Inappropriate Images

Good morning, Five Minute Families. What a week this has been! No matter which end of the political spectrum you are on, all of us are affected by the current events going on around us. Sometimes, we can live in blissful ignorance, at least for a time, but we are impacted whether we realize it or not. One thing that impacts us daily is what is allowed to appear on the screens and devices we have all around us-in our hands, hanging on our walls, sitting on our desks, even playing in fast food restaurants. Please note that to stay family-friendly, we will be speaking a bit in code, but Five Minute Families need to make a plan and be prepared to deal with inappropriate images and explicit media, no matter the age of their children. There are times when we are exposed, or accidentally expose someone we love, to images that we should not see outside of a covenant marriage. Just last week, we sat down to watch a movie that we thought would be ok to watch with our kids. Spoiler alert… it wasn’t. One image popped up. It was fairly benign compared to the pictures that float around in commercials these days, but it was still more than a young person needs to see outside of marriage. Because of our own desensitization, we wrongly did not immediately turn the movie off. When the second image popped up, we shut it off. I apologized to our children, but I knew to begin praying for their protection. During the height of the Netflix controversy, which was also last week, having older kids as well, our younger ones are exposed to conversations they often do not understand, so they have heard about the young girls’ dance movie controversy. They are curious, and it doesn’t help that many of you expressed outrage AND still shared the offensive picture on your social media pages, pages that your friends may have been scrolling with their kiddos nearby, and possibly hanging over their shoulders. One picture, one short, one movie, can stick in the mind of a child and confuse them for years. It can become the catalyst to a lifetime