Our Internet Scare + God’s Faithfulness – How My 8 Year Old Son was Nearly Exposed to Explicit Content Online
If there’s one thing I have learned in the last nine years of being a mom… it is that there is no such thing as “one size fits all” parenting. What works for one family may not be what is the best fit for the next. As you read through our experience I hope that you come away with the truth that the Holy Spirit, your “momma instinct”, that little nudge inside of you can be trusted. This is a story of a very close call that we had via technology and what we learned from it.
Using screens responsibly in our home is not something my husband and I thought much about before we had children. We cancelled our cable subscription shorty after our first child, Clark, was born. Honestly it was more to save money than it was because of the danger of cable programming. Once he was around two or three years old, we followed the example of other parents around us, and gradually started allowing him to watch age appropriate things on our iPad. After all, there are lots of toddler apps and little shows that are geared to that age.
It wasn’t until YouTube Kids entered the picture when my “mom radar” began to sound. I ignored it several times over the next few months because he enjoyed watching the little programs that YouTube Kids had to offer. I knew there was something that felt icky about him seeing things that I wasn’t, and hearing things that I didn’t, but I honestly just pushed those feelings aside because “every mom allowed it”. It was the norm!
After a couple of months of being weirded out about the fact that Clark thought Ryan, (of Ryan’s Toy Review), was his actual friend, I started to listen to my intuition and heard the Holy Spirit a little more plainly; I finally started paying attention.
I remember very clearly God impressing on me to get rid of YouTube Kids specifically. I avoided that feeling for a while because I really didn’t want to confront my three-year-old. Once I finally did, it was easier than I thought! He simply looked at me and said, “OK momma”, when I told him we were not gonna be watching YouTube Kids anymore. That was it… We moved on and never looked back!
That tiny experience gave me the confidence I needed to begin regulating technology in our home and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide me in that area of parenting. I knew in that moment that I didn’t have to do what everybody around me was doing. God had given Adam and me, as parents, power over our home and over our children to decide what worked best for our family.
A few years later when Clark was 7, and Penelope was 4, they used that same old iPad for games every once in a while and played around with it here and there. We eventually downloaded some sort of program that was very similar to YouTube Kids (I can’t remember what the app was called). I justified it in my mind because it wasn’t the same EXACT app that God told me to shut down before, I thought it would be different this time. The uneasy feelings were there, but I put them aside when my kids begged me to download it because their friends had it, and it was “so fun”. After looking through it and feeling like it looked OK, I allowed it. The first couple of weeks I felt a little bit unsure about it, but I kept allowing them to watch the little shows in moderation. Finally, the Lord woke me up one morning and I knew I had to do something about it.
Before I even had a chance to address it that day, Clark called me to his room in tears. He confided in me and told me that he had seen something on that app that had scared him. Of course it was an app for kids, but it was not something he had ever seen before. Apparently it was a show that must have been for older children, and there was a man wearing a scary mask of some sort. I’m sure it could be argued away as “innocent” but it had scared my child and that’s really all that mattered to me!
Once I talked with him quite a bit and prayed over him, I felt the same guilt and the weight of my disobedience, but once again God gave me another level of confidence in the technology area of parenting. Also in that moment, I felt extremely blessed that God had warned me and showed me that I could trust him with the most vulnerable, tangible, and practical parts of parenting. I vowed I would NEVER put my guard down again, I was done! Needless to say, we got rid of that app and a few months later the iPad totally crashed.
Here’s where it gets scary, and a little unbelievable honestly. The summer of 2020… The never-ending summer of 2020 is when things got much too close for comfort in the area of technology. Here’s a little back story… My sweet husband upgraded my phone the Christmas before, so I had my old phone laying around. Once quarantine hit in March of that year and we had to start virtual school, we needed as many screens as possible. Both Clark and Penelope were doing online school and it required several devices to keep up. I broke out my old phone to help with that. Later that spring, once school was out and Clark saw that phone laying around, he asked if he could download a baseball game to play on it. It was summer, and it seemed harmless, so I allowed it.
That game turned into another game, which turned into another game, and another. Obviously he only was allowed to play on it one or two hours in a day, so it was never a real issue; Until it was. The more I saw him with it in his hands during that hour or two, the more it did not sit well with me, again.
One day I clearly heard the Holy Spirit tell me that I needed to take the phone away, and go back to the way things had been for the years prior. Once again I ignored it, and just let it go. I had forgotten about the confidence and power the Lord had given me over these issues in my home. Totally forgotten. I continued to justify it because he had grown up over the last few years since our last incidence. After all, he knew the rules and he was not allowed to go on Safari and just surf the Internet. There was no social media on the phone and it seemed pretty safe.
One afternoon something felt really off with him and he seemed a little more obsessed with the phone than usual. He asked for a little more time on it and got annoyed with me when I told him no. It just didn’t feel right. We ended up arguing and I told him to give me the phone right then. I was clearly angry, so when he hesitated I knew something was up. I grabbed the phone and saw that he was on YouTube. He knew he was not allowed to be on YouTube and there was no YouTube app even installed on it!
Apparently one of the games that I had allowed, prompted the player to click a link to see training videos and/or game secrets that, of course, were on YouTube. He was innocently watching it, but also knew that he was not supposed to be on YouTube. He hadn’t seen or heard anything that was inappropriate but I knew that the freedom of a handheld device “away from mom” was too much of a temptation for him. It ultimately led him to disobedience, and sin.
Once again, I felt guilty and vowed to never allow handheld devices back in. I was so grateful the Lord protected him, and we didn’t discuss it again. I think a little part of him was grateful that I relieved him of a responsibility he was not old enough to handle in the first place.
Here’s where it gets really dark. Several months later we were hit by Hurricane Laura… And then a few weeks after that, we were hit by Hurricane Delta. We stayed here for Hurricane Delta and tried to document as much of it as we could. During that time, my husband’s phone got wet and basically went haywire. Because of the storms, nothing was open and no one was available to fix his phone right away. That night we remembered that we had that old phone in a drawer somewhere and it would really be a help to Adam since he was without one otherwise.
Once we got it charged up, my husband and I started to clear the history and delete apps to maximize storage. The phone had been turned off for several months, and you could see where the search history ended. The very last day that Clark had used the phone was June 10th, the day I took it from him.
When we got into the search history, there was an alert on June 9th that the phone had been compromised and/or “hacked”. That seemed strange so we kept scrolling. In the hours after the alert message, there were several unopened web messages from sites that were clearly pornography pages. After scrolling past those, we saw Clark’s innocent activity on the YouTube gaming channel that he had been on when I took the phone. There’s no indication that he saw anything from the pornography sites as none of it had been opened, and we feel confident that the Holy Spirit has confirmed that after a lot of prayer.
However, this was a total reality-check and example of God’s mercy for us as mommas. It pains me to think how close those images and that information was to his little fingertips. It makes me sick to my stomach that something so vile could’ve been in the hands of my child. I know that if his eyes would have seen any of it, his life would’ve been changed forever.
Had I not been confident enough because of my past experiences, and sensitive enough to the voice of the Father, I don’t even wanna think about what would’ve happened. I believe that the “smallish” issues we had in the past, helped to build my faith in this area, preparing me for June 10, 2020.
I’m sharing this with you because I want to communicate the importance of your “intuition” and your “inner voice” which is the voice of the Holy Spirit if you’re a believer. He can be trusted…in everything, always.
This lesson can be applied to technology or any other areas of parenting and life in general. This is not a post about how you should use technology in your home, limitations or parameters. It is a post about the voice of our Creator. The Heavenly Father that loves our children more than we do. He’s there. He’s speaking and wants to parent your children in a beautifully perfect way. It won’t look like everybody else, it may feel strange, but just trust Him!
Bless your heart if you made it this far momma! As always, feel free to comment here or message me on social media if you have any questions or want to chat! xo
