A Christian family guide to making morally and spiritually responsible decisions about movies, TV, and multimedia.
This is more than just another book about the media. It will help you turn your children’s hearts away from the negative and addictive influences of the media . .. and toward God and family.
You will learn step-by-step how to teach your children to develop discernment, wisdom, knowledge, and understanding about movies, television, electronic games, and the all other media of entertainment and communication.
This will enable your children to use and enjoy the mass media of entertainment without succumbing to the vain imaginings, enchantments, and temptations of the media mindset. You will equip them with the intellectual and spiritual tools they need to deal with all the media input that confronts them.
The Media-Wise Family approach has been tested on children and parents for more than two decades, and more than 90 percent of those who have been taught this method of discernment have found it effective. For example, at the 1993 World Changers Conference for 1,000 teenagers, 98% committed to base their media decisions on the discernment tools that they learned in this course. Also, many top media executives have said that they have changed the way they view the media because of this process.
Our families, and especially our youth, are being corrupted and destroyed by the powerful transformational influences of the mass media of entertainment.
Even our churches have been unable to give their members, especially their youth, help in dealing with the emotive images and idols of our entertainment culture. In fact, many churches are clueless about the extent of the problem in their congregations, while other churches have opted for anything goes.
As a result, the children have suffered, and the parents are confused and often clueless as to how to deal with the problem.
Like most of the books that have addressed the problem, many leaders who are attempting to address the problem have no solution except for parents to rearrange the furniture in their living rooms, or play Scrabble® with their children rather than watch TV (these are good ideas, but they do not offer a comprehensive solution)
Part of the reason for this cluelessness is the fact that there has been a dumbing down of the country by the self-esteem, values clarification, and some other recent education fads which dispense with the fundamentals of classical education and focus on politics correctness and egalitarianism. The consequence of these educational experiments can be seen clearly in the church. At the time of the American Revolution, the colonial church was praised for being highly Literate with most of the churchgoing population reading and writing English, Latin, Greek, and at least one other language. Today, many experts are told to edit and adapt their communications to a fifth-grade level for church consumption.
This dumbing down has prevented many concerned Americans from developing the necessary discernment to use the media properly, rather than being used by it.
Teaching children discernment is difficult for many parents because they:
DO NOT watch the movies, hear the records, or play the games that engage their children.
DO NOT understand the cognitive, psychological, and spiritual impact of the mass media on their children.
DO NOT understand that their children view the media syntactically in terms of the visual, aural, and emotional elements of the media (such as the action and adventure in movies and rhythm and beat in music), while parents usually see the media semantically in terms of meaning, message, and moral implications (such as the sex, violence, language, and message in a movie and the obscene lyrics of a rap song), while reviewers critique it aesthetically in terms of their artistic elements, and very few of them understand the other person’s perspective.
DO NOT understand how the mass media of entertainment influences their children at various different stages of cognitive development.
DO NOT comprehend the principles behind teaching discernment and media awareness other than discussing a particular tel vision program or locking the television in an closet and then playing board games or going for walks.
