By Movieguide® Staff
Pastor Josh Howerton says his job as a father is to be “watchful” and protect kids from harmful media content.
“Your job as a parent, very frankly…is to calibrate the consciences of your kids so that things that are good, right and true feel good, right and true, and so that things that are perverse, wicked, evil and destructive feel perverse, wicked, weird, evil and destructive,” he said in a recent episode of his “Live Free” podcast.
He said he and his wife “have sought to raise our kids in a radically heteronormative home where they do not, especially when they’re very young, they don’t see commercials with same-sex couples in them.”
“One thing that we do as dads being watchful is, we’re watching ‘How is the enemy trying to devour my family, and what I’m not going to do is stand passively by and just let the serpent get my family without me doing something about it,’” Howerton continued.
Related: Pastor Calls On Parents to Exercise Media Discernment After Screening Pixar’s TURNING RED
He then addressed his listeners, saying, “What we need to do with our kids when demonic, evil ideas are trying to come for our kids — my job as a dad is to be watchful, know how the enemy’s coming and go, ‘No, no, no man…you don’t get my kids.’”
Howerton isn’t the only one encouraging parents to screen their children’s content for harmful messages and ideologies.
“I believe that every parent — not just a pastor, but a parent — has a mandate to actually screen material,” Pastor Mike Signorelli told CBN’s Faithwire. “Because every single device you have in your home is a portal, either a window into the things of God or, unfortunately, things that I believe are demonic.”
Texas Pastor David Marvin has also warned parents to be vigilant about the messages their children see in TV shows and movies — including fairy-tale ideas of marriage.
“You’ve been discipled by Disney from the time that you were 5 years old. It’s true,” he said. “Messages about fairy tales and love and what to look for in the hero, and they lived happily ever, have been ingrained in your mind and my mind from the very first breath that you took.”
Marvin continued, “Every person who has ever been married, they quickly learn that marriage doesn’t change your loneliness. Marriage will fix your singleness. But it cannot fix your loneliness because that is an internal, soul-level, only-Christ-fixable problem.”
Movieguide® founder and publisher Dr. Ted Baehr has also written extensively on this topic, telling parents, “A child’s worldview is not downloaded and installed in minutes…Each of the tasks necessary for a child’s development must be done correctly and in the right order, or the result can be a disaster.”
It’s important for parents to be aware of what their children are seeing in TV shows and movies — and to do their best to help them build critical discernment skills.
Read Next: Media Discernment Becomes More Important As Streamers’ Push For Children’s Content
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