Don't buy your kids a smartphone for Christmas

Dear parents,

This Christmas, please do not buy your kids porn!

Now, what do I mean by that? I mean that, every Christmas, many, many parents buy their children a smartphone or an iPad for Christmas.

Your kids, if you have kids of that age, have probably been begging for one. Almost every kid wants a smartphone or wants an iPad, not because they want to call people or text people, but because they want access to the internet.

Let me just give you a couple of reasons why this is a terrible idea.

For the last 13 years I've speaking on the issue of pornography to young students right across Canada and the United States, and even at times in Europe. And what I have found is that, over and over and over again, we see that kids are accessing pornography on their smartphones and getting addicted at increasingly young ages.

In Christian schools the average age of first exposure to pornography is going down every year. I've spoken to about 3,000 students this year alone, and the average age of first exposure to pornography is Grade 6 (age 11–12). The average age of first exposure to pornography in Canada is age nine. It used to be far higher for Christian communities, but increasingly that's going down.

I've spoken in schools where it's common practice for parents to get kids their first smartphone when they're heading into Grade 9 (age 14–15) or 10 (age 15–16). And, when I speak to the grade before they get their smartphone, I find that the problem with pornography is far less than the grade immediately afterwards. And the factor is always the same.

The pornography companies recognise this and they've actually re-digitised all of their content to make sure it's easy to view on a phone and easy to look at.

And one of the things I want everybody to keep in mind is that these devices again are not simply just phones. They are access to everything; they are access to the entirety of the internet.

This would be the equivalent of, in 1985, if you had a house filled with unlocked closets and each of those closets were packed with pornography. That's the equivalent today of having a home filled with unlocked devices that do not have filters, that are not locked down. And you're just hoping that at no point is your child, in a moment of curiosity or temptation or even by accident, going to go onto a porn site or stumble across a porn site — or, increasingly, as kids send each other clips or send each other images — that they're not going to fall into temptation or fall into sin in that way.

When you give your kid a smartphone, you are relinquishing control of what they see, and even though some smartphones can be locked entirely down, very, very few parents know as much about this technology as their kids do. And I have gotten more calls than I can count in the last two years alone from parents who found that their kids, with all this time on their hands, managed to get around all the blocks and all of the filters and access porn anyway.

I've also heard from many parents who even said that their kid got addicted to porn as young as 11, 12 or 13 years old because they found an old smartphone in a junk drawer or somewhere in the house that nobody was using; and that they could take it, connect to the internet and then look at pornography that way.

Kids will say they need a phone because they want to be able to keep in touch with their parents, or because they want to be able to call their friends. I don't have any opinion on kids getting a phone that's used to text or to call.

My issue is with giving kids access to the internet, because over the last 13 years I've seen the massive amount of damage that this has done to kids in our Christian communities. I've talked to kids who are 15 years old and got addicted to pornography at age 5. I've spoken to Grade 11 classes (age 16–17) where every single girl in that grade struggled with porn at some point in the previous six months.

I remember vividly one kid putting up his hand in the middle of a presentation and he said: "If these smartphones are so dangerous, why do parents keep on giving them to us?"

I think that's a great question, and I think it's a question we should all consider when we're deciding this Advent Season what to get our kids for Christmas.

One of my friends put it really well. One parent asked him: "When do you give your child a smartphone?" His answer, I think, was perfect. He said: "Whenever you want their childhood to end."

Jonathon Van Maren (born 1988) is a Canadian Christian pro-life author, radio host and public speaker. His articles have appeared in First Things, National Review, The American Conservative and The European Conservative. He has published several books, including his latest: How We Got Here: A Guide to Our Anti-Christian Culture (2024).URL: How we got here His personal weblog is: Weblog The above article is a transcript of a four-minute video talk delivered by Van Maren on December 3, 2024. It can be viewed on both YouTube and Rumble.

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