Family Time vs. Screen Time

So our granddaughter, Olive, who's six years old, made an interesting comment to you the last time we were with them.

I didn't like this comment, and I don't even think it's true. Tell our listeners what she said to you. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. She's six years old, the cutest little girl in the universe.

Of course, she's my granddaughter. But I don't know what was going on. She just turns over and looks at me and says, Poppy, you're always on your phone. And my wife is laughing because you can't even stop laughing because you've been telling me this for, I would say months, but it's been years.

Years. And you're like, that is not true. I'm in complete denial.

And then you go through evidence of why this isn't true. And so with no prompting from me, our granddaughter said that, which must have been a God moment. I honestly, when she said it, I thought somebody's prompted her. But you know what? That was a six year old innocent comment.

That was absolutely true. Right? Are you admitting that?

Yeah, I hate to admit it because I put it away for the rest of our trip, you know, with our grandkids. But all I know is this. That comment is sort of defining of our culture. Yes. And so today we get to talk about screen time.

We've got David Murrow with us who has authored a book on that. But David, welcome to Family Life Today. It's good to be with you both.

Yeah. Really glad to have you back. It's been 11 years, you said, since you've been on Family Life Today. I came to talk about my previous book, which is called Why Men Hate Going to Church. That was a subject that was near and dear to the hearts of Dennis Rainey.

He was definitely focused on ministering to men. And so this newer book is focused on screen time because my day job is television producer and writer. And so I kind of know the insider story of the tricks that those of us who are in the screen addiction business use to get you hooked on watching screen content. Wow. This is going to be good.

Yeah, this is going to be great. And I got to tell you, I got a Father's Day gift from my wife, probably 15 years ago, called Why Men Hate Church, your book. Well, thank you. I was in the bookstore and I saw the title of your book and I thought, this is exactly what Dave wants to know.

When you opened up that package, you were super excited. Yeah, we started a church in 1990 to reach unchurched men. It was specifically men. And so I devoured your book. I was underlining it. I was quoting it. I mean, it was a powerful, powerful read.

I'm hoping people are still reading it. Yes, I hear it from people all the time. And the most exciting thing is that seminaries are using it to train pastors in the art of reaching men. It's always harder to reach the man. But when you get the man, you usually get the family in the deal. So it's definitely worth the extra effort to reach out to guys.

Yeah. So that's why we targeted men for our church. Not that we didn't care about women in China. Of course we did.

But it was like just what you said. If you can reach the guy, it can make an impact. Well, let me ask you guys, the smartphone has really shaped men. It's shaped families. It's almost as if it's become omnipresent. It's with us wherever we go, where people are constantly looking at it, locked into it. And that's shaped our culture.

It has. You know, all of human history, visual novelty has been rare. We've lived in a monotonous world where we eat the same foods, wear the same clothes, see the same people all the time. And every once in a while, there'd be something unusual that would happen.

A wolf would jump out in front of you or a lion would attack your village or something like that. But most of your life was lived with monotony. Novelty was rare. Now with the carrying of smartphones around, for the first time, we can summon visual novelty anytime we want. We no longer need to be bored. We don't need to learn to live in a world that's monotonous.

We can basically summon the wolf anytime we want. And the producers of media content know this. They know our brains are attuned to novelty and to threats. And so if you tune into any cable news show, it's going to be how the world is quickly coming to an end from this or that, this threat or that threat.

Or if you get onto the internet, you doom scroll the internet. It's just this constant noise of all these horrible things that are happening. So this novelty is being misused by the producers of media to keep us clicking, swiping, watching. And it's completely changing the interactive dynamic because we no longer know how to live in a world that's not constantly stimulating us. So true. It's so true for our families.

Oh, yeah. I mean, you're describing my life and probably millions of others. You know, you click and you stay and you click. And I mean, the title of your book is Drowning in Screen Time.

So it isn't just that we're sort of a little click here and there. There is a epidemic in a sense, right, with screen time. Define drowning.

How are we drowning in screen time? Well, I wrote the book with several parables at the beginning. The first parable is the story, I call it Max and the Sea.

This is a guy who's never seen the ocean before. And so he decides to wade into the ocean and he goes deeper and deeper and deeper. Now, that's parallel to what screens have done. You know, in 1920, there was no screen time other than to go to the movies. And then televisions came into our home and then screen time became interactive with the computers. And we just got deeper and deeper and deeper into screen time.

When he gets out into the deep waters, he encounters jellyfish and they start to sting him. And jellyfish represents unhealthful screen content. That would be everything from pornography to nudity to violence and unclean language. The things that Christians have been talking about for a long time. We've really been alone in the culture and calling these things out. Christians are very good at identifying the jellyfish. What we're not good at identifying is the depth of the water, because that's the other threat.

We can consume so-called wholesome content, Facebook, social media or whatever. If we're looking at it eight to nine hours a day, which is the average for an American, that depth of the water, that's the drowning aspect. It's displacing other things that we used to do when we weren't looking at our screens.

You got to stop for a second. Eight to nine hours a day is average? There was a study done by Nielsen Media Research, which is the gold standard in media, in 2018. This is prior to the pandemic. And they found that the average North American spends about nine hours of their free time every day looking at screen content.

Whoa. That's not counting the time for work or education for school. So and that's happened just in the last 20 years. You know, back when it was just a TV on the wall, we watched, you know, four or five hours a day. But now, because we can access screen content anytime, as you said, with smartphones, we fill in those little moments that we used to devote to just thought or prayer for others or planning our day.

We give those things over to Fox News, CNN, Facebook, Words with Friends, you know, whatever we do on our phone. It's absorbing those moments where our brains rest, where we contemplate and meditate on the goodness of God. And so we've replaced it with these things that keep our brain hyperstimulated and put us in fight or flight mode. And it's like our brains are like muscles that never rest. And it's causing a lot of stress and anxiety. So we can identify, like you said, the jellyfish.

We can I mean, hopefully we can. We can see the danger, but simple content. The depth of the water is the screen time that we just are.

The number of hours, the amount of time we're devoting to it that we're not devoting to what we used to do. I've used a metaphor before in some of my talks. I liken screen time to binoculars. What binoculars do is when you put them to your eyes, you see distant objects and they become very close. But you lose your peripheral vision. You lose the ability to see what's going on right around you.

That's so true. When we absorb ourselves in screen time, we see distant happenings. We see all the corruption in Washington, D.C., or we see protests or we see fires or we see earthquakes.

And these things come very close and they look very, very close to us. What we miss is what's going on right around us. The goodness of how people are relating to one another. The work of God in our lives. Jesus told us to love our neighbors. We don't even see our neighbors because we're always focused on what's happening far away. And I think this is probably the greatest challenge to the church today with social media. You see these conspiracy theories. We see all these happenings in the government that disquiet us as Christians. And we think it's our responsibility to get on social media and rage about those things. What did Jesus tell us to do?

Love our neighbors. You know, we need to put our peripheral vision back. Stop looking through the binoculars and start looking side to side to the people that need to know the Lord and who need to be loved. Oh, that's so good because it's shaping.

What you're saying is it's shaping the way we view one another, shaping the way we view our families, our government, our world, really. And like you said, it's really sad if I'm with someone and I don't see that someone literally within five feet of me, like my granddaughter, because I'm looking at a phone. I mean, when she said that, I got to be honest, I didn't show it. I was mad.

Mad at yourself? At the comment. At first it was like, I mean, literally I thought her dad told her that, my son, her dad told her that. You thought it was a setup. It's not just a six year old's observation.

This is not true. I can't believe she said that. I'm guessing Austin told her that and I'm like, Austin didn't tell her that.

She literally made an observation, which has to be true, that my wife has been telling me for months. And so then it's the deal like, okay, am I going to deal with this? And literally put it down.

I got to be honest. Okay, so I put it down. The only reason I put it down is I don't want Olive to see me on my screen and make that comment and the whole time I'm struggling to want to pick it up. It's that important in my life.

I'm like, what is wrong? Can I just turn this off for five hours? No, I can't. It's like I might get an email or a text or something.

Do you think it's an addiction? I don't know. But here's what I want to ask you.

What is it? One of the parables I tell in the beginning of the book is I talk about King David, before he was king, was a shepherd boy. And I describe his monotonous life. You know, it's flies, it's sheep, it's dung, it's still waters and green pastures and everything, right? But then a wolf comes out.

Everything about his body chemistry changes in a moment because this novel threat is presented to him. So what you were doing, what your brain was seeing on your screen is you were in a home with your granddaughter and everything was monotonous. It was predictable. It was normal. Granddaughter was where she should be. Your kids were where they should be.

The table was where it should be. Everything was normal, right? But your screen provided you with a wolf. Something interesting, something new that would cause your body to go into this hyper aroused mode. Same as David the shepherd boy when he saw the wolf. Yeah, that's literally what it is. And when I turned that off, it was hard.

I guess it was sort of a little bit of withdrawal. Actually, dopamine is the reward for seeing something new, seeing something novel. And our brains are hardwired for it. But that's something that has to come under the lordship of Jesus, just like everything else.

Our attention, where we fix our eyes. The Bible says fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. Most Christians have their eyes fixed on cable news and doom scrolling the Internet. And that's what's ruining our faith.

That's what's ruining our witness. That's what's making us so angry online is because these bad things and admittedly, they are bad, but we weren't meant to see them nine hours a day. And that's discouraging, honestly, because as a family, how can you compete with the wolf? You know, because it is boring. It is monotonous. We're doing the same old things. Our kids are doing the same old thing. And so it's hard to compete against that as a wife, as kids, you know, because it's stimulating to the mind.

Well, I'll give you another variance on that. Shelly Turkle, who's a professor at MIT, has coined a phrase called being alone together. And increasingly, what family evenings look like is not families doing something together.

It's everybody parked in front of their individual screen. You know, sons playing video games, daughter is on social media, wife is watching a sitcom, husband is on his iPad or whatever. And so we're physically present, but we're not involved in each other's lives. We don't see each other. And this is the increasingly unhealthy dynamic that is emerging. And one of the reasons it's so unhealthy is because if you're not talking to each other regularly and having those healthy little interactions, what's left to say?

Only the urgent. Why haven't you cleaned your soccer uniform? Why is your room such a pigsty? You only say the things you have to say to your kids.

You don't have those those serendipitous moments where you, you know, rub their heads or how was school or hey, you're looking good or those all go away because you're you're absorbed in your screen. That's interesting because Dave and I were watching a TV show the other day and I told him this and I found this truth. Hey, no more ripping on me.

Well, we're done with me. I just made this comment that a lot of times he'll we'll be watching a show together and he'll have his iPad on his lap. And he's a pastor. So a lot of times he's working on his sermon. Now you're trying to be nice. Well, no, but I'm just saying. And I told him, I said, I've realized that I've stopped talking to you even during a show to comment about the show because I feel like he's not in the room with me. This is starting to feel like an intervention.

But no, I think that I can do the same thing, though, if I can I can start scrolling on my phone. I think our kids, we all do it. Honestly, we all do it. But I realize, like, oh, I'm becoming more quiet. And I'm wondering, that's probably happening in homes where you're just not talking because it's as if they're engaged, talking to someone else on their device. Yeah, I think it's very unhealthy, this being alone together.

We need to fight that so hard. We need to be physically and mentally present with our loved ones or we're going to lose them. And you experienced this with your dad.

You know, I did. I was born in the early 1960s, kind of when television became ubiquitous in American homes. And in the Murrow household, if we were home and awake, the television was on.

We started the day with Today Show and we ended the day with The Tonight Show. The TV was always on. That noise, even at the table, it was never turned off. And a lot of people still live this way. It's always TV noise.

They're not comfortable with silence. Well, that kind of disgusted me. And so when I became a teenager, I just basically turned the TV off. I became a Christian. I had other priorities. You know, the Holy Spirit was working in my life. And I really didn't see the need for that until about 2003 with the advent of Wi-Fi. And all of a sudden I got very interested in following the news.

And I had this laptop and it could bring in dozens of websites. The wolf came out. The wolf appeared on that little 13-inch screen. And my kids and my wife had to have an intervention with me, Dave. So you're not the only Dave that's been in trouble this way. It's a Dave thing. It is a Dave thing.

And an Anne thing. They had to take me aside and say, you know, Dad, we really feel like you're ignoring us. That was the words they used. You know, I felt like I was a good dad. I had never been cut so deeply by anything my children had said. And then I realized that my folly was just to repeat what my dad had done. I mean, did you feel that as a son towards your dad? Oh, I certainly did. His television obsession disgusted me.

I just felt like he was avoiding real life. And here I was doing the same thing. Now, you think I would have learned my lesson.

Yeah. But in about 2017, a friend of mine turned me on to a little game called Words With Friends on my phone. I love words. I'm an author.

I'm all about this. And I started playing Words With Friends. And I figured, you know, it's 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there.

It doesn't add up that much. Well, thankfully, about that time, Apple introduced its screen time feature, which tells you how long you were on your phone. I get this report. I'm sitting in church on Sunday. They come on Sunday, by the way. I'm sitting in church and I looked at it and I had played Words With Friends for 12 hours. That week?

That week alone, 12 hours. And you could probably think, hey, this is making me smarter or I'm engaging with people. I'm engaging with little yellow tiles on the screen. I was so mad at myself again. Fortunately, I was in church, so I didn't say anything, but I repented right then and there. I deleted the game, which is really hard because they're friends.

You just disappear from the game like that. You feel like you're disappointing them. But I had to make that second act of repentance to get to the point where I am now where I think my screen use is somewhat under control. Our brains are so wired for novelty and so wired for something new and a challenge that it's very easy to fall into that hole.

Let me ask you. So you decided, OK, I need to stop playing this game for this amount of time. Was it hard? My experience mirrors the experiences of many people I've talked to.

It's very difficult at the beginning. Within a week, you hardly miss it. Wow. It's so interesting, too, just because of that downtime, that space. I remember feeding our kids in the middle of the night as babies and just being in the dark and in that darkness, just praying. You know, there's nothing else to do.

You're not going to turn on a light. And so I'm just praying and praying. It was this beautiful time of connecting with God, of just that silence. And now, you know, having grandchildren and I'm seeing all these young parents, there's no time for space. Like in the middle of the night, when you're feeding their babies, you're scrolling on your phone. That is so true. The words you said, there's nothing else to do. There is now always something else to do.

And that is really unprecedented in history. It's not how we're meant to function. Our brains are meant to rest. And as followers of Jesus, we're meant to use those downtimes for communion with God.

And we are just preempting that with screen content. I saw, just last month, Ann and I were speaking at our church on our book on parenting. And somebody that morning, for whatever reason, because they knew we were talking about parenting, sent me a little clip from the internet. So they got it off their phone.

Remember this? And it's a dad feeding his little baby daughter. So she's over here in his right arm with a bottle in her mouth. He has taped on the side of his head facing her a picture of his mom. So she's looking right up at the baby's, you know, his wife, the baby's mom, and he's got his phone. And he's looking at his phone and his baby's looking at his wife.

I mean, I pulled that off and the whole congregation just broke out of laughter. But I thought, it's funny, but it's also sad. It is. Because his entire, you know, everything, all his energy is chasing the wolf, I guess, you know, on their phone.

Yeah. It's just so pervasive and so easy to fall into that trap because it's biochemical as much, even more so than spiritual. There is a need to survive. You know, our brains have to notice novelty because it's something that you can eat or something that can eat you.

I mean, it goes, it's primal. And so advertisers and screen content producers are using our brains against us. They're using that, those urges, those chemicals against us to addict them on their products. Yeah. What's really interesting, I thought, I don't know if I've ever read it anywhere else, but in your book was how you describe how screens have socially distanced us. And again, I don't think I'd ever heard that term before the pandemic. You know, social distancing.

I'm sure it's been around, but, you know, that became the term. You know, you got a social distance and yet you bring out the idea even from the TV screen to now the phone screen. We have been socially distanced by our screens.

You could look at architecture. I mean, in the 1940s, all houses had front porches. Well, they got rid of those because nobody sat outside anymore.

Starting in the 1950s, they stayed inside watching Ed Sullivan. So, yes, screens have been socially distancing us as soon as they entered our homes. We spend way more time looking at them than we spend looking at each other. And I think that's a reason for a lot of the mistrust. You know, a study was done that just broke my heart among baby boomers and olders. Only about a third of them are called low-trusters.

They asked them questions about, you know, if you give another person an opportunity, will they take advantage of you? Only about a third of the older generation were. 73% of the younger generation are low-trusters.

They feel like everyone's in it for themselves. You can't trust the government. You can't trust your neighbor. You can't trust the church.

You can't trust the schools. And all this mistrust is the fact that we simply don't see each other anymore. What we do is we see an image of ourselves and that the images that were fed are typically images of people doing bad things. Everything from crime dramas on television to endless stories about corrupt politicians and pedophile priests and all these terrible people because they're wolves and wolves get our attention. And do you think that's why the anxiety percentage has gone up so high in our kids? Well, it's one of the reasons. You guys, of course, track family dissolution and you know what's happening to our families. It's a chicken and egg question, which was first. I think they're both contributing to that.

But yeah, a lot of the anxiety is certainly because of social comparison would be another thing. I mean, if you think about it, a young woman who grew up, let's go back to King David's day. If she was trying to catch the eye of a young man, she'd have maybe four or five other girls to compete with. That was it.

That was all the women in the village. Who are you competing with now? Kim Kardashian with dozens of social media influencers. I mean, how is a woman supposed to compete with that? Well, let me ask you this.

Go back to where we started. Speak to the guy or the gal who has a six-year-old saying to them or their wife or somebody in their life has said, you know, I think you might be on your screen too much. What would you say to them? There's an old saying in recovery, if 10 people tell you have a tail, you better turn around and look. You've got to realize that if somebody is saying you have a problem with screens, you probably do. So you have to accept that word with humility.

Second, you have to understand the biomechanical things that are going on in your brain and the reasons why you turn to your screen. And you have to understand that you're fighting your biology here. That takes effort. It takes prayer.

It takes the support of others. And I'm hoping we can get into this into our next section. You know, what do we do if we are severely screen addicted, which is what we're seeing in a lot of young people.

And you've got to go for maybe professional help or counseling or you really got to get some really skilled allies in this fight or you're going to lose it. David, give us a good homework question for tonight at our dinner table with families. Like as a parent, what could we ask? Like, can we ask the question, do you guys think that I'm on my phone too much? That's an excellent question.

I mean, that just that humility or you could you could start off maybe with a theoretical. Do you know anybody who's on their phone too much? Does it ever. How do you feel when somebody looks at a phone instead of you? How do you feel about that? And then turn it around to yourself. And boy, that that humility will go a long way. I would say pray before you have those conversations and even to ask your spouse if your kids are gone to ask your spouse, do you feel like this is dominating my life?

That's a great question. And for me, even with that day with all of the action step was look around, not down. It was that simple as like I'm looking down a lot at a screen. I need to put that away. Look what's around me. I have a precious six year old granddaughter that I'm not going to get every day with.

I'm only there first year. I'm going to miss that. Miss her, miss my, you know, her little brother. I mean, it's just crazy to think we could get so caught up in a screen and miss what's around. So I hope today is a day that people say, you know what, I'm going to ask that question and I'm going to answer it with humility and I'm going to take the step God wants me to take. You've probably heard someone say at some point or another, wherever you are, be all there. And honestly, we have devices attached to us that keep calling us to be somewhere else when we are where we are. But if we value relationships, as David and Wilson were saying, if our kids and our grandkids matter to us, if our spouse matters to us, we need to know how to manage our devices and not be controlled by them.

David Murrow has helped all of us in a book he's written called Drowning in Screen Time. We feel this book is so pivotal that we want to make it available this week to every Family Life Today listener who can help support this ministry in our ongoing mission. We seek to effectively develop godly marriages and families. We believe godly marriages and families can change the world one home at a time.

And our goal is that every home would be a godly home. So when you support that mission, help us reach more people more often with practical biblical help and hope for their marriage and their family. We want to say thank you by sending you a copy of David Murrow's book, Drowning in Screen Time. You can make your donation online at familylifetoday.com or you can call to donate. 1-800-FL-TODAY is our number. Again, the website is familylifetoday.com or you can call 1-800-358-6329.

1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. Make a donation, ask for your copy of David Murrow's book, Drowning in Screen Time. We trust that the book will help you and we want to say thank you in advance for helping expand the ministry of family life through your donations. Now tomorrow we're going to talk about how every minute of every day we face the choice to either be engaged in a real relationship with a real person who's right there with us, or to have a digital relationship, which is a whole different kind of relationship, with somebody who's on a screen somewhere else. David Murrow joins us again tomorrow. We hope you can join us as well. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.