Online Safety for Your Teens on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face.

Last week on the podcast, I drew our attention to the article in Time magazine about

adolescent anxiety and depression, and we talked about a way to think through some of those issues,

but I promised more practical steps in the weeks and months that follow. And this week,

I do want to talk about one of those things, and that is the issue of online safety for teens.

One of the common denominators in the phenomenon of anxiety and depression that has been reported

by Time Magazine that is experienced in the life of our teens is the fact that they have so much exposure online.

They're seeing so many things that are harmful to their souls on their phones, on the internet, on Facebook.

And so we want to talk this week on the podcast about how to protect our teen's safety online.

This is an issue that I have thought a lot about. And a text that sort of informs my thinking on

it is Psalm 119, verse 37, and it says, turn my eyes from looking at worthless things and give me

life in your ways.

This is a prayer from the psalmist that we would turn away from things that are harmful and

things that are worthless, and we would turn our eyes to the life in the Word of God.

And so I just want to have that text be a banner over several suggestions that I would give to parents this week as you try to protect your kids online.

One recommendation that we can keep our minds on as we turn our eyes from looking at worthless things, is the importance of parents in protecting

their own personal purity. I have had the opportunity to talk to so many young men in their teens

and 20s who got introduced to online pornography through their fathers. They saw something on their dad's phone,

they saw something on the internet history, and that led them down a rabbit hole of pain for

years. The reality is, is that when we as parents are protecting our own personal purity,

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