Who is Shaping Our Children?

Children absorb information and influences from their
environments. In this electronic, information-rich age, we should, more
than ever before, be discriminating about what our children learn and
where they learn it.

As a parent, it is up to you. You must decide, as far as
it is in your power, what you want your children to hear, see and
experience.

Watch what your children view on television. Many
“children’s” programs today feature ghosts, sorcery, witchcraft,
violence or obscenity in some form or another. Yet for some children,
the television has become a babysitter!

We can teach our children all we want when we are there
with them, but if we put the television in front of them to make things
easier for us, then we will undo all the good we have done. Professional
communicators in the electronic media gear their programming to capture
and hold our attention.

Satan skillfully uses the secular media in his diabolical
plan to catch our children and involve them in things outside God’s
kingdom. He uses the mesmerizing power of television and other media to
teach them a perspective and attitude about life that is different from
the pure perspective of the Word.

When children watch gory, horrific scenes on television
(or on other visual media), they lose their inner knowledge that the
weird, the monstrous and the evil are inherently wrong. When we let our
children feast on godless TV and video offerings, they will develop a
taste for this new “food.” They will lose the ability to discern the
distasteful, the ugly, the disharmonious and the obscene, and they will
lose the desire to avoid these things.

An early result of this ungodly diet of entertainment is
that our children want to experience everything in a heightened sort of
way. The music must be loud, the colors must be bright, and the action
must move quickly. Everything must be experienced in an extreme way
because this is what the media has fed into their lives.

Today we are reaping in our nations what we have sown in
the past—violence, lewdness, drug abuse, pornography, profanity and
vulgarity. Jeremiah 10:2 warns us, “Thus saith the Lord, ‘Learn not the
way of the heathen’” (KJV).

Forming Godly Character

We must not let ungodly teaching mold the minds of our
seed. Our children are too impressionable, too vulnerable and too
precious for us to subject them to the influence of the world’s
humanistic and ruthless media.

Our children are being subtly and carefully schooled in
humanist philosophy. Its doctrines include the teaching that parental
guidance and rules hold only a secondary place. They teach the rights of
the child to oppose adult scrutiny of his or her behavior.

The result is that the children acquire twisted,
self-centered conceptions of “equal rights” (children can decide their
destinies and paths just as freely as adults—or parents) and of the
supremacy of individual choice and decision-making.

I have found that ungodly teachers are themselves unable
to guide our children. Or they reject the opportunities to guide
students by offering them a “choice” at crucial times in their academic,
moral or vocational development.

Colossians 2:8 speaks directly to this type of subtle
teaching, which can steal the minds and hearts of an entire generation:
“Beware lest any man spoil you [and the next generation] through
philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the
rudiments [principles] of the world, and not after Christ.”

The word “spoil” may be translated “to steal away the best
that you have.” Vain philosophies and humanistic ideologies will
captivate and destroy the best that we have—our children.

Psalm 1 offers concerned parents some good advice about
controlling what their children listen to, the company they keep, whose
advice they seek and how they spend their leisure time. “Blessed is the
man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path
of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful; but His delight is in
the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night” (vv.
1-2, NKJV). These Scriptures provide a sweeping summary of negative,
self-indulgent activities, as opposed to meditation, delight and total
absorption in what pleases God.

Romans 16:19 says, “I want you to be wise in what is good,
and simple concerning evil.” The word “simple” in this verse means
“ignorant of, inexperienced in, or unsullied by” what is evil. It is a
naive parent who believes the myth that a child needs to be exposed to
evil in order to choose the good.

Our constant prayer, as parents, must be: “Father, help us
to be wise in the formal and informal education of our righteous seed.
Help us to carefully guard our children’s minds and to screen out,
whenever possible, those influences that do not give life to our
children.”