What are the top three emerging digital issues that increase risk of harm to our kids and how can we address them?

Discover the pressing digital challenges faced by today's families with Chris McKenna, founder of Protect Young Eyes, as he shares his personal journey as a father in the digital age on the Ben Lippen Podcast. Gain invaluable insights into the alarming rise of deepfake technology and the pervasive threat of sextortion, both of which are rapidly impacting the lives of countless young people. We promise you'll leave with a deeper understanding of the tools and strategies needed to create tech-ready homes equipped with multiple layers of protection to safeguard against these modern threats.

Journey with us as we explore the broader implications of early digital exposure on young minds, comparing it to feeding sugar to a newborn. Chris offers real-life anecdotes that highlight the stress and confusion unfiltered internet access can cause in children, underlining the necessity of a united front between parents and schools to combat these influences.

For those feeling overwhelmed, we introduce "the table," a community platform offering tech support and resources to empower parents. Expect to feel encouraged and motivated as we tackle these challenges together and ensure a safer digital environment for the next generation.

Check out these free resources from the content discussed in this episode.
What is sextortion?
Deepfakes post

Transcript

Mrs. Erin Kay: Welcome back to our third episode in our series with the founder of Protect Young Eyes, Chris McKenna. We are so excited to have you here for another episode, as we talk more about just being digitally (I can't say it) aware and how to walk in the ways of the Lord with technology. So why don't you just take a minute and just share recap real quick of who you are and what we've talked about on the last two episodes?

Mr. Chris McKenna: Sure. So Chris McKenna, dad, follower of Christ, husband, those are the important things. I've got four kiddos. I've got three sons who are in seventh, eighth and ninth grade, and then my daughter is a sophomore in college and so, walking through these. I have a son with Down syndrome. So you know all the different variables there.

It's disability, there's, you know, boys and a girl, and kind of navigating all these things in middle school and high school and college and stumbling and bumbling through the digital age, just like all of you listening to this right now, trying to figure things out.  I got to tell you, and for any parent out there in "Ben Lippen land" who you know has a child with any kind of cognitive superpower, like my son, Grant, you know, trying to help a young man who has zero executive control over his decisions navigate these incredibly addictive digital spaces is an incredible challenge.

So, I see you (not really). I hear you, you hear me, right. However, we want to communicate this idea of wow, I'm there with you and I'm feeling those challenges and can understand where you're coming from, if that's you. So that's a little bit about us and started this organization just out of a need that I saw in ministry back in 2015 and have just tried to continue to educate as many parents and kids we speak to I don't know 10,000, I don't know how many thousands of kids all year long through kind of another side of Protect Young Eyes, where we talk to K-12 to equip them. We just want to bridge that gap between... we know they're using it, but how do we help them use it well?

Mrs. Erin Kay: Yeah, oh, I love that, and thank you for sharing that about your family and connecting it in that way. We definitely have students here at Ben Lippen that have different learning differences, and so that's also a really great topic to fold in here. So we're excited to have you here and to share with us today, and so let's dive right in. So we've talked a little bit about tech ready homes. We talked about the five layers of digital protection in our last two episodes, so now let's move into some of the issues. Right? So we're positioning it where you've got your home as tech ready as you can, and you have an understanding of these five layers of digital protection. So now we kind of have our armor, so to speak, to look outward, to look at some of these digital issues. So, right now, what would you say are the top three emerging digital issues that increase the risk of harm to our kids and how can we address them?

Mr. Chris McKenna: Yeah, that's a good one and right, you can ask me that question next week and there might be new things. You know, there's two big bogeys out there that are really darkening the experience of children online right now, and that is deepfakes, and another one is the issue of sextortion. So I'll talk about those two kind of right away because I think those are most pressing. So if you're not familiar deepfakes, you can go right now. If you're Apple or Google, depending on what app store you might use Google Play or the Apple App Store just type deepfakes into the search and what you'll get in the Apple App Store. I just have my phone right here in front of me. You would scroll and you would see just so many different apps that you could download that allow you to alter photos, so someone could just you're walking down the street, someone could take your picture, they could download one of these deepfake apps and they could turn you into doing almost anything. And the sinister version of this is pornographic, nudifying deepfake apps, which there's many of them out there that can turn any body into a pornographic, explicit version of themselves, doing whatever. Many people learned and were educated on this very quickly right after the Super Bowl here in 2024, when somebody did this to pictures of Taylor Swift and then circulated them on X, formerly known as Twitter, and that caused a lot of people to become aware of this as an issue. Now, celebrities have dealt with issues around deepfake photos and videos of them being altered for well over a decade, but the problem was the technology was really expensive and it was really bad. You could always tell, like it was horribly obvious that this was somebody's head chopped off and put on someone else's naked body. That's not true anymore. That's not true anymore. So now we have this harm at scale meaning downloadable in the app store and at precision, indiscernible to the human eye, that it's fake. That's the difference that we have today.  I was just on a call where, like now, we are in a place where we have to create AI to figure out what's AI.

Mrs. Erin Kay: Wow!

Mr. Chris McKenna: The human eye can no longer discern what are the fake photos or what has been created. So you have to actually create AI to discern what is AI generated, so that we can know real from fake.  That's where we are today, because it's so good in the way that it's bad right.

So that's issue number one. I mean there are hundreds, I mean thousands and thousands of kids who have been victims. It doesn't matter that it's fake when you interview the victims of deepfake pornography, and this is happening to teen girls everywhere, and it's mostly teen girls because most of the models, the programs that generate these fake images, have been trained. Remember, this is an algorithm. You train it with images so it knows how to discern future images. They've been trained on females because it's mostly men consuming the content. So it's primarily teen girls who are the victims of these sort of situations, where teen boys will take a picture of them at prom, homecoming, something innocent. Just take a screenshot of their social media pictures and then put it into some of this technology, share it with everybody as if it's something that this girl generated, and the trauma felt by the girls is the same as if it was real. It doesn't matter that it was fake. Even if everybody knows it's fake, it doesn't matter. There's just been this tarnishing of her and her, you know, just overall feelings of worth and significance. So that's issue number one.

We've written a post that gives parents 15 different ways that they can mitigate the risk of deepfake technology. We can't eliminate it. Right. If you go back and listen to your previous episodes conversations, Erin, that you and I have had, people would learn that I'm a risk mitigating kind of guy. That's my view on things. I'm always trying to assess and then put things in place to either prevent or detect risk. We can't do that with this one. I can't stop someone from taking a picture of my kid walking down the street. That's where we're at, and now, with glasses that people are going to be wearing, they'll be taking pictures, which is the next thing here after watches. That's going to be a constant threat, so we want parents to be aware of that and related to that, I would say the next thing that is really gaining traction is eliminating all personal electronic devices.

I'll get to sextortion here in just a minute. I'm just kind of doing my out of order, but the one that I put right after deepfakes, because they're related, is removing all personal electronic devices, including AirPods and Apple watches, from the education day. The technology is clearly distracting. The science is there, right, and not just that, but a reassessment of educational technology, right. The apps and the Chromebooks and the iPads and the devices that we give kids quote for education don't actually further educational outcomes enough of the times, right. So it's this whole idea of education and technology, not only what kids are bringing in, which is often where parents fight because they want to have access to their kids all the time, right, and it's parents who I love you, but you're often the ones that are forcing that issue when it's actually producing negative outcomes for your kid during the day. And we also need schools and we're seeing this over and over again schools that are now doing a better job of assessing educational technology and how it's used.

I would say that's another emerging issue. A lot of that has been really propelled because of things shared in the Anxious Generation, a book that came out just recently from Jonathan Haidt Last name is spelled H-A-I-D, as in dog T, as in Tom Jonathan Haidt, and we've been saying this for years to get devices out of schools. We've seen the benefits. We've also seen the negative impacts and the reason I connect that to deepfakes is a fabulous way to decrease the probability of that happening is to get digital phones, which you know have cameras, out of the school day, out of bathrooms, out of lockers, out of as many of these places as possible where those kinds of photos you know can be taken.

And then the third issue is sextortion, and you know again, we've written a lot about this the bad actors that are perpetrating these crimes against children are becoming more and more sophisticated because of technology, because of deepfakes. They can fabricate that they are a friend, that they are somebody, they have a voice that sounds like someone who's like them or knows them, and creating fake accounts and getting to know them and sending a DM and sending a little bit of something which is actually a fake photo, saying if you send something of me or I send something of me, you send something back. And then that turns into an extortion scheme because it's so easy, you can figure out so much information about everybody through public records, through parents' own social media accounts, that they discover, they can threaten and they can coerce and say I know who your parents are, I know who your principal is, I know where you go to school, I know where you have, you know what your sports teams are, your coaches. I'm going to send this to everybody and they do these countdowns and DMs 10, 9, 8, and I'll send it unless you send me $500 or unless you go to CVS and buy me all these gift cards and I'll send an Uber to pick them up. Like the schemes around these pressures, this is primarily boys that are being victimized. If deep fakes are primarily victimizing teen girls, sextortion is primarily victimizing teen boys because a limbic system moves a lot faster than the thinking part of the brain and if the prospect of a nude photo is in front of that brain, that creates a lot of unhealthy impulsivity. So it's a weaponization of their curiosities, of their impulsivity, and that's the scheme and thousands of cases that are being worked on by NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and internet crimes units all over the country. I don't know how many young men and a few girls, but how many young men have died by suicide because of this, because they're so distraught over the issue. A young man here in Michigan, my home state I'm now friends with his family. It's just, it's a horrible thing.

So, these are, like I said, the darkening of technology, of childhood, through technology.  I know we can use it for good and I know we can share The Gospel in places that we couldn't, and we can have digital ways of communicating with others. But my question comes back to at what cost, like, at what cost?  For those who push back and are like, quit being such a doomsayer, quit being you know, negative whoever about technology... I'm working on a poster right now, that's sort of in process, and the title of the title of this is it's okay, only a few kids are dying, like that's what I feel, like we, we say when, when we're justifying these things and we don't treat anything else in the physical world that way, Erin, like product recalls, as soon as one kid gets hurt because they fall off of something, you have this nationwide recall.

We have one head of romaine lettuce that has listeria or some bacteria on it. We clear all the shelves in the country. But we've had hundreds of kids die by fentanyl overdose, by suicide, because of interactions with technology, and yet we all just say it's an advance, let them use it. And these are just hard questions that I want us to ask ourselves in the overall scheme of childhood. When you never would wish this upon yourself as a child and I know parents feel that way why do we wish it upon our kids? Let's step back and just delay and wait and let them have more innocence in childhood. 

Mrs. Erin Kay: Right, right. And speaking of that innocence in childhood and technology, what outcomes have you seen when it comes to early introduction of technology to children? I mean, you can walk around and see very small children with iPhones or tablets and other variations of technology and just the access to shows on television. And you know, growing up we didn't have cable, we had like PBS and things like that. But now it is just wide open. Like you said, it's just like a smartphone hanging on the wall... supercomputers hanging on the wall. So what are some of the outcomes you're seeing for children who have been introduced to technology at early ages?

Mr. Chris McKenna:  Well, so I've written a post called Too Much, Too Soon, and the bottom line of it is digital media exposes young people to thematic elements they're not ready to process, and when you feed a young brain adult-sized information without adult-sized wisdom, it causes stress and confusion. It's showing them content ahead of schedule. It's showing them content ahead of schedule. And so this is a conversation that I had with a therapist here in town who talks about this idea of ahead of schedule. It's like TikTok and tweens is like giving sugar to a newborn, right? There's this adage among new moms that you don't give sugar to a newborn, or sweet foods at the beginning. Instead, you start with vegetables because you want to acclimate their palate to foods without sugar. Right? We're hardwired to crave sugar because it built up fat stores and kept our ancestors from starving when food was scarce that kind of stuff. You don't want your kid to create a taste palette based on sugar because that shapes long-term food preferences, and I use that as, again, sort of this tangible way to describe what we need to do. This principle highlights how early exposure to stimuli can set a precedent for future preferences.

The young brain is never as shapeable again as it is during adolescence, right?

Many of us, if we think about ourselves as adults, the way that we look at ourselves in the mirror, the way we treat other people, even our relationship with God, if we really dig deep, many of those perspectives wrestle against hooks that were set during adolescence, things that happened to us or didn't happen to us between the ages of eight and 16.

Right, and we now show our kids a ton of information way ahead of schedule and it plays out in you know there's I could rattle off research around correlations between kids who are exposed to certain amounts of screen time between ages eight and 11, the increase in suicidality goes. It increases like 9 to 11%, whatever the statistics are, I'm going to pull them up here, I don't have them memorized like 9% to 11% or whatever the statistics are, I'm going to pull them up here, I don't have them memorized. So we can point to these kinds of things. But then it plays out in more anecdotal ways. For example, I was a keynote speaker at the National Catholic Educators Association 3,000 educators down in New Orleans. After I got done with my presentation on mental well-being and childhood and technology, within 20 minutes I had two principals of two different elementary schools from different parts of the country come up and tell me the exact same story. Both of them had just expelled a fourth grade boy because in both cases, those boys were inappropriately touching their female teachers.

Mrs. Erin Kay: Wow!

Mr. Chris McKenna: And what they discovered in both cases is both of these boys had discovered unfiltered internet devices at home and were consuming large amounts of pornography at night.

Mrs. Erin Kay: Wow, and how old were these boys, again?

Mr. Chris McKenna: Fourth grade.

Mrs. Erin Kay: Fourth grade. So we're talking eight to nine, ten, nine...

Mr. Chris McKenna: Yeah, nine, maybe turning ten, and so this is what happens, right? Whatever you feed a young brain is what it learns to love, and young brains have mirror neurons in greater abundance than we do as adults. Right? In other words, this is why they often do things gross motor that they observe in the physical world. That's how they adults. Right, in other words, this is why they often do things gross motor that they observe in the physical world. That's how they learn, right, as they figure things out, they mimic us with sometimes embarrassing precision in the things that we say and do. Right, that's by design... and this is why, when you talk to children's assessment centers, there's 800 of them all over the United States.

These are amazing organizations that work with families whose children either are the victims of sexual abuse or are the family of a child who has abused another child. When I interviewed our CAC here in Grand Rapids, the two individuals that I spoke to said, in 100% of the cases that they had worked in the previous 12 months, the young boy or girl who had sexually abused another child had been consuming pornography as a child. Right? So these are just, these are some of the horrible outcomes. There are less pernicious outcomes that I think fly under the radar when it comes to attention span, right...

When you constantly feed a young brain every eight seconds a dopamine hit of entertainment and then you expect that child to sit in language arts and listen to you. I don't care how good of a teacher you are, you're not that good. The algorithm is better than you and you're going to lose that battle to Fortnite, to Minecraft and to TikTok every single school day morning if that's what they've been consuming, right? So you have this range of things that again. I step back and ask how can amazing schools like Ben Lippen compete with those kinds of things during the seven hours, right that you have a child, when during the 17 that you don't, from 3 pm to 8 am the next day, those are some of the exposures that are taking place. That's a difficult thing to work with.

Mrs. Erin Kay:  Yes, and one of the beautiful things about Ben Lippen is we definitely work as a partnership with our parents, and why we're so thankful that we're having these conversations with you, because it's helping to strengthen that partnership so that we can have consistency between home and school and school and home. So thank you for that. All right, so as we wrap up this episode, I'm going to ask the same question I've asked in our last two. So we've just gone over a lot of information about these emerging digital issues. So what would you say to the parent that is so thankful for this information, but they don't know where to start?

Mr. Chris McKenna: Well, I'm going to say the same thing, because I want to keep things really simple, right? So the enemy wants a parent listening to this to feel overwhelmed and do nothing. So I'll say the same thing that I said last time because, as I said in the very first episode, I want us saying the right things and important things to our kids so often that they roll their eyes and are annoyed by it. So I'm going to do the same exact thing. I'm going to model that behavior. Pick one thing and learn it. Pick one thing, that's it. Pick one thing, whatever it was that I just shared, and then figure out a way to have a conversation about that thing with all of your children in an age-appropriate way. So as a part A and a part B, pick one thing and then talk about it.

Mrs. Erin Kay: Yes.

Mr. Chris McKenna: Talk about it.

Mrs. Erin Kay: And as adults we don't lose that need to hear things on repeat. So thank you so much for that. Alright, so where can people find more about Protect Young Eyes?

Mr. Chris McKenna: You can visit us online. You can also just at protectyoungeyes.com. You can find us on major social media platforms. We share a lot. Everything that I've shared in this episode you would find in some way shared through social media, and I also want to invite all Ben Lippen families. If you're struggling not knowing where to begin, you don't know how to set up a router, whatever it might be, we have a community of like-minded parents who get tech support, who get all the one-on-one assistance that they want. Abby from my team monitors that. She's my community care lead and we call that "The Table". So you can come to The Table, ask your questions and we'll solve things there together. Those are the three ways. So through the website, through social media, just kind of passively consuming some of that. But then also, if you've got deeper issues and deeper questions, meet us at The Table.

Mrs. Erin Kay: Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you for being with us today and we look forward to engaging with you on the next episode.