of these is connected to other neurons an average of five thousand times for a total number of fifty trillion connections. (That's a fifty followed by twelve zeroes!) By the time children are three, the number of connections has expanded twenty times, to a thousand trillion.
²

It's those connections between the neurons that cause us to think the way we do. Only about 20 percent of those connections are hardwired by God.
³
They account for things we all learn. If our brains are functioning correctly, we roll over, creep, crawl, walk, and run. Listen and talk. See, smell, and taste. Scribble and then write legibly.

Connections of the other 80 percent of the brain's neurons are formed by what we do prior to age twenty-five.
⁴
Doing something a few times won't result in a firm connection, but repetitive beliefs, attitudes, and actions result in solid connections. They are
considered “soft” in comparison to the hardwiring God causes during conception, but they become “harder” the more we use them. I'm thankful we can still learn new things as we age!

My trainer at the gym, Linda, gets this concept. She recently put me on machine I hadn't used in quite a while, with a higher weight. During the first set I completed, the lift was very challenging. During the second and third sets, it was much easier. It wasn't that I was miraculously stronger in the ten minutes between sets. My muscles just remembered lifting the weight.

Just as my muscles have expectations, my brain expects to do the things it often does. It remembers what it's done before. That's why patterns can be challenging to break. Attitudes, reactions, and actions we often have are the ones we'll have again.

The gym where I work out added a back room—with especially challenging equipment in it. The activities Linda has me do back there are tough! For a while when that back room was still a novelty, Linda would say, “Let's head to the back.” And I'd moan or joke, “Let's not!” But then I recognized that my negativity was influencing my efforts. My brain was expecting me not to be happy! So I adopted a new strategy and intentionally stopped verbalizing my displeasure, even as a joke. Instead, I focused on my improvements.

So what influences the brain patterns of today's teens? Whatever they experience often is going to influence their beliefs and their behaviors. And guess what they're experiencing often? Everything tech.

Have you identified some specific concerns about your teens? Is it their impatience? Their multitasking that you interpret as rude? Entitlement attitudes? Not enough sleep? Complaining? Academic apathy? Quick boredom? Believe it or not, it's not their fault they are that way.

Of course your teens have a responsibility to honor and respect you and other authority figures in their lives. But the reality is that the various screens and different devices they use have caused them to believe what they believe and behave how they behave. We'd be no different if we were their age. Okay, I'm just going to make you read that again: We'd be no different if we were their age! We'd have been trained up on the same daily tech exposure and would be struggling with the same belief and behavior issues.

Take an honest look at yourself. Are any of the impatience, multitasking, sleeplessness, complaining, entitlement, apathy, or boredom issues more present in your own life than they were five years ago? Or even a year ago? I have to be truthful: They are for me. Even as adults we continue to be influenced by what we see, hear, and do.

But our brain patterns—and our thinking minds—can be transformed in good ways as well. It's one of the ways God is good to us: He is able to transform our minds.
⁵

Nurture

Two things shape a generation. One is the nurture it receives during the developmental years. Technology tools and toys have the largest influence on brain development of today's teens and children because they spend so much time with these devices. While they're passively viewing or actively interacting with their screens, neurons are being connected in certain ways. Because those of us who are older had different experiences when we were young, our brains are biologically wired differently. Our different neural pathways mean our brains process and execute differently. That's one of the reasons generational dynamics can be challenging. We have an actual technology generation gap!

Children who are consistently handed phones or tablets by parents who want to keep them busy are being nurtured more by technology than by their own parents. Often, even when parents are engaged with their kids, technology is still ever-present. What attracts more of teen's attention? It's what or who is doing the nurturing. For some young people, technology is present in the home
and
in the culture at large. For others, it might be present more in the larger culture, but technology and its influence can't be ignored even then. Those of us who are older were raised
with
technology, but many of today's young people are being raised
by
technology.

Challenges during Developmental Years

The second influence on a generation's formation is the challenges it faces. Technology influences these, too. Our teens haven't had nearly the number of personal challenges those of us who are older have had because technology has made things easier. But it's also made them more aware of worldwide struggles and complexities than any generation before.

My parents told my brother and me about how they'd go to the movies on Saturday and watch news stories with war footage in the theater before the featured film began. That war footage was heavily edited, and it was already fairly dated by the time anyone saw it. When I was young, my brother and I watched television newscasts with war footage. That was also carefully edited. But today's young adults, teens, and children are exposed early and often to real-time, raw, unedited footage of wars and crises from all over the world. And they don't just see it, they hear it too. The sounds of war, school shootings, and homelessness are also real to them.

When I was young, I heard about starving children and might have seen occasional photographs. Today we can see these children in television commercials, during news reports, on documentaries, and even in social media ads in various sidebars across the Internet. Now it's not just those from emerging nations, but hungry, homeless, and ill children from America stare back at us from screens. Our children and teens see them, too—up close and personal on the screens in their homes or in their hands.

While there are generational generalities, we must not paint
all teens with one broad stroke. Although nurture and challenges are primary influencers, other things contribute to make young people who they are. For this reason, not everything we cover in these pages will be 100 percent applicable for 100 percent of your teens and children. Things like education, personality, learning styles, passions, and spiritual gifts also contribute to make our teens who they are. Family values and faith are also major influencers on how they develop. Whether children have personal faith in Christ and are being led into maturity in Christ may be the most important factor when it comes to not allowing the negative potential of screens to change them. Understanding some key truths about our kids will help us.

A large portion of this book is going to be about debunking the lies that come to our teens because of our technology-saturated culture, but for now we get to focus on some
truths
. I offer five essential insights that help us understand teens' beliefs, motivations, choices, and behaviors.

Truth #1: Teens' Relationships Cause Beliefs

Jordan's family had relocated, and they were trying to find a new church. His parents insisted he attend a youth group activity on a Friday night. He wasn't there long when he texted his mom: “Come get me, please. Nobody here knows me, and I don't know them!”

Being in a situation without established relationships was stressing him out because Jordan's identity is closely tied to his relationships. In between churches, Jordan no longer felt like himself. He didn't really know who he was anymore!

Young people prioritize relationships. Notice, I didn't write that they prioritize friendships or people. No. They prioritize relationships. Some relationships are strong—usually with people they know and spend time with face-to-face. Others are with people they know but spend little if any time with. Then there are relationships with people on social media who they may not know at all. This can include friends of friends. It can include Hollywood actors they find fascinating who they read about on websites and follow on Twitter and Instagram. The relationships may be with musicians, designers of their favorite games or apps, politicians, or even pastors.

Because they value relationships and want to keep people happy, they have
relationship-based beliefs
. Since teens tend to base their opinions and beliefs on what other people think, they may not be able to defend their views well initially. In fact, the views are really not
their
views—at least not deeply. Teens downplay and even ignore experts and people in authority over them when making decisions and choices. Rather, they rely on who they
know (or who they
think
they know). These “friends” influence their beliefs and, therefore, their behaviors. This is why young people change their minds often. They listen to different people with different ideas and decide to agree with them. This can be frustrating for parents, teachers, and pastors who thought a teen's mind was made up. It probably was, but not for long.