When it Comes to Media, This is the BEST Filter You Can Get

The most important filter you give to your kids is not a good Internet filter, but a good internal filter.

Don’t misunderstand me. For years, I worked in the Internet filtering and monitoring industry—I’m a big, big believer in the importance of good content filtering if you have the Internet in your home.

But often Christian parents live in a world of false security because they have invested in good technology. They keep an eye on the age rating apps their kids download. They often have multiple levels of filtering on their Internet router and on each computer and tablet in the home. They are careful to make sure salacious, violent, and crude content comes nowhere near their kids.

But the old adage proves helpful here: the best defense is a good offense.

We spend our kids formative years being the guardians of their eyes and ears, not remembering that our primary responsibility is to train them to be the guardians of their own hears.

The Tip of the Iceberg

There’s a lot of content out there that gets a great deal of press in Christian circles because it’s
obviously immoral or too intense for children.

• Pornography
• Sex on TV or in movies
• Frightening gore
• Glorification of the demonic
• Abusive language

This is the kind of stuff earns something an R rating.

But these are only the tip of the iceberg. The most massive part of an iceberg isn’t the stuff
you see above water, but the stuff you see below the waterline: 85-90% of an iceberg’s mass is
below the water—and it’s that part that can tear a hole in your ship and send you sinking to the
bottom of the ocean.

Look at this description of what Paul says about where the world will head in the last days:

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, landerous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.” (2 Timothy 3:1-5)

It’s that last line that is key: “Avoid such people.” We need to understand that the media we consume is in some ways like the company we keep. The media characters we uncritically allow into our homes are like people we are inviting into our lives.

Below the Water Line

Paul lists some above-the-water-line stuff here: abusive, brutal, lovers of pleasure. Violence and exual content are staples of modern media, and parents are right to be wary of these things.

But you also see a lot of below-the-water-line stuff here.

“Lovers of self.” There was a really interesting study done a few years ago. They took samples of TV shows marketed to pre-teens from different decades: the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and finally the 2000s. They looked at the values promoted in these shows, values like benevolence or tradition or being part of a community or popularity or hedonism.

Guess what value was ranked low in every other decade except the last one? Guess what value was ranked the #1 promoted value in today’s TV shows?

Fame. That’s right. The importance of being famous and being noticed is the #1 value being promoted to kids in this generation.

“Lovers of money.” Consider the amount of advertising that is marketed to kids, always prompting them to want better, more, bigger, newer.

“Proud” and “Arrogant” and “Swollen with Conceit.” How many characters on TV are known for their arrogance and then it’s just sort of laughed off as a humorous thing?

“Slanderous” or “Treacherous.” You see this a lot on social networks, for example. One study suggests 88% of teens say they have seen someone being mean or cruel on social media. And we feel more at liberty online to do this because we don’t have to see a person’s face-to-face reaction to our slander. Kids can easily hide behind the screen.

“Disobedient to parents.” This one is huge in media today, especially in movies marketed to kids, where the kids seem to know better than the parents, where it’s the parents who learn a lesson at the end of the show, not the bratty kids.

It’s not about avoidance. It’s about training.

The point of this list is not to give you a laundry list of media you need to shun in the home. Far from it. The point is to make ourselves aware of the kinds of values that get transmitted through media that isn’t just the obvious, blatant stuff.

The goal, when it comes to being the media guardian of your home, is not to simply filter everything that is worldly. Rather the goal is to see to it that our kids become self-regulating adults, so they can spot these world values when they see them.

Filters are good. Fences are good. But you are training them to some day live in a world without filters and without fences.

And that means giving them that internal filter.

And the easiest way to do this is to involve them in the filtering process.

• When you want to review an app for their phone or tablet, pull them to your side to read app reviews.
• When you want to review a movie for them to watch, read some of what content reviewers like Plugged In or Common Sense Media say about the content of the program with your kids.
• When your kids want to try out a new TV show, and it looks good on the surface, watch the first episode with them. Then help them to process afterward some of the content you noticed.

What do you after that is up to you and your family’s values. You may let your kids get the app, see the movie, or watch the show again. You may not. But when it comes to the grey area stuff, ask them to begin thinking critically about content.

These are just a few ideas, but the overall point is that if our long-term goal is to give kids an internal filter, then we need to raise “media literate” kids.

Media literacy is the ability to listen to a song, watch a movie, play a video game, watch a TV show and spot the messages, the values they promote, the underlying beliefs. Media literacy includes everything from learning to avoid the snare of porn because you know how it can harm you, all the way down to being able to enjoy a good movie and be able to spot the good and the bad, the godly and the evil, the wise and the unwise.

Media literacy is helping our kids take in the whole iceberg.

And filtering technology, no matter how good it is, can’t give them that. Only you can.

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