More Than Just the Talk by Jonathan McKee

Author:Jonathan McKee [McKee, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012030, FAM003000, HEA042000
ISBN: 9781441265111
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2015-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

The Pseudo Parent

What happens if Dad doesn’t have guys’ night with his son? What if Mom doesn’t date her son? Seriously, what would happen if Mom or Dad forfeited their calling as parents and decided life is too busy to spend time hanging out with their son? What if neither of them ever engage in casual conversations about life, friendship . . . even conversations about sex? If this happens, something else gladly slides into place and teaches young people all they need to know about these subjects. Something else raises our kids. A pseudo parent.

I’m referring to entertainment media and technology. If a dad doesn’t teach his kids about sex, then Google will. If a mom doesn’t have these conversations, then social media will gladly step up. Entertainment media and technology are readily available, and today’s young people are soaking it in and marinating in it most waking hours.

Numbers can vary a little, but one of the most respected and quoted studies in the field (from the Kaiser Family Foundation) revealed the average eight- to eighteen-year-old devotes over 7.5 hours per day to entertainment media and technology.1 That’s a lot of TV, music, Internet, and video games. And each year, technology keeps advancing. Now most of these popular gadgets have Internet connections included. Smartphones, game systems, Blu-ray players, TVs . . . they all offer easy access to the web. It’s no surprise to hear that a teenager used a smartphone to access the web, but what about these other popular devices? For example, a recent study showed that 61 percent of U.S. teens used their game systems to go online.2

In short . . . kids have a lot of distractions just a click away on almost every screen they frequent.

What do you think they are learning about sex from these sources?

What are our sons’ favorite hip-hop artists teaching them about how to treat women?

Or if that isn’t scary enough . . . what are our sons learning about women from some of the darker corners of the world wide web?

In chapter 9 we’ll explore exactly how prevalent online porn is, and frankly . . . it’s frightening. What’s more frightening is the misinformation that porn spreads about human sexuality.

David Segal, in his New York Times article “Does Porn Hurt Children?” couldn’t help but notice common cautionary advice from the academics he interviewed:

“I have a son,” says Professor Reid of U.C.L.A., “and I don’t want him getting his information about human sexuality from Internet porn because the vast majority of such material contains fraudulent messages about sex—that all women have insatiable sexual appetites, for example.”3

In the world of porn, every woman is a sex object, flawless, promiscuous, and unrestrained. Today’s young men are beginning to think this is the norm.

In my work with teenagers, I’ve spent a lot of time with teenage guys on and off campus. In fact, my first decade of ministry was campus ministry, so many of these kids were not the kinds of kids you’d find at church on any given Sunday.

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