What is a Tech-Ready Home and How Do We Create It?

Discover the transformative strategies for balancing faith and technology in your home as we chat with Chris McKenna, the visionary behind Protect Young Eyes. Chris shares his compelling journey from a business consultant to a leading advocate for safe technology use among children. Through a fascinating analogy, he compares technology to "junk food for the soul," urging us to evaluate digital spaces through a biblical lens. We delve into the contrasting motives of these spaces, often at odds with Christian values, and underscore the need for vigilance in the digital age.

We introduce a comprehensive five-part framework that will empower families to cultivate a tech-ready home with God-honoring principles. From modeling appropriate behavior to managing the ever-present Wi-Fi, we provide practical steps inspired by Deuteronomy 6 to foster genuine human connections. For those feeling overwhelmed, Chris offers actionable advice to start with essential relational and technical steps. Join us for an episode filled with insights and encouragement for navigating technology in faith-focused homes.

Here is a link to a free download from Protect Young Eyes to help you create a tech-ready home.

Transcript

Announcer: 0:33

Welcome to the Ben Lippen Podcast, where we explore life's challenges through the lens of biblical truth and expert advice. We aim to equip families with practical, faith-centered tools for today's world. Tune in for inspiring conversations that encourage and strengthen your walk in faith.

Mrs. Erin Kay: 0:49

encourage and strengthen your walk in faith. All right, welcome back everybody to another episode of the Ben Lippen podcast. As promised, today we have with us Chris McKenna from Protect Young Eyes, and we are so excited to have this guest expert in this series talking about technology and how we can prepare our homes for that. So, Chris, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are?

Mr. Chris McKenna: 1:17

Sure Thanks, Erin. Well, I didn't expect to be doing this. I don't know how many people listening to this could probably say that same thing. You have a degree in something and now you're doing something else. That's certainly where I find myself, but the progression that the Lord has had me on, I think, has prepared me, as he often does, for where we end up being. I sort of see what I'm doing right now as for such a time as this kind of opportunity right.

Mr. Chris McKenna: 1:44

So I have a background in business consulting. I did that for over a decade, so it's important to understand, because I tend to see the world, Erin, through the lens of assessing risk and then doing things that mitigate risk. I did that for businesses large billion-dollar companies for years, and now I'm trying to do it at a personal level and help families do that in a digital world that, I think, has introduced an unnecessary amount of risk into the lives of our kids by design and too many parents who under appreciate, for various complex reasons, either they're choosing not to or they just haven't been taught what is out there, right, underappreciating the risks that are out there. And so I moved from business consulting into working in full-time ministry with a large middle school ministry at a Christian church here in Grand Rapids. I did that for about seven years and it was during that time where I watched us put the internet in kids' pockets, from 2009 to 2016. I watched social media come to life. I watched the selfie culture become something.

Mr. Chris McKenna: 2:52

I watched us put a hundred million people with a hundred million choices and a hundred million problems into the pockets of 13 year olds almost without question, and that was a problem to me.

Mr. Chris McKenna: 3:06

That felt like a bad idea as a man who had struggled with pornography for years. Why would we put that monster in their pocket and expect amazing 12 and 13-year-olds to be able to navigate that all day, every day? So I started Protect Young Eyes to educate the parents in my ministry. That led to the launch of a website in 2015. And now that has led to hundreds I don't know, maybe a couple thousand presentations by now, opportunities to testify, also in front of the US Congress, draft legislation, work with amazing schools and parents like those listening right now to help to bridge that gap between that decision and technologies that truly and hear me very clearly on this, everyone who's listening, truly do not care about our children.  Almost all the digital spaces where our kids like to spend time have goals, especially as followers of Jesus Christ have goals that are radically different than ours. We must never, ever forget that.

Mrs. Erin Kay: 4:09

Yeah, Thank you for that. That's very powerful. So tell us a little bit [about] why it is important. You know, as parents and students and faculty and caregivers of students at Ben Lippen, and for our students themselves. Why is it important for them to examine this with a biblical worldview versus just technology is bad and that's not what I need to do. Why is the biblical worldview so important?

Mr. Chris McKenna: 4:39

Well, I think our human nature is if you just say something's bad, then it becomes shiny and attractive, and that's true, but I don't think that's the best way to go about it. What we have is a product that has been designed to replace goodness that God has created in us. First, we were created to express ourselves in relationship. We were created to express ourselves through talents and skills and abilities, and whenever technology tries to replace those expressions of human with something digital, it's always a worse version of it. It's like junk food for the soul. Even though it satisfies and even though you want it temporarily and it tastes good temporarily, it always leaves you wanting and a slightly worse version of yourself. Now there are ways in which technology have helped humanity when it comes to information, when it comes to medical, when it comes to science, when it comes to ways in which it can process so quickly and at scale. And yet we must never forget that we have an enemy who wants that same processing power and that same scalability to process and scale harm we're now. 10% of teenagers have been victims of or know somebody who has had explicit photos taken of them, deep fake technology, turned them into something explicit and then shared with other students 10% of our young people. So these are the kinds of things we must never, ever take for granted when it comes to these digital spaces, and for the parents that are listening, and even for some of the teachers that will listen to this, I have some illustrations that I like to use to help us with our more Gen X maybe analog brain, to comprehend some of the things that we do today with our kids.

Mr. Chris McKenna: 6:48

I want you to imagine for just a minute that you are getting ready to go to school.

Mr. Chris McKenna: 6:54

You have a backpack and in that backpack, your parents put in a notebook, pencils and your history book, and then, before they zip it up, they say no, wait, wait, wait.

Mr. Chris McKenna: 7:03

Before you go to school, I have a few more things that I want to put inside of it. I want to put your DVDs, a DVD player, a TV, your Game Boy, all the games, all your CDs, a digital camera, pictures of all your friends, your baseball cards, your Pokemon cards, all the things you love, five porn magazines. Zip it all up and then say to your kid you're not allowed to touch any of it all day long. Even though you love all those things and they're engaging to your brain. You're not allowed to touch any of them, and I know some of your friends also have all these things and their parents don't monitor as well, and so they can play with them. But if you play and look at any of their things, you're in trouble, right? Don't look at any of it all day, and if you do, I'm going to ground you for a month. Have a nice day.

Mrs. Erin Kay: 7:53

Yeah, "Go have a good day, honey".

Mr. Chris McKenna: 7:54

That's exactly what we do every single time. We hand our kids a smartphone, and I don't want any adult listening to this to ever forget that we ask our children, we ask our students, we give them school issue devices that were not designed for education. We ask our students to exert a level of self-control that we never, ever had as children, every single day. So I want to frame these things in a way that we can relate it to something we remember, something that we know, and step back, because the slow fade toward wrong doesn't seem wrong, and sometimes you have to step back and go. What have we done? Where have we gone? How did we get there? And those are the critical questions that I want us to keep asking.

Mrs. Erin Kay: 8:43

Yeah, absolutely, and that reflection and I talk a lot with students about being a curious observer of what's going on, just to kind of separate the emotional aspect of being engaged in things that aren't helpful for us and ask those questions like is this what we need to be doing? Is this what God wants me to be doing? Is this how God is wanting me to lead? All of those types of things. So with this we can talk a lot about the moral and ethical implications of this. But a lot of our parents they want to know practical ways that they can create tech ready homes, tech safe homes for their children, because there's so much coming at us right, there's not only the the pressures from children wanting to fit in the social pressures that everybody has the phone everyone has this, what you know wanting to fit in the social pressures that everybody has the phone, everyone has this, how do I fit in but also the navigation of society and how society is moving with so much more technology. So how do we create those tech ready and tech safe homes?

Mr. Chris McKenna: 9:50

So you know before and maybe we can get into this in another conversation, but I want to push back at some point on this idea that our kids are somehow harmed, left out and a lesser version of themselves if they don't have these things. Yes, because that is one of technology's greatest lies that it has convinced us of, and it is evidence of the billions of dollars in marketing and you can almost prove it by when something bad is created with technology, there's not even a word for it. Whenever you say the word technology, it's always in advance. What's the adjective you use when we invent something in technology that isn't in advance? Like we don't even have a word for it, because we just assume that everything related to technology is better, and I think we all know that's not true. I want to press on those things whenever we can because we can do a lot of practical things. I'm going to give you practical things, but at the end of the day, it is asking something not created for our kids to not harm our kids, and that's not what it's designed for. So we have to do some hard things. We have a framework. It goes back to that consulting CPA background that I have. I like pictures, I like spreadsheets, I like flow charts. That's just the way my brain works. And we have a five-part framework. That is our tech-ready home framework. Right, how to create a tech-ready home.

Mr. Chris McKenna: 11:19

These are five behaviors, Erin, that we see in families that tend to have kids who learn how to use technology in good, positive, god-honoring ways. Each of them right. We do a whole 90-minute to two-hour presentation on these five things. We're obviously not going to have that long of a conversation right now. Each of them is robust, but they sound like this. Number one is model the right behaviors. Number two is pursue authentic connection that idea that a full calendar doesn't necessarily mean we are fully connected to our kids. I think we need to remember that as busy families. Number three encourage work and play. Right, the idea that kids who are most often successful in life were those who had chores, were those who stumbled and bumbled through the outdoor world, skinning their knees, falling out of trees and stubbing their toes, because that's how you make sense of yourself and relationships.

Mr. Chris McKenna: 12:16

Number four is we delay all addictive technologies. Youtube is social media, just in case you're wondering. And the fifth one is to intentionally prevent harm. These are the layers of protection that we wrap around our kids the hardware, the software, the routers, the things like that right. So model the right behaviors, pursue authentic connection, encourage work and play, delay addictive technologies and diligently prevent harm. Those are the five things that parents have reflected back to us, that these are the things that, when done persistently and consistently, create the greatest probability of a family that learns how to use technology well. Again, as a risk guy, I can't eliminate all risk. I can't eliminate all the variables. Every child is created differently, every family has different dynamics. We could talk about parent anger and all kinds of things which we do. These are all variables around those five things, but more often than not those are the things that tend to work.

Mrs. Erin Kay: 13:19

Oh, that's so good and we'll dive into some of these layers and issues in some of our other episodes, but before we wrap up this episode, I want to ask, what advice and support would you give to the parent that just heard those five things and thought, "oh my goodness, these are all great, but I don't know where to begin"?

Mr. Chris McKenna: 13:46

Well, then you begin. We tend to want the very first thing to be one thing relational and one thing technical. So all of what I talk about you can put into two macro buckets and often talk about stuff with my kids, including things I don't really want to but need to. And then there's toggles and switches and software and hardware that we can put in place, and so I often will say to parents just pick one of each of those right. A technical thing that a parent might try to do and we'll get into this in the next episode relates to your Wi-Fi at home. Our Wi-Fi signals in our houses are incredibly powerful tools for either good or evil, and there are ways that those need to be controlled, and there's hardware that can do that. Relationally, I think we need to go out of our way to make sure that our kids know beyond any doubt that they can land safely and softly with us, and we say that to our kids so often that they're annoyed, that they roll their eyes and they finish our sentences. That's the Shema, that's the Deuteronomy 6, 6 through 9.

Mr. Chris McKenna: 15:02

When the Hebrews were walking around, wandering and complaining, as they often did, and they said Moses, how do we teach our kids about God, right, and our Jewish brothers and sisters still, to this day, take these verses very seriously. Right? Jesus even quotes this right Love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, soul and strength. And then it says you talk about God when you walk. You talk about God when you lie down, you talk about God. When you get up, you bind him on your head, you bind him on your arm as a sign. You shove it into the doorposts of your house, which the Jews literally do.

Mr. Chris McKenna: 15:36

If you see hinges in Jewish homes, they took these verses and they shoved them into the hinges. This is what they do. They wrap it around their heads at the wailing wall in Jerusalem. In other words, God was saying "you want your kids to remember who I am, how good I am, then become a divine algorithm in their lives."  Say things so often that that is what they know, and I'm afraid that too many parents are too busy and we are too distracted ourselves to say important things frequently, consistently, an annoying number of times in the lives of our kids. To compete against the real algorithms that we have given them, we need to be more persistent and consistent than what we put in their pocket.

Mrs. Erin Kay: 16:28

I love that. Yes, and landing safely. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Okay, so we're gonna wrap this episode up, and this takes us really nicely into our next episode. So y'all make sure that you have subscribed to the Ben Lippen Podcast. Please share this episode with others who you think will benefit from it. It's not just for Ben Lippen families. We can share it with other people too. But, Chris, in the meantime, while we're waiting for the next episode to drop, tell them how they can find out more about your organization.

Mr. Chris McKenna: 16:59

Well, ironically, we do share a lot of really good information on social media, Erin, even though I'm going to say some things that we don't like about it. But we're going to use it for the kingdom as well as we can to just search, Protect Young Eyes. Come to our website. There is a mountain of free information there for parents. Those are the two places that I would start. We do have a subscription community where we have one-on-one tech support for anybody who wants to know how to set some of this stuff up, how to have these conversations. We have a community where you can get that support from Abby, who works with me. But those are the three ways right Education and community, I think, can solve a lot of this, and we've built an organization that tries to come around families in those two ways.

Mrs. Erin Kay: 17:38

Awesome. Well, thanks for being with us today and we'll see everybody in our next episode.

Announcer: 17:45

Thanks for listening to the Ben Lippen Podcast. We pray you leave encouraged and uplifted. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and share it. We look forward to continuing this journey with you on the next episode.