The Truth I Discovered About Youth Screen Time

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Being raised in a Unity youth program means that I am very passionate about the spiritual enrichment of today's children. Lately I have been talking with my fellow ministers about the obvious decline of adult church attendance, but even more importantly the maybe less obvious decline of youth attendance.

As we put our heads together, trying to come up with reasons why youth attendance is down, we see a couple patterns unfolding. Obviously less children attend when less parents attend, but even those parents who are attending still don't bring their children to the youth experience.

This points to a very obvious problem that modern parents don't see value in a church youth program.

If they don't recognize the value, there is no way they will be able to push past their child's initial resistance to trying something new, like Sunday school. This is a real problem.

As I was pondering this issue, I stumbled upon this article from the BBC, about how much time modern children spend on media devices such as phones, tablets, TVs, computers, etc.

Now, would you be surprised if I told you the average child spends 6.5 hours a day on a media device!?


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That is 2,372.5 hours a year and let me put that in perspective for you. If a parent or grandparent brought a child to the youth program every Sunday out of the year, that child would receive 52 hours of spiritual education that year. That’s only 52 hours of spiritual education versus 2,372.5 of programming from the internet, social media and television.

Do you see the issue here!?

Plus, we must also consider that most, if not all, children cannot attend every Sunday (especially those in split homes or weekend sports programs) and are more likely receiving 26 hours a year, if they are coming at all. Of course, some fortunate children also receive spiritual education from their parents at home, but I expect it is far less frequent than we would hope.

How much spiritual education should a child be getting? Half as much as they get from online media... a third... a quarter... a tenth... or less? I don't think it is a question we are considering seriously enough, if at all.

But if we actually believe in our children as the future, we will definitely have to start increasing their amount of spiritual education, especially if we desire a more spiritual future.

The Truth I discovered about youth screen time is that we need to really be mindful about how much spiritual enrichment our children are getting. If you find that your child is deficient in this area, I can attest that a church youth program is a great place to start. But if church is not your thing, then consider ramping up the amount of time you speak about spirituality in your home. Remember, you are competing against 2,372.5 hours of online media programming.

Location: Boulder, CO, USA

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