Adults are refusing to grow up, and their children are paying the price

Adults who never want to grow up emotionally have created a generation of children who, like Cypher in the movie "The Matrix," want to — or sometimes are even forced to — perpetually escape into technology as a means of finding their bliss.

According to a recent study, these kids are desperately overprotected from honestly engaging with the real world while simultaneously allowed to wander aimlessly in a technological fantasy land from a very early age.

They don’t mind if their kids are afraid and distant all the time, as long as they are afraid and distant just like them.

While 30% of 7-year-olds and 60% of 11-year-olds have a smartphone, the data also shows that about 60% of 17-year-olds aren’t allowed to leave their neighborhood without supervision.

This madness is born of modern adults' addiction to being comfortable and distracted at all costs as they perpetually coddle the scared children living inside them, rather than accept their God-ordered duties to raise their actual children into future adults. Remember, self-medication doesn’t always have to come in drug form.

But this isn’t just somebody else’s problem. It is also present within many Christian families today, where the explicit narrow road of the rugged cross is always buried under the never-ending pursuit of flat-earth feel-goodisms. It doesn’t take much for children, after watching such obvious fraud and emptiness persist year after year, to gladly latch on to false gods of their own.

We are plagued by adults who, more than anything else, just want whatever they want whenever they want it. Instead of doing the hard work of preserving a world that can be passed down, they let their own social media and technology flags fly while other traditionally fundamental social structures and relationships die.

The cycle works like this: The schools fall apart because the adults are too selfish to be involved. Then the parents overprotect their children from the screwed-up society those broken schools helped create.

This, in turn, leaves the kids to desperately reach out for meaning and adventure using social media — even though it is every bit as dangerous as the real world. The parents, however, are too busy pleasuring themselves to prevent that pitfall because of the very emotional addictions, distractions, and comforts that caused this whole cycle in the first place.

No, you don’t just love your kids and want them to be safe from a scary world. You just love yourself too much to fight for them. Your emotions became your worldview, and your children an actual human sacrifice.

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Worse yet, we are likely going to be mired in this era of systematic epistemological obstruction for a long while. It is the sad but inevitable next step of what postmodernism and moral subjectivism look like if there are no absolute standards other than me, myself, and I.

Since the church decided it was going to take a generational coffee break from doing its job of discipleship and stewardship, the parents and families all thought they had the green light to let their electric boogaloo go to infinity and beyond.

Our smartphones are putting more questionable information in front of us than we've ever had in the history of our species, and most of it rhymes with ‘Did God really say?’ from the Garden of Eden. I mean, the original happy couple of the book of Genesis couldn’t even hold back the temptation of a single tree, but I’m sure the modern parent and child alike will find all the meaning and protection they need from the internet!

Imagine the parent who is too worried and distracted to encourage his kid to pursue goods like going on a date, getting a job, or reading the Bible but is just fine with him slurping infinite but obnoxious meaning from tech addictions because that feels just like looking in the mirror. These parents don’t mind if their kids are afraid and distant all the time, as long as they are afraid and distant just like them.

That millstone is heavy enough, though, to pull both parent and child into the abyss at the exact same time.

You weren’t designed by your Creator to be anonymous, alone, inside, and hooked to technology, yet many parents are feeding their kids that life as though they are proudly sending them off to earn a Ph.D. in divinity from Harvard. We must do better.

The way, the truth, and the life is not an iPhone app. It is an adventure that calls us to go forth to all the world, but how are we supposed to do that if parents not only keep their children's spiritual training wheels on too long but never plan on taking their own off, either?