“It feels a little like trying to teach your kid how to use cocaine, but in a balanced way.”
- Parent Quote in regards to media usage
 
This past week, I was able to attend a conference regarding the faith community and mental illness. With over 800 people in attendance, it was a powerful witness of the support we desire to give to people who struggle, we just don’t always know how. One of the talks I attended had particular relevance to almost everyone in our community regarding media usage or “screen time.”
 
Often, we are tempted to look at the youth and scoff at their use of social media. Like the passage in the Bible though, we may be trying to take the splinter out of our neighbor’s eye, without noticing the log in our own eye. Our speaker, however, was in no way going to let us blame others for this new cause of depression in our world, because it is not just the youth.
 
“I’ve never found the end of Facebook,” he said, in reference to the endless scrolling down on our news page that is easy to get sucked into. We all laughed when he said this, as this statement is very true. We get on our phones or other sources of media, just for a few minutes only to discover an hour later how we just kept scrolling and scrolling, engulfed in the next new thing.
 
The struggle doesn’t end with social media. That was only part of the graph he revealed as he discussed screen use not only with teens, but with kids as young as eight years old being exposed to as much as six hours a day of screens and media. Before we startle at this statistic, it is important that we first look internally.
 
I used to love to play video games as an escape from the world. Now don’t get me wrong, video games, like many forms of media, aren’t bad in and of themselves. For some people, video games are a means to help their mental health, not deter it. For myself, this wasn’t the case. After a game from my childhood was rereleased, I beat it in just one week! Like many of us when it comes to technology use, I lost track of time. Every night I came home from work and played. I was no longer doing the other things I loved or even noticing my sister when she walked in the door at night.
 
The unique thing about video games is that they measure the amount of time you spend playing them. I could see how in a weeks time I had played for almost twenty hours! That floored me. I couldn’t help but think of everything else I could have been doing with my time. The prayer time that seemed difficult to add into my day, the gifts I wanted to crochet for my family, the books I seemed to never have time to read...there it was in black and white where all my time had gone.
 
TV, phone apps, and other forms of media or “screen time” often do not track the hours spent staring at a screen. And yet when I saw the numbers in black and white I knew I had to put an end to it, which for me meant selling the game, because I knew it would only be a temptation in my house. Now, this doesn’t mean we are all called to go home and sell everything with a screen. There is so much good in technology. There are faith apps, support groups on Facebook, and ways to video chat with our family from all over the world! We should never criticize something due to the bad it may bring. What we should do is hold ourselves accountable and strive to discipline ourselves so that we are masters and not slaves to our phones, social media, and other screens in our lives.
 
After all, it isn’t just the youth that can become sucked into technology; they learn from us. They see if they are worth our time as to whether we even look up from our computers or phones to look at them when they speak to us. They learn from what they see on phones, computers, and TV shows if we do not monitor them. They see what we watch, even in the background. They see if we are giving the primacy of our time to God and others or to our screens. They see us, but do we see ourselves?
 
It is a difficult struggle to balance the good and the bad of all that we are offered in the world today, but this struggle begins with us. As Spiderman is well known for saying, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Social media can lead to community or separation. It can lead to family time or family distance. How are you using this power? Are you being a faithful steward to God, your family, and to yourself? You and I can make a difference. It all begins with us.