From Strong Families = Strong Churches (Wake Forest, Aug 28–29, 2026). Scott Brown on technology, social media, and the cognitive weakening of the mind.

I want to talk about technology, social media, and cognitive decline of the mind that we're seeing here today. My text is Psalm 119 verse 37. Turn away my eyes from worthless things and revive me in your way. Now, this is a warning message here. It's become very clear that this brave new technological world is having a profound impact on the minds, on the thinking of our kids.

And it's related to games and social media, the assaults of algorithms, the artificial intelligence, the notifications, the personalized recommendations that that flood all of us really, but it's particularly being documented among our youth, causing addictive behavior, cognitive decline, the weakening of the memory, including dramatic rises in depression, and even suicide, really all over the world, but particularly here in America. And I know it's obvious that we're living in a different world than some of us grew up in, definitely a different world than I grew up in. The world that I grew up in, you had a television and there was four sources of news and your telephone was bolted to the wall and you pretty much had an embodied life. You actually were relating to the people that you know. And news traveled very, very slowly.

Now you hear of almost anything of any kind of dramatic nature that's controversial in seconds. And it's just so happens that if there's something controversial that anybody did, they are accused, tried, convicted, and sentenced and condemned by the internet mob within a matter of minutes. That's the world that we live in right now. It moves very, very quickly. And all of this can be transacted on your phone or your tablet or your computer.

Now, what's happening over the last probably five years particularly, there's been a flood of research, papers and books that are being written about the damage, particularly of smartphones and social media platforms that are affecting all of us, but particularly a younger generation. In fact, just last week, I'm sure you saw the announcement that Facebook met a lawsuit was resolved against Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Twenty-nine states brought lawsuits against this company, and they settled last week. It was really a landmark settlement over addicting children to their platforms. It's going to end up a $12 to $18 billion fine to this company because of the damage that these platforms have really just very clearly done to children.

And in the lawsuit there's some really interesting provisions. You know Facebook is saying they're gonna impose two hour daily limit for anybody under 18, two hours per day cumulatively across Facebook and Instagram. Messaging and certain long form videos excluded from more than two hours, according to the calculation. Midnight to 6 a.m. There'll be a shutdown.

Notifications will be shut off at night for minors. There will be school hour restrictions 8 to 3 p.m. On weekdays. Forced interruptions of endless scrolling, 15 minutes of continuous use. They'll give a notice.

I'm sure that will stop them. That will stop all of us, wouldn't it? If you get a notice after 15 minutes. Well, and then there's a 60 minute notice and there's a 90 minute notice. Well, I guess you can ignore them if you like, but beauty and cosmetic filters are being restricted.

They're just all kinds of restrictions or at least provisions that are supposedly going to emerge as a result of this this lawsuit. One qualification and maybe is important to say, the whole lawsuit is, is still requires court approval. And of course, Metta has not admitted any wrongdoing. But what you find is these same kind of restrictions of smartphones are being imposed by nation states all over the world. For example, Australia, Norway, the UK, Austria, Poland, Slovenia, France, they've imposed certain restrictions and time caps, force pauses, nighttime shutdowns, things like that.

And the Problems are really being documented all over the place. The American Academy of Pediatrics this year was just warning against games and social media and algorithms and artificial intelligence and the constant notifications and recommendations that come, you know, through these platforms. It's just a constant press on the minds of all of us with auto-play, with, You know, endless feeds, rewards, personalized recommendations, the algorithms are chasing you down. They're chasing your kids down. And the brain is on the receiving end.

Here's what the American Academy of Pediatrics has said, children and adolescents are highly responsive to novelty, reward and social feedback. At the same time, the systems for inhibition, judgment, delayed gratification and impulse control are still developing. On one side is a brain learning how to regulate attention and resist impulses. And what they're saying is that all of this is harming their attention span. There are many people who are saying that this generation's children are dumber than the previous generations.

Working memory is harmed. Contemplation is harmed. Imagination is harmed. Personal relationships are harmed. As people have all these friends that they don't even know and they don't even see.

They just get, you know, a few characters here and there from them and you have information without careful processing. They identify multitasking and skimming and scanning. These have affected all of us in one way or another, most likely. They have me, for sure. But The greatest negative impact is on perseverance and cognitive growth.

In days past, you read something and you memorized it and you recited it. But The smartphone generation is being trained for novelty and incessant interruptions, rapid switching from thought to thought, really without continuity, with constant stimulation that is affecting the brain. Now, how did all this happen? This is the technology generation. The researchers, and there are so many books about this that have been released in the last year.

It's incredible. Gen Z is called the technology generation. They were the first generation to grow up with round the clock access to the internet and even in their pockets. Gen Z would include Millennials born, follows the Millennial generation born between 1981 and 1995. Jonathan Haidt who wrote a book called The Anxious Generation, Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and as I will show you, unsuitable for children and adolescents.

He says that by the late 80s at the beginning of this transition from a play-based childhood, we saw a transition to a phone-based childhood. And the impact is dramatic. He documents it in his book, Anxious Generation. Depression among teens for girls, 144% rise from 2004 to 2020. For boys, 161% rise in depression.

Anxiety from 2008 to 2018, 134% anxiety, emergency room visits for self-harm up 188% since 2010, suicide rates up for boys, 91% for girls, 167%. So these are real factors that are playing into our culture. He says this, all this started with the advent of the smartphone introduced in June, 2010. These rises started in 2010. It's indisputable the curve and you know by 2016 you had 79% of teens owned a smartphone.

Children ages eight to 12, 28% were carrying around smartphones. Teens were spending an average of seven hours a day on their phones. So he calls this period from 2010 to 2015, get this, the great rewiring of childhood. Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast for adolescents over the course of just five years. You know Steve Jobs told us that the smartphone was going to change the world and it is.

He sums it up like this between 2010 and 2015, quote, the social lives of American teens moved largely into smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet activities. He says this great rewiring of childhood is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began early in 2010. He says it like this. The first generation of Americans who went through puberty with smartphones and the entire internet in their hands became more anxious, depressed, self-harming, and suicidal. We now call that generation Gen Z, in contrast to the millennial generation, which had largely finished puberty when the great rewiring began in 2010." That's from Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, his book.

It's a very interesting book. He talks about various harms that were done, social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. And he says that it's the people with the least willpower in their growing up years with the greatest vulnerability to manipulation. These were children and adolescents. And he says that this is the time when the frontal cortices were still large, highly undeveloped.

And he tells a story interesting in the book. He tells the story of, if fabricated, if you went into a store to buy a piece of technology for your 13 year old and you ask the employee in the technology section of the store how much time will they need to spend with this technology, and if they said, for pre-teens, 40 hours a week, for teens, 50 hours a week, You would walk out of the store. But we're not walking out of the store. Regarding attention fragmentation, I think this might be one of the critical matters. This has to do with the ability to stay on one mental road.

Have you ever felt that you had just been more distracted than ever in your life. You're jumping from one email, one text, one alert, you know, one video at a time. He says this, the average number of notifications on young people's phones from the top social and communication apps amounts to 192 alerts per day according to one study. The average teen who now gets only seven hours of sleep per night, therefore gets about 11 notifications per waking hour or one in every five minutes. He talks about addiction.

He says, when an addicted person's brain adapts by counteracting the effect of the drug, the brain then enters a state of deficit when the user is not taking the drug. If dopamine release is pleasurable, dopamine deficit is unpleasant. Ordinary life becomes boring and even painful without the drug. Nothing feels good anymore except the drug. Another author Lemke, she writes, the smartphone is the modern day hypodermic needle delivering digital dopamine for a wired generation.

So this whole world of instant information and constant attention drag is affecting. It's actually rewiring people's brains. Now we know that smartphones and social media is harmful for kids. We know that. But what can we do about it?

And how can I keep my child from screen addiction? Well, how about this? How can I keep myself from screen addiction? How can I help keep my child from becoming scatterbrained and unable to read and follow logical chains and listen to sermons? How can I keep my child from pornography?

We're not even talking about the pornographic problem. We're just talking about the brain rewiring of things that are lawful. OK? How can I keep my child from predators? How can I keep my child from predators?

How can I keep my child from foolish people that we don't know? How about foolish people that we do know? That they have instant access to like never before. Okay, I'm going to give you some recommendations. First of all, how are you doing as a parent?

It won't help your kids if you're constantly staring into your smartphone. There's some common recommendations from governments and high school administrators. I'll just give you some of them that municipalities or these public school systems are enacting. No smart phones before high school, no social media before age 16, phone free schools, you know to keep children from the looks and the likes and the shares and the re-shares and the memes, the constant barrage that goes on all day long. Tony Reinkie, several years ago, I wrote a book called 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You.

And he made several points. He said, first of all, we're addicted to distraction. He said, we lose our literacy. He said, we lose meaning. We lose our place in time.

And the smartphone creates an environment where You're in a world of constant solicitation. A constant checking creates a habit of distraction. Distraction creates an appetite for more stimulation. And the stimulation makes silence and actual face-to-face relationships uncomfortable. The loss of silence weakens contemplation.

The weakened contemplation diminishes reading and deep sustained thought and things like prayer and delight in actually being with human beings. Brett McCracken wrote a book about this as well. He says, the battle for your attention is ultimately a battle over who you will become and who you will worship. Will you see faces and hear actual voices and sing together and listen together and eat together and know the people who know us. So here's some recommendations.

First of all, check your own habits as an adult. Set up screen time rules in your home. That's a recommendation. Set up screen time rules in your home. That's a recommendation.

Set up screen time rules in your homes. I don't believe that kids should have smartphones and tablets and computers that have free access to the internet where they're messaging whoever they want and whoever wants to can message them. I'm just not in favor of it. I think it's very harmful. There's a pastor's wife at Capitol Hill Baptist Church where Mark Dever is who wrote a book about this.

She says, when parents hand a child a screen even for a limited amount of time each day they are working against their well-being. I just think you should consider that. She says, if you feed a baby cotton candy, it's not going to want to eat pears because it's lost the taste for them. The same is true of the virtual world. There is so much sensory, sensory overwhelm in the virtual world that it can dull the senses to the beauty and pleasures that we're supposed to experience in the natural world and because she's she's arguing that you should take your kids out of the virtual world completely and put them in the natural world.

That's what she's saying in her book. In her book, she quotes a sex trafficking law enforcement officer. He says this, smartphones are an ecosystem where traffickers and predators have unfettered access to young people. He explains, when we were growing up our parents would lock the doors and windows at night that kept the bad guys out. You can lock the doors all day long, all night long, and the bad guys can still get through the airwaves.

That's just the reality of it, he says. So I think the first is set up screen time rules in your home. Second, focus on self-control. The number one task of teaching a toddler is self-control. That's the number one task.

And they have to exercise self-control in everything, particularly the kind of media that they consume. Here's a reality. Little video game players grow up to be big video game players. Kids should stay off personal social media completely until they're mature enough. What they post on social media will never go away.

I'm not in favor of putting your kids on social media and having them do cute things and getting a bunch of likes for it. I think it's dangerous to them. I think it messes with their brains. I think it's really, really harmful to make your kid a social media star. It's very bad for them on a number of levels.

We can talk about that later, but I'm just very disturbed when parents allow that to happen with their kids. Here's a third. Be cautious and vigilant and read your kids' chat groups. You know parents who regular you know ensure that they're having meaningful conversations. Should they be using their text groups just to say one silly thing after another and get interrupted 50 times a day by, by, oh well okay, you know, even your family members, if they're just getting interrupted all the time by the next funny thing, the next five word response.

Is that a way you really want your kids to grow up to be just constantly being pushed and drawn away from the actual world that they're living in? Is that the world you wanna create? If you just allow them unfettered access, that's probably what you're going to get because as we know, foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child. They like it just as much as everybody else does. But it's not that good for them.

Silly conversations, they're maybe harmful conversations. Maybe predatory conversations from people on the outside that you don't even know. Maybe predatory conversations from people that you know. This is just the danger of this private internal world that has been created. Here's another recommendation.

Focus your kids on the real embodied world, the natural world, outdoor activities, the people that they know who can interact with face to face turning away from a virtual world to a real world. Here's another recommendation. There are good uses of smartphones and things like that. Every grandma knows that. I'm going to call that a good use.

You know Families can communicate in a really blessed way that way as well. As long as there's there's some level of of wisdom in using that. I think that can really be a blessing. Sending pictures to your family. I do it all the time.

Something funny, something neat, something interesting. I'm probably gonna send it to my kids. And so I think there are a blessed use but there has to be some level of control in it. My text, my text, turn away my eyes from worthless things. Ephesians 5 15, see then that you walk circumspectly not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil.

Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not be drunk with wine, which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." So there's your warning. It was a warning message to take heed to this world that we're living in. It has changed. And I think parents have to be very vigilant and actually train their children a little differently than previous generations.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word that directs us to the things that are true and the things that are beautiful. We thank you that you teach us how to live differently in this world for your own glory. I pray that you give these parents wisdom. I pray that you give these children wisdom as they engage in a life in the real world.

Amen.