MORE LOVING AND TEACHING

In the last chapter, we talked about lovingandteaching. In this chapter, we’re going to talk about that subject even more. We couldn’t possibly talk about it enough.

Before a church meeting years ago, a friend picked up the printed program and said, “I guess we’re going to sing the same old hymns.” In a tone of mild reproof, I said, “Yep, and we’re going to hear the same old gospel too.” Judging from our behavior, we all have a need to hear the same truths—and feel the “same old” Spirit—over and over, all our lives, in different ways and in different circumstances.

All these childhood problems,

are expressions of PAIN. With that pain in mind, we must never lose sight of loving our children and helping them to experience the healing that comes from OUR love and from the love of the Savior of the world. As we love and teach them, they heal, the pain stops, and then these behaviors just naturally tend to become useless and disappear.

In Chapters Two, Three, and Five, we talked extensively about the nature of addiction. We easily recognize addiction to alcohol and drugs, but those are just a scratch on the surface of the pervasive cancer of addictions found throughout our lives, our families, and in the world.

Remember that an addiction is any behavior or substance that negatively affects our genuine happiness, and which we cannot easily stop, which would include the obsessive use of alcohol, drugs, anger, being right, defensiveness, controlling, withdrawal, and on and on. Sometimes I ask the people in a large audience to raise their hands if they’re addicts. It’s a trick question because only a few 12-step people raise their hand, when the truth is that nearly everyone in the room—like 99%—is addicted to some substance or behavior. After I list the variety of addictions, I ask for a show of hands of those NOT addicted to ANYTHING. No hands.

Screen Addiction

For a moment, let’s look at addictions to gaming, phones, or other electronic devices. We’ll just call this SCREEN ADDICTION. There is so much overlap in this general addiction category because we use phones to play video games, to use porn, and to feed our addiction to social media, YouTube videos, and more. Screens (1) ARE an addiction, and (2) they make so many other addictions possible.

At the end of Chapter 5, I talked about the dangers of screens and how we deceive ourselves about the seriousness of our children indiscriminately using them. More and more scientists are saying that screen addiction is as serious as alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. Every bit. It has a measurable, significant effect on the brain and our behavior, self-worth, and relationships.

I’m not here to prove that screens can be harmful. We all KNOW in our hearts that screens quickly become a very serious distraction to the emotional and spiritual health of our children. And scientific studies have proven beyond all doubt that the effect of screens on the young, developing brain is serious, even horrifying. If you’re here watching this, it’s very likely that you have an addicted child.

But even though you KNOW the addictive properties of screens, let me briefly refer to a study by the National Institutes of Health, a highly prestigious scientific organization, where they studied 4500 children, ages 8 to 11. Their experts set well-researched guidelines proven to contribute to healthy behavior in children:

• 9-11 hours of sleep per night
• at least one hour of physical activity per day
• less than two hours on screens per day

Very simple guidelines. No question about them. Kids need these things in order to be physically and mentally healthy. No surprise, they found that kids who met these guidelines performed better in school and on cognitive tests of brain function. Let’s make this plain: children’s BRAINS WORKED BETTER if they had enough sleep, got some exercise, and didn’t overuse screens.

Guess how many children in the United States met all three well-established guidelines for the health of their brains? 1 in 20. I thought the number would be low, but even I was astounded by this. The parents of only ONE child in twenty cared enough to ensure that their children’s brains were developing in a healthy way, during a time when the brain is establishing patterns that are unlikely to be broken for a lifetime. This isn’t shocking anyone yet? Another way of saying this is that 19 of 20 children have significant risks to their health. Nearly 1 in 3 children met NONE of the criteria.

This is an epidemic health problem that makes COVID look like a broken fingernail, and yet, where is the outcry insisting that WE parents change our parenting? No outcry. In fact, absolute quiet. And the study demonstrated that the “limitation of screen time” was THE most important variable as far as negative effect on brain function. But at least 1 out of 3 kids through the teen years goes to sleep with their phone physically ON them, not just nearby. And they use it within 5 mins before sleep and within 5 mins of getting up—both behaviors recognized as harmful to their brains. Screen addiction is truly an epidemic, and I’m not naturally an alarmist.

What if we learned that in our community, the water supply had excess lead in it, and it was harming the brains and health of our children? What would we do? Oh my, we would stop drinking the water IMMEDIATELY, bring in bottled water, completely change the water treatment, fire a bunch of people, conduct an investigation, provide funds for research, sue the government, and on and on.

How do I know we would do all that? Because we HAVE. In recent memory, all that happened in Flint, Michigan, and they did all those things to correct a problem that—while absolutely unacceptable and dangerous—ended up causing measurable harm to FAR FEWER children than are affected EVERY DAY by screen use IN FLINT, Michigan, much less the entire country.

But who is taking action about screen use? I can tell you who: phone manufacturers, video game designers, porn producers, online sellers of every description, marketing experts, and even behavioral scientists, ALL of whom are doing everything they can to INCREASE screen time, to increase the damage to our children’s brains. And while this horror continues and escalates, we stand by making feeble attempts—or none—to “limit” screen time a bit, ignoring the effects that are accumulating before our eyes with no possibility of denial.

Why are almost none of us seeing this addiction in a serious way? We have launched massive campaigns against alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and firearms. We have even launched a “War on Drugs.” We have an entire federal government agency called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). Where is the Bureau of Protecting Children from the Addictions to Screens Being Actively Promoted by Uncounted Manufacturers and Others Who Make Money From Using Our Children? How are we not recognizing the need for PARENTS to do this job?

Why We are Not Recognizing Screen Addiction

Nobody could possibly have known this was coming. 20 years ago. It wasn’t even a thought. Not even 10 years ago. I did considerable research when I wrote the first Real Love in Parenting book in 2005. I found NOTHING on screen addiction. Now “devices” are everywhere for our children—in every hand, on their laps, sitting on tables, or wherever, including being charged while lying on their skin at night while they’re asleep.

I am NOT going to wow you with more statistics about how common this addiction is. For one thing, just the data for good studies takes 1-3 years to accumulate, and then in the submission and approval process, another 6-12 months is eaten up. So any statistics I give you are already years out of date, with an addiction growing at an astonishing speed. All the numbers are out of date—by a lot. Oh, maybe one statistic. Recently, a survey of hundreds of parents indicated that 70% of PARENTS admitted that one or more of their children is addicted to screens, and the parents usually downplay the problems with their children. And this addiction is just getting warmed up.

Right now, 95% of kids are playing video games by age 2. That number won’t change by a lot, because it can’t. We’re essentially at 100%. I can tell you that as I personally travel, sit on a plane, eat at a restaurant, check into a hotel, whatever, I commonly see families seated together while they are all on their own screens, with nobody talking. You’ve seen it too many times.

Many schools now forbid teachers from removing phones from children who are using them IN CLASS. Can you imagine the learning happening in such classes? Yes, you can. The class looks like a gathering of zombies: all the kids are staring at their screens, and the teacher has given up and is on his/her phone.

I have talked to a great many CEOs, who are finding it increasingly difficult to find kids who can do anything more than “talk” on social media and score in a video game. The executives can hardly believe the lack of interest in workers finding a job.

Just the other day, I talked to a mother who told me that when she took the phone from her son as a consequence for his defiance and complete inattention to life, he fell to the ground, curled up in a ball, crying, and sucked his thumb. He was 23. You have a choice: you can do something about your child’s screen use now, or you can watch them sucking their thumb and crying at age 23. That doesn’t seem like a hard decision.

Teens who spend only the AVERAGE number of hours per day on electronic devices—compared to those who use them for only an hour or less—run a 66 percent higher risk of “feeling sad or hopeless, seriously considering suicide, making a suicide plan, or making a suicide attempt.” Would you knowingly increase your child’s risk of suicide by 66%? And yet 80-90% of parents are doing exactly that.

That particular study described ONLY a relationship between screen time and suicidal behaviors.

A great many other studies demonstrate that more screen time leads to:

• Isolation
• Unhealthy relationships
• Social and emotional delays—meaning immaturity. It is common to see 6 YEAR social and emotional delays in teenagers immersed in screens. 6 years? 14-year-old children who have the maturity of 8-year-olds? Yes.
• Lost sense of personal control (Facebook, other social media, and other screen uses take over our children’s ability to think and make choices.)
• A tendency to manage anxiety by escaping into fantasy (which makes healthy relationships and families impossible, as well as excellence in careers)
• Inability to form face-to-face “real” human relationships
• Decreased ability to find and keep jobs later in life

AND these factors are known to create a potential gateway to other addictive disorders.

Porn addiction, for example, is only the slightest step away from phone addiction. Same with gaming. Why? Because kids on screens are united by their escape into a Virtual World.

THAT is the greatest danger of all the screen addictions: Virtuality replacing Reality. When kids are in their virtual world, they feel in control—which they like—but they’re also being severely controlled. And whether they are controlling or being controlled, they are disconnected from reality, which includes the reality of the pure love of Christ, the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and any possibility of genuine happiness, which is our reason to be.

One day, my eye caught an advertisement for a video game: “This new game will keep you up all night. Warning: This new game is highly addictive!!” The GOAL of this game—and essentially all games—is addiction, more playing time, buying the next upgrade, buying rewards and skills, and whatever online. They hire specialized behavioral scientists to help them design a game to ADDICT people to its use—which produces BILLIONS of dollars. This is happening billions of times a day throughout the world—not just with games but with online sales, social media, and more—and our children are being assaulted and seduced every minute they are connected. Watch the documentary The Social Dilemma for an eye-opening exposure of how your children ARE the market of online sellers. They are openly the target of a great many people who want to use them.

But despite all the studies, what really matters is whether screen time negatively affects YOUR CHILD. If it does, regardless of the statistics, that’s a 100% incidence of addiction or potential addiction in your child.

The HONEST answers to these questions will reveal truths to you that you may have been avoiding.

Screen‑based technology is replacing written media (books). Only a few years ago, you had to buy books or check them out from the library. You had to carry them home. When you were finished reading a book, you had to replace it with another book. SO inconvenient by today’s standards.

But now screens are the norm for communication, and they are INSTANTLY available for a WIDE variety of activities, so children have increasingly high levels of access to screen‑based activities—ALL of them. So the technology itself is partly the culprit for this explosion of technology addiction.

Adolescents and young adults often—even usually—struggle developmentally with identity issues. They ask themselves, Who am I? What is my relationship to others and to the world? How do I fit in? Am I worthwhile? Communicating through screen-based technology allows them to “try on” new behaviors and identities in a hidden or secretive, or anonymous way before they decide who they are in a face-to-face relationship. This can lead to significant delays in actually developing a stable, independent identity. Without regular interaction with a stable, loving parent, how in the world can a child figure out who he is while inundated by the input of MILLIONS of people online who don’t know who they are either?

Because of the hidden, anonymous nature of screen‑based activities, adolescents and young adults are also able to fulfill their need for thrills and rule-breaking, so there is often a high incidence of high‑risk or immoral online activity—connecting with predators, addiction to porn, and way more.

I simply repeat: The dangers of screen addiction AT LEAST equal the dangers of alcohol, drugs, and tobacco.

The question for parents is this:

I wish I were exaggerating.

Would you stand by and do nothing while they were shooting up heroin or smoking crack in their rooms? That is not a rhetorical question. That IS what they’re doing with their minds and souls. When they’re using screens excessively, they ARE shooting up. I am NOT an alarmist. I deal with this every day. It’s likely that you do too.

Back to the question we asked a while ago:

Ah, yes, when something has a positive use, it is SO easy to rationalize having and using that thing, even though it has potential dangers.

So many things we use or see every day have their positive uses, but they are accompanied by the unintentional side effects or dangers: handguns, cars, and medications. The list of things that have positive and negative uses is endless.

So what are the reasons we use to rationalize having electronic devices, or screens?

• We’re keeping track of our families.

• News. Being aware shows that we’re engaged with the world. We must keep up with the latest tragedies, murders, and weather disasters. Whether any of that matters is another question.
• Political knowledge—how else could we be aware and know how to vote, right? But how many of us are addicted just to political talk shows, and does that make us happier and help us contribute more to the world? Or is it just more drama?
• We keep our schedules on devices. Good thing, right? And contact information
• Instant access to a knowledge of the world: You can Google everything you would ever want to know.
• What are rhino horns made of? How does a wing generate lift? Population of Shanghai?
• Mapping, GPS (life-changing)
• Purchase everything. (Way more than we need, fueled by psychologically charged ads and sharing of information about our purchases with EVERYONE)
• Reviews for hotels, restaurants.
• On and on and on. So many uses.

So, our screens DO have positive uses, but we can get the essential ones without the dangers. Remember books? We had access to all that positive information before screens. And there are phones now where kids can call or receive calls only from certain numbers. Without Internet usage. But we don’t buy those. We listen to our children tell us how they will be wise with a device they couldn’t possibly understand. We let them make their own choices about incredibly dangerous habits and information, and viewing material. It’s VERY much like listening to a child persuade us that they will drink and drive, BUT they will be very careful.

And that is true. EVERYBODY does it. Everywhere. During class, eating, traveling, and during church. Adults use this excuse too, and mostly unconsciously. So if EVERYBODY is doing a thing, how could it be bad?

Screen use is somewhat similar to the use of food, which is everywhere and has positive uses. Food can be good if consumed properly. If used badly, food can become a problem. So can AIR at sufficient depths while scuba diving. Everything has its good and bad qualities. It’s our job as parents to decide whether the mostly frivolous uses of phones are worth the horrifying and documented dangers. This does not seem like a difficult decision, and yet we keep ignoring the evidence. I maintain with some confidence that it would be safer to allow children to carry handguns to school—only small-caliber pistols, of course—than to possess phones and unlimited access to other screens.

Back to a definition from Chapter Two:

Addiction is not a disease. Addiction is a response to pain, and we can become addicted to ANYTHING that temporarily decreases the pain we feel from the relative absence of Real Love. Screen time definitely distracts us from the core pain of not feeling loved. It has all the usual properties common to addictions. Here are a few properties of screens that make addiction easy, and also tend to perpetuate it:

But we let all of this happen. Why?

Which brings us to a fourth reason we are not recognizing and addressing screen addiction:

In most cases, YOU are in enough pain that you’re barely coping.

And you’re in enough pain that you can’t clearly see what addictions are doing to your children—in this case the use of phones and other devices. I have never seen parents who are fully connected to the pure love of Christ themselves who are failing to address the dangers of all addictions to their children.

Do you want to stand by while your children decrease their pain in this way—this apparently innocent, universally available way? Will you choose to ignore all the negative effects we’ve discussed? If you don’t make a concrete decision to do something about it, your kids WILL likely be affected in all these ways. You may not see it immediately—we rarely do with addictions—but the harmful effects DO happen.

So instead of loving and teaching our children, we simply nag them to stop looking at their screens and pay attention to us. But if they don’t feel truly loved by us, why SHOULD they pay attention to us? It’s almost an absurd expectation on our part, for at least two reasons:

1. The screens are FAR more interesting.
2. WE give them the message that they’re flawed, mistaken, and disappointing, while screens generally don’t do that. WE are more painful to our kids than screens.

The Biggest Drawback of Screens—Withdrawal and Isolation

What is the biggest drawback of screens—of phones, games, porn, social media, and more?

I alluded to it earlier. When our children use screens, they withdraw into a virtual world.

Many sci-fi books and movies have been produced about this subject, where we see the entire society withdraw from the “real world” into a virtual world. All day. To the point that they have little to no life outside of virtuality. Right now, many of us are NOT far from that fiction. A recent major movie made this point well: Ready Player One

In the sci-fi stories, people withdraw to the point that eventually they download themselves into computers and leave their bodies behind. We’re not far from that. Many people are completely immersed in their devices. I know more and more people who have no life whatsoever outside a screen. I know 12-year-olds who have quit going to school, who never talk to their families, who have effectively disappeared from life. No exaggeration. And then they get older, and it continues as they become 40-year-old men (some women) living in Mom’s basement. They’re GONE. They’re alive but not.

Complete withdrawal from life is obviously death, but the partial withdrawal into a virtual world is just as bad. If we go in and out of virtuality, we can deceive ourselves that we’re here in the world “sometimes,” so our addiction must not be too bad. This is exactly like the alcoholic who reasons that he’s not really an addict because he’s never missed a day of work. But he’s never present emotionally either. All addictions deceive us like this.

Addicts of all kinds are utterly compulsive. The user can’t quit. Actually look at your children when you tell them to put their phones down. If they don’t do it immediately and willingly, they ARE already addicted to some extent, and if you ignore it or deny it, their addiction will worsen.

One of the worst effects of screens is that when people are in pain, screens provide a consistent and easy way out, so they NEVER have to deal with their pain. They never learn to find the real healing of love—from you and from God. They stay alone and unhappy all their lives. It becomes a kind of living death. It’s that serious.

Why Screen Addiction is So Difficult to Address

Let’s look at some other factors that make this addiction so difficult to address:

With devices, we “sort of” connect with all our friends and families, but comparing this kind of CONTACT—the better word—with genuine connection is like comparing HOLDING a book with READING it. With devices, we just touch the book of other people’s lives, maybe open a page, but generally we don’t do any serious reading or exchanging.

If we don’t know HOW to genuinely connect, texting and Facebook seem pretty real—which of course is the tragedy—so we keep doing it, and eventually we become certain that if we disconnect from the devices, we will also disconnect from these people who call themselves friends.

And it IS highly likely that if we leave our screens, these SUPERFICIAL friends WILL turn on us—and it can happen viciously in an instant. We can become social outcasts in a moment. Imagine all the talk on the devices around you if you disappear and appear to “shun” the evil people who remain addicted.

I’ve seen that happen to people who disconnect from the virtual world, and it’s not pretty. Yikes, who could deal with that level of rejection and abandonment? No wonder your kids are actually TERRIFIED of disconnecting. I’ve SEEN what happens when kids or adults disconnect, and often they ARE ostracized. You quickly discover what your relationship with someone was based on—a genuine connection or just the superficial and artificial party you’re having in a virtual world.

And here’s the gold hidden in all that fear. Only when we STOP using our devices as our main source of connection can we learn who our real friends and family ARE. Yes, if you and your kids quit maniacally texting and Facebooking, you’ll lose “Friends,” but then you’ll discover the sweetness of real connection with a few people. Your spiritual ears will open to the Real Love of these people and to the pure love of Christ. That can’t happen while you’re inundated with the buzzing of flies, which is what most device connection is.

With their attitudes and behaviors, many children now demonstrate a belief that they have a Divine right, a constitutional right, a birthright to carry their phones with them EVERYWHERE. And to use them when they want, and to have the latest phone the instant it’s released. The average teenager picks up their phone 60 times a day—keeping in mind that if they’re on it for an hour, that counts as ONCE. They LIVE there in that virtual world, and it’s having the effects of isolation and changes in the brain almost identical to the effects of porn—a subject we’re getting to.

When parents first begin to understand the use of consequences in loving and teaching their children, they will often remove a child’s phone privileges. It’s not uncommon for a child to bite back with some version of, “You can’t do that!” That’s called entitlement and arrogance. It’s declaring: “You can’t do this to ME. Do you not realize that I get EVERYTHING I want?”

This reaction from a child is more understandable when we realize that WE taught them to believe in their self-importance. They couldn’t BE addicted to screens unless we had unwisely given them the freedom to choose what they wanted before they understood the responsibilities that come with their choices. Screen addiction always, always involves a sense of entitlement.

You’ve all heard this excuse about everything: “Everybody”:

• Is going on the trip
• Will be at the party
• Is wearing this
• Has this kind of shoe
• Has the latest phone

And, after all, if everybody has it or does it, your child couldn’t possibly be the only one without it or who can’t do it. What would that say about you, the parent?

And they’re right, everybody has and uses their phones, including the parents. How could you be singled out as the one cruel, intolerant parent?

People in pain believe—mostly unconsciously—that THEIR pain entitles them to the attention and support and compliance of EVERYONE in the world. No kidding. Pain is very focusing in that way. Imagine yourself in the middle of a room where people are all having important conversations. But you walk in, fall, and break your ankle. You would instantly feel entitled to immediate attention from everyone because of your pain. Pain simply makes us selfish.

We don’t know how to genuinely heal their pain—with our own love and by helping them connect to the Atonement and pure love of Christ. So, we feel helpless, and we let them develop their own way of dealing with pain. Effectively, they raise themselves. They raise each other at school and on the Internet. We’re not there emotionally and spiritually, so they feel—and justifiably so—that they have a right to fill that vacuum.

They’re addicted to pain relief, but we fail to realize that WE are their DEALERS.

Who buys the phones to make them feel entertained and occupied? We do.

Who lets them sit in front of screens all day, because we don’t know what else to do? We do.

Who actually PUTS them in front of the screens from a young age, because we don’t know how else to productively occupy their time? We do.

No wonder they get addicted and have a hard time quitting. Their dealer lives in the house with them.

Screen Time Increases the Danger of Comparing

When they’re on social media, they compare how many friends they have to the friends their friends have. It’s a number. We can now QUANTIFY popularity.

They compare themselves to pictures of people who have spent hours to look perfect, or Photoshopped their pictures, or picked the best photo out of a hundred to post. And then they just feel worse about themselves after all the comparing.

Screen Time Increases Fear

Another effect of screens.

The most serious disease on earth today is FEAR: of pain, of being alone, of not being loved.

Screen time pours gas on the fires of FEAR that everyone has already. 

The advertisements everywhere, and messages on social media, and the news of the world tell kids that they have to look a certain way or they’re losers. And then they feel depressed, have eating disorders, are obsessed with their looks, and have plastic surgery at ages that are shockingly young.

Social media and news and games sell death, destruction, drama, and more—all variations on fear. The old newspaper adage is, “If it bleeds, it leads.” (In other words, fear sells.)

Look at the advertisements on your screen:

You MUST see what I’ve been saying about how the world markets its values everywhere.

You CAN’T miss it.

The Bottom Line on Addiction to Devices

Let me give you a bottom line on addiction to devices.

Recently, a good friend of mine attended the funeral of her best friend. During the funeral, she thought about what is important in life, and she realized how much time she and her family spend doing things that are NOT important. She spent a couple of days in bed, mourning the time and joy she had lost to her inattention as a parent.

On the third day, she walked into the living room, where her husband and two teenage children were sitting on different couches or chairs, utterly immersed in their devices. They didn’t even notice that she had come in.

She said, “I want your attention.” Even after being absent for a couple of days, she had to speak a couple of times before anybody lifted their head. That is the addictive nature of screens. She said, “I want a family meeting. Now.” Then she talked about what mattered to her, and what mattered in eternity, and that sitting on devices all day wasn’t one of those things, and would never contribute to achieving the important things.

“This is not living,” she said. “I want us to learn to live and really enjoy each other. We’re going to have more of these meetings.”

This mother decided that, finally, she was going to be a real parent, even though her children were older. To me, she is a hero. We’re not parenting enough or well enough. In fact, I recently read in a well-known newspaper that increasingly, we’re “outsourcing” parenting. We’re hiring people to come into our homes and potty train our children, to buy our children’s clothing, to put on birthday parties for them, and more. We’re hiring nannies more and more. I am NOT saying that all these things are always bad, only that we’re NOT making parenting the priority it deserves. To be blunt, when our children use screens, we allow them to be parented by whoever happens to enter any room they’re in, whoever participates in any discussion, and whoever plays any video game they’re playing.

VIDEO GAMING

This subject is worthy of a separate mention from screens, but only barely.

Like using social media, Internet surfing, YouTube binging, porn, and whatever else we do on electronic devices, video gaming dissociates us and our children from the reality of the world—and, more importantly, from the tree of love, the pure love of Christ.

Video gaming is one way to create virtual worlds. The games USE phones and other devices, which only naturally leads to other uses of those devices and further disconnection. The users naturally reason—quite unconsciously—like this: “Well, now that I’ve finished my game, I can play again and again,” then, “Wow, look at all the other things I can do on my device, and as long as I’m here . . .” And before they know it they’re buried so deeply in virtual worlds that they barely function when they’re VISITING the real world.

The games tend to be violent, addictive, progressively rewarding, and seductive. They are DESIGNED to be addictive. We talked about gaming a little before, but now with more context and therefore more understanding.

Global video game revenue is bigger than the income from the entire world’s movie industry, PLUS the revenues from all North American sports industries combined. (Dec 22, 2020)

For some games, millions of copies are sold on the first DAY of release.

Gaming is just a flavor of screen addiction, but it has hundreds of millions of devotees, a great number of whom are addicted to it. It’s worth highlighting again for a moment.

SOLUTION to Screen Addiction

What is the solution for screen addiction or even screen distraction, which is just a step away from addiction? Parents are the solution. Lovingandteaching is the solution. Children who feel sufficiently loved by their parents—with the pure love of Christ—and who are properly guided, simply do not become addicted to anything. They live under the tree of life. They don’t NEED the distractions of the world to diminish their pain. The great and spacious building is just not attractive to them.

In the meantime, though, while you are learning to provide the fruit of the tree of life to your children, and while you teach them how to plant and grow their own tree, you can establish and require compliance with guidelines for screen use.

Screen Guidelines

Love is unconditional. Screen time is NOT. It’s a privilege that is EARNED and EASILY LOST, as are a great many privileges. If you abuse your driver’s license—a privilege—you can easily lose it. Children need to learn that they can similarly lose their “license” to use screens.

Children believe they have a divine right to their phones or whatever device. NO. Wrong.

“But everybody else has one,” they say.

And you say, “I believe you, but I’m not raising everybody else. I’m raising you.”

OR you say, “Yes, and they are being raised to succeed in the WORLD. I am raising you to be a happy child of God and to follow Christ to eternal life.”

Benefits of limiting screen time are HUGE—rather obvious after discussing the dangers. With guidelines—and buckets of love—you avoid the dangers. You teach delayed gratification and responsibility. CEOs are telling me that it’s difficult to find employees who don’t want some kind of reward—a party, congratulations, a medal, a participation trophy—at the end of each workday. They want vacations and benefits and promotions today. Screens teach them this immediate gratification, and by limiting or eliminating the screens you teach them a far more productive way to live in the world.

I re-emphasize that privileges are EARNED and easily lost. You’re not just born with privileges. You have to work for them and prove that you can handle them by fulfilling specified conditions. Again, this is not unlike earning the privilege to drive a car—earned and easily taken.

What are some examples of conditions for earning screen time? Let’s keep it simple. Earlier in this chapter I described a large study done by the National Institutes of Health, where they stated that very limited screen time was one of the three factors most important to the mental and physical health of children. Let’s look at the other two, which are great beginning conditions for earning screen time:

First Condition: Sufficient sleep for their age

In the last chapter, I gave you guidelines for hours of sleep for different ages, as well as how to get children to bed consistently on time. Children who don’t get sufficient sleep are immediately impaired, as we’ve discussed.

If children aren’t getting sufficient sleep, screen time doesn’t need to be limited. It needs to be eliminated for at least two reasons:

1. Their screen time is interfering with their sleep time. The more they game or text or whatever, the less time REMAINS to sleep. Simple math.
2. Screen time stimulates the brain in ways that are not peaceful, a condition required for sleep. When people have difficulty sleeping, every sleep expert immediately asks about what that person is doing BEFORE sleep, and they recommend elimination of coffee, alcohol, or anything that significantly alters the peace of the mind. It is unwise for children or adults to use screens within an hour before bedtime.

Second Condition: Physical exercise

As the Institutes of Health recommended, children need at least one hour of physical activity per day. A child might participate in a team sport at school or otherwise. Some kids don’t like organized sports, so you could require recreational tennis or hiking or cycling for an hour—the possibilities are endless—before they can use a screen for 30 mins or 60 mins or more. 

Essentially, they are buying this privilege. That’s just one way.

Or they have to run a certain DISTANCE for every half-hour of screen use. I remember one child who refused team sports, and then when required to run a certain distance, he just went outside, sat under a tree with his phone, and walked back inside, stating the distance he’d run. Dad learned this trick, removed the phone entirely, and on his way home from work, put a different object in the fork of a different tree about three miles from home. The son couldn’t use his screens until he had run to the tree and brought back the right object, which he couldn’t fake. That’s one way.

Third Condition: Grades

Without hesitation, establish standards of grades—according to the capabilities of your child—and if they’re not met, the phone is GONE. Not limited, Gone.

Don’t BEGIN by taking the phone for an entire semester—without fail that will seem punitive as a first step—but do remove the phone at least until you have the results of the next two tests in any subject that is a problem. This might require weeks of no phone, or until you’re happy with the exam results that you can observe online.

You might talk with teachers by email to get feedback. Tell the teacher what you’re doing. Teachers almost never hear from a parent who is HELPING.

If removal of screens for weeks doesn’t help, take them away completely and state that you’ll discuss screen time when the grades meet your standards consistently for a time you will decide. Children everywhere are sacrificing their entire futures by sitting in front of screens. It’s a tragic mistake that you can help them avoid. That’s your job.

Fourth Condition: ATTITUDE and behavior at home

This is possibly the most important condition for screen use.

Consequences are imposed to teach, and they are best used immediately in order to make the association between unproductive behavior and unpleasant results. So when a child demonstrates even a LITTLE “attitude”—resistance, unkindness, defiance, or any of the five Zero Tolerance behaviors (anger, whining, teasing, lying, withdrawal)—you hold out your hand, palm up, in the gesture that says, “Give me your phone.”

We have talked about just a few conditions for screen use. There are many others, like completion of chores at home, and many others you can get creative about.

Taking privileges for screen time is a beautiful example of an imposed short-term consequence designed to prevent long-term natural and disastrous consequences, which we discussed in Chapter Eight. I can’t say this next sentence strongly enough: Do NOT hesitate to take the phone or other screens away, or you WILL lose all moral authority and credibility with your children. If you fail, you unflinchingly impose lifesaving consequences, which demonstrates your fear of their disapproval; in effect, you resign as a parent. If the child resists you about taking the phone or other device—when you simply hold out your hand, palm up—you increase the time the phone is removed.

If necessary, and perhaps as a first step, take your children’s phones permanently. You’re a parent, not an entertainment distributor. Many parents have sold their child’s phone. The point is well made. Children do not require a phone while living as a minor in their parents’ homes. They do require a loving and strong parent. Although statistically the movement is small, those parents who allow no phone before children leave the home at age 18 or at graduation from high school, have discovered that their children are more shielded from the distractions of the world, are more present in the family and other productive activities, and are simply happier

An Example of Teaching Screen Guidelines

Let me tell you a story about a mother, Renee, who had a daughter, Katrina, who used her phone ALL the time. Endlessly she was on social media, texting, watching videos, blablabla. Her grades were falling. In effect, she disappeared from the family, from school, from church, from everything. Mom asked me what to do.

Me: Take the phone.

Mom was terrified of Katrina’s disapproval, but she took the phone. Katrina really didn’t like it, and she expressed her disagreement and disapproval vigorously. She even refused to give it up at first. Mom said, “I was going to take your phone for the rest of the day. Now you’ll get it back at 4:00 pm tomorrow.”

Katrina handed over the phone, but then she fussed about how unfair it was. Mom said, “Now it will be the day after tomorrow before you see the phone. Two days. I can keep counting if you’d like. It’s all your choice. If you behave badly, YOU are choosing the price that goes along with it.”

Katrina stopped fussing. Renee beautifully executed the process—calmly—that I had described to her, what I call ramping up the consequences. It’s simple, elegant, and effective.

Later that day, Katrina found the phone in her mother’s desk and took it back without permission. As she took it, she was pretty snotty and said something like, “It’s about time.”

Renee happened to be walking by the room, so she entered the room and held out her hand, palm up. Katrina refused to give up the phone, and Renee knew that a physical struggle or a yelling match wouldn’t be loving and teaching. So Renee said, “Okay, you’ve made a choice, and now you pay for your choice. That’s what real agency means.”

Renee went to the garage and found a flat-head screwdriver, a hammer, and a pair of pliers. Without being instructed, Katrina followed her mother with fascination and fear. She removed the pin from the three hinges on Katrina’s bedroom door, then removed the door and took it to the garage.

Katrina blew up, shouted, and protested about the “violation of her privacy.” Counter-intuitively, Renee did not address Katrina’s negative behavior. Instead, she addressed the higher goal. Completely undisturbed, she taught Katrina about gratitude. She talked about the benefits that Katrina enjoyed as a member of the household: shelter, heating, cooling, insurance for the house and car, food, and on and on. It was an impressive piece of loving and teaching. She added, “Katrina, you’re acting like a selfish victim and being very ungrateful. Gratitude is essential to our happiness, and it’s my responsibility to help you learn that. Until you do learn some gratitude, I’ll keep removing privileges.”

Katrina: So, how do I get the phone and my door back?

“Well,” Renee said, “in the first place, it’s not your door. It’s my door in my house. That’s part of your problem, that you feel entitled to so much.”

Katrina obviously still had an attitude, so Renee continued to teach and guide her. She said, “It will come down to grades and attitude.” She described the improvements that would need to happen, and she required Katrina to repeat them in her own words, so Renee would know she really understood.

Katrina tried faking a good attitude for a day, but Mom made it clear that she was trying to teach Katrina a real lesson, not just a brief, pretend one. A change in perspective often takes time, as it did with her. And the improvement in grades took longer than Katrina would have liked to. Renee did not compromise on attitude or grades. If she had, she would have lost her position as a parent.

Renee wrote me: “I took Katrina to work the other day, and she tried some attitude, getting more and more snotty in the car. I turned it into a game. She would huff, and I would puff. She’d slump in her seat, and I would too. It threw her totally off guard. Before long, we were laughing. She did a couple more things, and I could see what she was trying to do, so I made the conversation light‑hearted, and she was disempowered. She realized she had no weapons that could hurt me because I wasn’t afraid of her disapproval.

Me: WOW. You’re really learning that you don’t need her approval BECAUSE you have the pure love of a couple of people and from God. So, good for you. Now, about Katrina. You can be almost certain that at this early point, she’s not changing the patterns of behavior she’s established for many years. She's being very good and cooperative right now. I’m not being skeptical, just experienced. It’s very likely that she’s putting on an act. She thinks she can manipulate you and get her phone back soon—because that has always worked in the past.

Katrina did pretty well for two months—better attitude and grade improvement documented online—so Mom gave her the phone. But then her grades fell again. Her attitude got snotty again.  (This is not unusual)

Mom demanded the phone, but Katrina refused to give it. This proves that Katrina was putting on an act SO THAT she could selfishly get what she wanted . . . again. Changing a lifelong direction takes real persistence. Remember that.

Mom took the door off again. Katrina refused to give the phone and kept the negative attitude.

Mom had a written list of consequences to add in case of continued resistance, and she understood that consequences are NOT effective if not accompanied by all the love she could give. No anger, no impatience, just calm administration of short-term consequences to save the life of her child. Next consequence? Mom quit taking Katrina to school by car. So Katrina had to get rides with friends or take the bus—you know, like almost everybody else did. But Katrina’s attitude continued, along with hiding the phone and refusing to give it up.

During school, Mom searched Katrina’s room for the phone. Nothing. In the middle of the night she took a flashlight into Katrina’s room and found the phone tucked in her underwear. (They can be very clever and persistent, so you have to be too.) Mom took the phone and put it in her business safe, where she said she would keep it for a month—or longer if the attitude and grades didn’t improve. This is a real mother, determined to love and teach her daughter until important lessons are learned.

Katrina wanted to know why she was losing the phone for so long. Renee said, “You’re addicted, kid. It takes time for your brain to come down from the constant dopamine high, so you won’t know what sober even FEELS like for several weeks. When you get sane again, we’ll talk about it all. Right now you’re either drunk or in withdrawal, so a sensible conversation is kind of impossible.” Mom had NO impatience as she said all this. TONE.

Katrina was determined to win this contest, and her attitude got worse, so Mom kept escalating the consequences: She canceled all time with friends. Then she canceled vacations and a school trip. Kids are very persistent. Why? Because they’ve learned that if they persist, we GIVE IN.

They spent more and more time together, with Mom loving and teaching. She reminded Katrina that the goal is happiness, and that being responsible is a part of that. She taught her that eternal laws govern happiness, and that when Katrina understood and kept the laws, she’d be happy and then would naturally be given the privileges that belong to a responsible person.

Renee told me, “Last night Katrina got invited to go to a movie, so she asked me if she could go. I asked her if her chores were done, and if she had done everything on the responsibility list we had created together the day before. She had not, so I said, ‘Then you have your answer. YOU created your answer.’"

This is a great example of making the CHILD give you or herself the answer to a question, by telling the truth about herself.

Then Renee said to Katrina, "I’ve heard that's a great movie. Sounds like fun. I WANT you to be able to see it. When you want to see it badly enough, you’ll do what it takes to qualify you for that privilege.” She added that true responsibility isn’t about doing the minimum so you can GET stuff. It’s a habit, so she required that her daughter demonstrate a full week of consistent responsibility and good attitude before earning the privilege of seeing a movie.

Mom was brilliant to say that she WANTED her daughter to enjoy privileges. We all need to learn from this. We WANT our kids to have fun, but not at the price of failing to learn to be responsible and loving, which are requirements for happiness. The Plan of Happiness—the plan of salvation—is governed by LAW, and those laws are not flexible.

So, notice that even without her phone, Katrina still hadn’t learned responsibility or gratitude. Removal of the phone doesn’t MAKE a child learn. The phone was removed only to create the OPPORTUNITY to learn responsibility, but that takes time, faith, courage, and persistence from both Mom and daughter. At this point Katrina wasn’t ready to have faith in her mother’s love, much less God’s love. All she cared about was immediate gratification and a return to the old ways of her being completely selfish and entitled, with manipulation being her tool to accomplish that. She knew she couldn’t have her phone, so she began sneaking out of the house at night.

Renee installed cameras trained on the bedroom door and window, followed by loving, teaching, and consequences if Katrina snuck out. The sneaking stopped. Then it resumed, as though Katrina was challenging Renee to impose consequences—almost curious about what would happen. This was a contest Katrina was determined to win. MOST Of you parents—if not all—have seen this kind of stubborn resistance, and that’s where parents give up, and the child wins the contest but loses the life lessons and qualities they badly need.

Katrina was 15 years old and eager to get her driver’s license at 16. Renee put a calendar on the wall and put a big red circle around the date of her driver’s license exam. Every time Katrina snuck out of the house, or demonstrated attitude or resistance, Renee moved the target date for the license further out by another day. At first, Katrina thought Renee would give in, but she didn’t, and Katrina was beginning to believe that she wouldn’t get her driver’s license until she was 40.

The sneaking stopped. The attitude slowly disappeared. WHY did Renee stop sneaking? That’s an important question, because she could have continued even with the surveillance and other consequences.

This is why she stopped sneaking: The universe is ordered. The Laws of Happiness are consistent with the Plan of Happiness. Mercy cannot rub justice. Mercy exists only through the power of the love and Atonement of Jesus Christ. That’s ORDER. Having come from the presence of God, children want to be within that flow, or that tapestry. They want to be a part of the power and glory and love of that whole picture.

When parents are inconsistent, when they’re not loving, when they don’t know how to love and teach, when they don’t impose consequences for the benefit of their children, they create a world of CHAOS for their children, which is inconsistentt with that light of Christ, or love of Christ, which “goes forth from the presence of God to fill all the universe, the light that gives life to everything, which is the law by which all things are governed.” (D&C 88:12-13)

When we parents don’t govern ourselves by law and light, our children are cut loose from that which fills the universe and gives life to everything, and they react to that pain in a variety of unproductive ways. When we ARE consistent with law and love, we provide them a rock on which they can stand, and with time and practice, that rock becomes the light of Christ and then becomes Christ Himself.

When Renee consistently gave her daughter love, light, and law, her daughter finally got a taste of that premoral condition, as well as a taste of the Spirit who had been speaking to her all along, but which she did not recognize in the mists of darkness and in the great and spacious building.

Katrina could FEEL Renee’s love as she taught her the Course of Life. She got her phone back. She behaved well for a couple of weeks. They had happy conversations. She was a happy kid. Why? Because Mom had the courage and faith to persist in loving and teaching instead of alternating between anger and giving in, which is what most parents do without any positive effect.

Sure, there were still setbacks. There were times when Katrina behaved badly, along with times when her mother was not loving. But Mom persisted, and eventually Katrina gave up resisting and instead embraced the now-obvious love of her mother, which she realized that she enjoyed more than the foolishness of rebellion, phones, sneaking out, and more. She became responsible at home and at school. She broke up with her boyfriend. She went to college. She was happy and dated sensible guys. She exuded gratitude and a desire to love people.

It’s important to understand what happened here. Katrina was never consciously a difficult child. She was reacting to a lifetime of pain that inevitably results from not feeling the pure love of Christ. That’s ALL. Mom learned how to find love for herself and to share it with her daughter while she also taught her true principles. But Katrina was still experiencing the residual of a lifetime of not feeling valued, so each uncomfortable event in the present became intolerable to her when added to the mountain of past pain. This is classic PCSD, as we discussed in Chapter Three.

Mom persisted in loving and teaching to the point—and this is the HUGE principle to learn here for all parents—that Katrina found her mother’s love, and the love of God, MORE SATISFYING AND MORE JOYFUL than the superficial excitements of all her old addictive behaviors. Until a child has a reliable light to move TOWARD, it’s unreasonable and ineffective to tell them to stop wandering around in the darkness.

I have worked with a great number of alcoholics and drug addicts, and I have discovered from personal experience and from extensive research that AFTER treatment—often including inpatient treatment—the incidence of returning to addiction is something like 95%. Horrifying. Why does that happen? Because it’s not enough simply to remove the addiction. THAT—the addiction—was how the person treated the emotional pain in their life, and without their addiction, the pain remains, but now without a means of decreasing it.

Addicts don’t quit using until the PAIN is addressed, and almost no one does that. Treatment experts focus on the addiction, which is just not enough. Renee understood that controlling her child’s behavior was not the point. She needed to help her heal her wounds and her pain.

Persistence

Remember that all this drama with Katrina began with the addictive use of a phone. Had Mom not been consistent as a parent, the behaviors would have worsened—guaranteed with any addiction—and many, many such children become crippled and even dead.

You can’t give up when lovingandteaching. The alternative is unthinkable, which is letting them emotionally die, sometimes physically die.

We absolutely MUST consistently loveandteach them. We are teaching them the Laws of Happiness, without which they are like “the waves of the sea, driven and tossed by every passing wind.” (James 1:6). We must feel loved enough ourselves that we are not afraid of the disapproval of our children, which fear is the greatest obstacle to parents loving and teaching.

Do not get a phone—or allow a phone—for a child where it is not possible to create complete transparency. To be clear, that means that you, as a parent, have COMPLETE access to everything they do on their phone, computer, or any device. They cannot delete their history, nor delete texts or anything else. You must be able to see it all. You don’t hover and constantly check on them, but you DO spot check from time to time, just as addicts provide a urine sample from time to time to prove their sobriety. In this case, you do it with a child who is addicted, AND with children to PREVENT addiction.

Technology is changing too rapidly for me to describe how you accomplish this accountability. You can do research with your Wi-Fi provider, your phone carrier, and many programs and apps for parents to achieve what they want. Google it. But privacy laws also change, so you’ll have to figure it all out, even if it means they have a phone as I’ve described before—with no Internet, whatever, only texting and phoning specified numbers.

Or—almost impossible to imagine—children have no phone until they leave home for college or trade school, or until they reach some arbitrary age like nineteen.. Many parents are doing this with great success.

You WILL hear some version of this from a child if you insist on transparency: “But this is a violation of my privacy.”

Answer?

Kids have NO right to privacy. Why?

They’re not prepared for it. They’re not prepared to make a great many decisions alone, and much worse, they’re not prepared to make them with the input of EVERYBODY who is lost along with them. And nearly everyone on the Internet is only too happy to participate in your child’s decision-making. Remember that. Billions of voices are influencing your child, so if you don’t actively participate, you have transferred your parental responsibilities to... whoever happens to be communicating at the time: random strangers, the sellers of every addiction on earth, the shopkeepers who sell evil for their own gain, everybody.

It was not many years ago that all over town—especially near schools—people nailed flyers to trees with a picture of a suspicious-looking man near a group of children, and the words beneath said, “Stranger, Danger!” We were so concerned that our children would be exposed to predators—which actually proved to be relatively rare—but now the predators are far more sophisticated, to the point that we have forgotten about them. They do their work out of our sight. They’re actively preying on our children wirelessly and anonymously through screens, in ways where we cannot actually see them.

So we tend to ignore the existence of these predators. But they’re very much there. Let me say it again: If you leave your children unsupervised with screens, you are handing your job as a parent over to total strangers, and NONE of them has your child’s best interests in mind. If their intentions are not outright malignant, at the very least, they are trying to use your children for their own gain in some way.

It is not hard to explain to a child that they’re simply not prepared for exposure to some things. Every child knows that:

• At age 8-10-12, they’re not prepared for driving. The government recognizes that and will not issue a license until a later age, usually 16. Children don’t get to drive because they WANT to. Nor do they get to demand a phone or privacy because they WANT it, or because everybody has one.
• Before age 21, in the U.S., you can’t drink. Adults who allow it can be prosecuted.  While there is an age for drinking, there’s no set age for phone use, and that’s where YOU as a parent come in. It’s NOT about chronological age. Using a phone is about preparation—from you—with loving and teaching and limitations and guidelines and transparency.
• Rental car agencies are smart enough to know that younger people are simply less capable of making wise decisions, in this case, while driving. The statistics to support that assertion are clear beyond all doubt—impressive, actually. For MANY years, the minimum age for renting a car was 25; in some states now it’s now 21. Well past 16.

What’s the point? Just because kids can OPERATE a car does not mean they can do so responsibly. Same with screens.

Let’s make it really simple. If you knew your child was making a bomb behind a locked door in your home, would you allow that to continue? NO, you wouldn’t. If your child has a phone or other electronic device, he has a potential bomb on his person every minute he carries it.

Transparency for how long? Till they move away. It’s simply a law of the household.

You just spot check them here and there. You still can’t prevent everything. If they choose to be devious, they can use friends’ phones, for example. But you’re not a policeman. You’re a parent, so it’s all about lovingandteaching. Kids who feel loved don’t misuse their phones.

Your kids watch their peers use screens, and it’s a free-for-all. Everybody does what they want, and that example does far more than just NORMALIZE screen use. When kids see their peers do whatever they want with screens, it also translates to a sense of entitlement about everything else.

Solution? YOU. You become a model of wise screen use, and most of the statistics about quantity of screen use—hours used, use before bed, taking screens TO bed—apply to adults, who are only slightly behind the kids in phone use.

SO, how can you be a model, an example?

• You DECIDE when to use your phone, instead of just REACTING to every beep. (When I’m talking with my children or my wife, usually I don’t have my phone with me at all. If I do, I do not look when the phone beeps.)
• You set your phone aside when there is a family activity—anything: meals, conversations.
• You do not just sit and surf the Internet, watch YouTube videos addictively, or check FB—even if there’s no family activity. Your kids WATCH what you do.
• You have a LIFE. You work or exercise outside where possible. Or you visibly serve (church or other volunteer organizations). Or you plan and execute family activities (Pinterest). You lead by example, and your children will tend to follow your example and your love.
• Where possible, you never look at a screen when a child enters the room (nor when your partner does)
• Where possible, say WHY you are on the phone, and how long you will be thusly engaged.

Not ever. For kids, multi-tasking would include using a screen and doing homework, using a screen and talking to you. For you, multi-tasking would mean doing ANYTHING else when you’re addressing a child, or the child is addressing you, verbally or not. Multi-tasking says, “I don’t care about you” to the person you’re paying partial attention to. Don’t do it. If something important comes up while you’re with a child—like your boss calls with an emergency—fine, but TELL the child you’ll handle the issue, guess at the time you’ll be occupied, and tell your child you’ll be right back when the task is done.

On a school day, I recommend no screen until homework is finished—EVER—following the principle we discussed in Chapter Eight: “Work before play.” And a child saying “I did it” (the homework) isn’t enough. As a parent, you have the responsibility to spot-check assignments and completion, and we talked about just a few minutes ago.

PRESCRIBE time limits for screen use at home. Kids who have never had guidelines often go CRAZY at this prescription. AGAIN, this is entitlement, which derails a child’s happiness every time. “It’s MY phone,” they say. So, using that reasoning, if they bought cocaine, would it be okay to use because it’s THEIRS?

Or they say, “Everybody does it,” again. Sure, and everybody is treating their pain. You simply state that you’re not there to entertain them. You’re there to love and teach them.

Prescribed time is understood for everything. This is no different. You don’t go to most stores whenever you want. You don’t drive a car whenever and however you want. You can’t just walk into the school—your school—whenever you want. TIME governs everything, including phone use.

Yes, there are apps that will limit time on a phone, and that might work for you, but loving and teaching is the most effective approach to anything related to your children.

Also specify the hours when children CAN’T use their phones, like:

• NOT during family times.
• NOT during meal times.
• NOT after a certain hour, not an hour BEFORE actual bedtime, because it’s harder to go to sleep with your dopamine and oxytocin and blabla levels elevated.
• Phones go into a basket at night, or—if necessary—a locked safe. (Eventually just loveandteach, not a safe)
• If you see a negative change in attitude or behavior, LOOK for your child having a borrowed phone, or investigate whether they’re using devices at the house of a friend.

Overall:

• Screen time is a conscious decision, not just when there’s a beep or a gap in time. Either you just react to the availability of screens, or you consciously choose how and where you use them. Rock or human being
• Like with any addiction, you can’t just expect children to stop using, which would leave them without means to reduce their pain. Addictions go away naturally with healing and with the replacement of the habit with something else—like love, service, worship, and more. So first you love and teach, and between you and the Savior, they will be healed.
• Then introduce them to what real life is like. DO things with them. Teach them things.
• Read a book with them. DISCUSS what you both learned while reading.
• Fix a hole in the wall together. Learn to repair drywall.
• Show them how to replace an old drain trap for a sink. Someday they will use this, and—just as importantly—they will grow in their confidence overall as they learn to do things.
• Teach them how to trim trees or bushes, or how to plant trees and bushes.
• Replace an old electrical plug. Look it up on YouTube.
• Teach household skills, like sewing. (Google it if you don’t know how)
• These are life skills that WILL be required, while skills in social media and video games are optional

Recently, a mother told me that her 4-year-old said to her, “Mommy, can you take this (phone). I think I’ve become a screen addict.” The child had obviously participated in some family meetings, eh? Children who feel loved don’t WANT to be addicted to anything that would detract from the love they feel.

Although I have suggested a number of ways to limit screen time, I emphasize that the best policy with screens is NO TIME AT ALL. There is no reason that a minor child at home truly needs a smartphone. Phones without an internet connection can sometimes be useful, the Gabb phone being one example. Keep in mind that we never talk about how much our children’s use of cocaine should be limited. The ideal rule is NO cocaine, and it’s similar with phones.

There are some programs or apps—YOU pay attention to your children and do research—that are not good for some kids, or all kids, ever: maybe Facebook, Snapchat, some video games, whatever. Porn sites certainly. ASK yourself? Is there a benefit to this app? Often yes, but is it worth the risks?

All these limitations (and allowances) are no replacement for:

• Lovingandteaching
• Transparency

BUT you might need to limit some programs—or games—and there are apps to do that.

Never leave a child in their room alone with a device. It’s just too risky. Not worth it.

There are virtually no reasons to have a phone at school. It just becomes a secret place to be affected by the world. Schools have computers for real schoolwork.

At home, kids need to look at their screens in public rooms, where the screen can be seen by you the instant you enter the room. If they’re not doing anything wrong, what is the problem with that limitation?

When you restrict the location of screen use, they often pretend to be mentally challenged. “But I don’t understand!!” Yes, they do.

Location is a principle everybody understands:

• You don’t build campfires in the living room.
• You don’t practice baseball in the house.
• You don’t use screens in private locations.

This is an aspect of screen use that is RARELY used by parents.

If kids are using their screens, TEACH THEM while they’re doing it. Remember loveandteach?

You don’t teach just by limiting screen use. USE screen time.

You already have transparency, so with screens, you have a CLASSROOM full of opportunities to teach them about life, relationships, love, pain, and fear.

EXAMPLES:

A friend of your child texts: “When is my mother EVER going to get a clue about ANYTHING?”

You read this on your child’s phone and say, “What is your friend really saying?”

Another text:

A friend of your child says, “I hate Katie.” (who is another friend of your child

You ask, “Why does your friend hate Katie?” and you talk about how people get angry because they are afraid of being criticized, or not included, or being compared to someone. You’re using screen time to teach your child about people, unconditional love, and the ways we react to a lack of it.

Another example:

Your child is sent a photo by a friend on INSTAGRAM:

YOU: Why did he/she put that particular picture up? What is the MESSAGE of the picture? 

Does it say, “Look at this cool THING?”

Or, “Look at ME?” or Look at HER/HIM?”

Or, “Look at my BODY?”

Our children need to see the meaning and motivations of what people do. It helps them to be more aware. It helps them to be understanding and compassionate. This also helps them to understand themselves better.

Let’s Talk About Movies

I strongly ADVOCATE that families watch movies as a powerful teaching tool. It’s a virtual classroom, a practical illustration of principles that otherwise might remain only intellectual.

Let me illustrate how powerful videos can be in teaching:

1. One good way to teach our children is to speak or read the words that describe a principle. That is what we do when we read the scriptures, attend a variety of church meetings, watch or listen to General Conference, and much more. This mode of teaching can be very effective, especially when aided by the Spirit, but experience clearly reveals that many people require much more than this approach.

2. We can teach a principle to a child while they are engaged in a behavior contrary to that principle. We can require them to tell the truth about their behavior and compare it to behavior that is guided by divine principles. This is a very direct, intimate, and powerful way of teaching that I have illustrated many times throughout this training.

One principal problem with this approach is that telling anyone, including children, that what they are doing is incompatible with true principles—another way of saying “wrong”—can be quite threatening if they’re not eager to learn.

3. This brings us to a third way of teaching our children, which is to illustrate a principle through the observation of other people.

Moroni directly told us that this method of teaching was one of the major reasons for the writing of the Book of Mormon. Yes, it gives us the teachings of multiple prophets inspired by the Holy Ghost. We’re also given an account of the Savior of the world to the American continent. But Moroni says that an additional purpose of his writing was so that “[God] could show you our imperfections, so you could learn to be wiser than we have been.” (Moroni 9:31)

There are great advantages to learning from the behavior and accounts of others:

• We have a strong tendency to overlook or deny our own mistakes—or fail to see them entirely—because admitting we’re wrong has been strongly associated with criticism and pain all our lives. But we’re astonishingly perceptive in identifying the mistakes of OTHERS because there is no threat to our own sense of worth. You’ve likely seen this many times in the last week alone.
• Even if we identify them, learning from our own mistakes is far more difficult than learning from the mistakes of others. While we’re in the middle of our own mistakes and subsequent consequences, the distractions of pain and fear can seem overwhelming. We have a strong tendency to defend ourselves rather than to learn. But those distractions are greatly reduced while watching the mistakes of others. It can be far less threatening to learn from their mistakes.

The Church has learned this lesson well in recent years, proven by their expansion of video presentations of the gospel exponentially from the days when preaching the gospel was not much more creative than handing someone a Bible or Book of Mormon along with the exhortation to repent. That wasn’t very effective then, and it’s far, far less effective now. Now the Church demonstrates endless creativity in presenting the gospel through print, memes, social media, and video.

The list of videos alone is striking:

• Bible videos, Doctrine and Covenants videos, Church History videos
• Video collections on His Grace, Hope Works, Revelation, Hear Him.
• And on and on.

The theme of these videos is repeated again and again: the saving principles of the gospel, including the pure love of Christ, are presented as they are seen in the lives of real people. This tends to catch the attention of people in powerful ways that are often impossible with other media.

This parenting training is an example of such video teaching, which includes learning through the experiences of others. And movies—where we began this discussion—are another example of such teaching.

When my children were at home, on many occasions we all watched a movie as a family, and often they experienced what they called—sometimes while rolling their eyes—”The Pause.” I would pause the movie during a scene and ask questions—5 questions, in fact, that became known as the 5 Ws: What-What-Why-What-What. Let’s review these and see what we can learn from them.

1. What: What is Person A (on the screen) doing?

There are so many options and opportunities here. Person A might be demonstrating selfishness or compassion, arrogance or humility, gratitude or ingratitude, anger or peace, and so on.

2. What: What is Person B doing in response to the behavior of Person A?

3. Why: WHY are they doing it? Why are they behaving this way?

If people are behaving badly, the answer to “Why” is almost always some version of this: “They were not feeling loved, so they defended themselves from their pain by acting out in this way or that way (usually some Protecting Behaviors).”

If people are behaving productively, the answer to “Why” is almost always some version of, “They were feeling loved enough to make a loving choice despite the potential threat to them.”

4. What: What would be more effective?

How could Person A or Person B have chosen differently, so that the interaction might have turned out far better?

5. What: What circumstances or interactions have you experienced that were similar to the one we’re watching now? If you could go back in time, what would you change about something you did or said?

You can go through all these questions with one child, or you can mix it up with more than one. If they don’t volunteer a situation from their own life, you can easily recall one for them.

Example:

In the movie, Person A snaps a criticism at Person B, and Person B responds by turning and walking away in a huff.

You pause the movie and ask a Child: What did the first person do?

Teaching children how to handle conflict changes everything. Children tend to argue and fight because they don’t know how to do anything else when they feel hurt or afraid. You can also teach children how to use the 5 Ws in real-life situations. The first three questions are the same. Only the last two change a little:

#4. What: What would you do differently in this situation next time? Then you might teach them how to TALK about their differences and work out a solution instead of expressing unfocused, useless anger at each other, or withdrawing.

#5. What: What can you do right now about the situation? If two children were arguing, either child could find the other and say, “I was wrong to be angry at you a few minutes ago. I could have been calm and just listened to you instead.” 

These What-What-Why-What-What questions can be very useful with children, and with practice, you can use just one or two of them to resolve or prevent conflict.

Back to Screen Guidelines, which began the discussion about movies and the 5Ws.

If your family is active together, and you’re lovingandteaching, kids won’t NEED screens.

Go online and search for “Family activities for young children (or teens),” or “Activities for 4-year-olds,” or whatever age. There are so many things to do.

Years ago, my adult son and I built an eight-foot jungle gym for grandkids from PVC pipe, including a swing and slide. It was inexpensive and fun to build, and it has provided activities for countless events.

You can build a fort outside and play with the kids in it.

Read the same book either simultaneously or apart, and then get together to discuss is.

Play outside, enjoy nature, run, and walk.

Do homework together.

This is a microscopic sampling of the available activities. The other day, my nine-year-old grandson played on his tablet for half an hour and then declared to everyone in the family, “Okay, screen time is over.” Then he corralled everyone to engage in a family activity. Nine years old. It’s not harder to work and play together. It requires simple loving and teaching, along with your awareness of what they need. 

Give Up Your Phones

We’ve talked about many ways to MANAGE screen activities, but sometimes that just is not enough. If a child is sufficiently addicted to screens, a more abrupt and complete step is required. EVERY addiction specialist knows this. Is there any inpatient drug treatment facility that CUTS BACK on the use of cocaine? Or recommends using cocaine half as much as present usage? Any treatment center that does that with alcohol? (laughable) Or bulimia? No, uniformly, treatment of these addictions involves STOPPING the use of the substance or behavior.

Why is that so important, to completely STOP addictions, rather than to manage them?

1. Because once we become addicted to a substance or behavior, habitually and compulsively, we go to that substance or behavior to decrease our pain. It becomes a neurologic PATHWAY that doesn’t go away—often for a very long time. We are so trapped in that cycle that we simply cannot regulate a “lesser” use. Ask any addict. If they use ONE time, they slide right back into the complete cycle within hours or a single day. The addictive behavior has to be eliminated.
2. As long as we’re using our addictive substance or behavior, it alters our automatic responses, even our brain chemistry. Until we’ve been completely sober for quite some time—months, sometimes years—we don’t even know what it feels like to live without being altered or distorted by our addiction. Uncounted people have told me when they have achieved complete abstinence, “I just didn’t know how addicted I was until I had been sober for X months.” I suggest, in fact, a new definition of “sober.” It’s not about how LONG you haven’t used it. It’s about your ability to make clear, conscious decisions about relieving pain that don’t involve even the temptation to use your old substance or behavior. THAT is sober, and it takes time and faith and lots and lots of love—from people and from God.
3. As long as we’re “drunk” in our addiction, our brains and emotions are so distorted that we can’t feel unconditional love even when it’s offered, which makes healing impossible. Then the pain continues, and we’re stuck in a loop of addiction. While your child is even affected by the THOUGHTS of screen time, he or she CANNOT FEEL YOUR LOVE, and that must not be allowed to happen. I cannot over-emphasize this. Parents don’t take it seriously, and the consequences are catastrophic.

Addiction to screens is a little different from any other addiction. One part of the definition of addiction is that the behavior is difficult to stop. That is a very simple test for you to know whether your child is addicted to screens. I suggest that you DO IT. Do the test. OBSERVE your children when they are told to give up their screens for meals, or bed, or to listen to you. If they whine or resist, they ARE addicted to some degree. Non-addicted kids just do NOT resist when directed toward a healthy activity instead of screens. Most of you will be astonished at HOW addicted your children are, but you MUST find out and then take the appropriate action.

It can be very useful to simply stop all use of screens, not as a consequence for something they’ve done, but mostly for information. Try it. It takes faith and courage, but just do it.

• When you stop all use, you may discover just how addicted a child is, like the 23-year-old boy we discussed earlier in this chapter, who curled into a ball on the floor, sucking his thumb. True story.
• Experiment with completely stopping for a week, and during that week, engage in a multitude of family activities. When you return the devices, if their previous addictive use returns quickly, you have learned that elimination may be required for much longer periods. Again, this is not a punishment. It’s just loving and teaching your children to be happy and productive, and confident in the Course of Life.

My children are all adults, but I CAN tell you that if I had young children now, there would be NO SCREENS except for:

1. School work done on a computer in an open location, visible to all.
2. Occasions when we were using them all together, as in the watching of a movie, for example.

I know many families who have no screens, and they have discovered that they’re NOT essential. And their family TALKS to each other, and they learn stuff, and they grow closer to each other and to the Lord. Imagine that. Screens did not exist for 99+% of human history, and during that time, somehow people managed to create productive and fulfilling lives.

A father wrote, “We had a power outage at our house this morning, and my PC, laptop, TV, DVD, iPad & my new surround sound music system were all shut down. Then I discovered that my mobile phone battery had died, and to top it off, it was raining outside, so I couldn't play golf. I went into the kitchen to make breakfast, where I found my wife and kids. We talked for a couple of hours. They seem like nice people.” Hysterical. How can we get to know our children if we’re not fully engaged with them, which is impossible while any of us is distracted by a screen.

I have heard many kids say, “I hate my parents since they took the Parenting Training.”

I ask, “Why?”

The answer is predictable: “They don’t let me play video games like before, or have my phone all day.”

What is a doctor’s job? To save life and preserve health. What if you need an injection to save your life? (I’ve personally been in the position of saving lives with injections and surgery.) But an injection might be painful. Does that stop the doctor from administering it? No, because his job is to save lives, not to temporarily make you comfortable. What is your parents’ job? To love you and teach you. To keep you safe from dangers that could destroy you, and that might involve temporarily making you uncomfortable, like with teaching and consequences, one of which might be taking your phone for a while—or permanently.

In Chapter Eight, I told the story of me violently jerking a grandchild off a bridge by his collar, which potentially saved his life. Do I regret the discomfort I caused him? Or that I startled him a lot? Not at all. Have I regretted the discomfort I have caused in treating and saving the lives of many patients? No, because temporary pain was absolutely required to prevent more pain later, or possibly even death.

Parents, your responsibility is to loveandteach, not to make your children comfortable, nor to entertain them. You are here to prepare your children for life, which includes a great number of difficulties and discomforts. If they are not prepared, life can bury them.

President Eyring said, Our Father in Heaven is more concerned about our progress than our comfort. (Ensign May 2017)

President Monson said, “Our mortal life was never meant to be easy or consistently pleasant. Our Heavenly Father ¼ knows that we learn and grow and become refined through hard challenges, heartbreaking sorrows, and difficult choices. (BYU Women’s Conference, May 2, 2008)

We MUST not rob our children of the difficult experiences through which they learn, grow, and become refined. Pain is part of growth, and we must not protect them from the pain that teaches. And the pain of withdrawal from all addictions is especially necessary. If we avoid it in our children, they are doomed to repeat the isolation and pain of addiction, whether to screens or anger, victimhood, and so on.

A mother wrote to me and said, “My son, Tommy, age 4, became aware that he has an addiction to screens, and now he helps me see that I have one too. He suggested that we both do no screens for two weeks, and that I quit hiding in the bathroom to use my phone.” That message blew me away. This is what’s possible when kids wake up from the coma often induced by screen use.

In 1958, Edward R. Murrow was the most well-known and respected news correspondent in the world for radio and television. He expressed his concern over what was happening with the emphasis on entertainment, with no regard for the welfare of people. He said, “100 years from now [historians] will find . . . recordings of our moral decay, our escapism, and our insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.”

How right he was—how prophetic—that we HAVE diligently insulated ourselves from reality, as we endlessly text and post pictures about our opinions, appearance, cars, vacations, clothes, and plastic surgery, while we say little or nothing about loving and teaching our children. He said that vast financial forces were enabling us to escape reality and leading us to “empty our minds.” What will counteract this? Lovingandteaching our children, to finally counteract the mind-numbing and emotion-deadening effects of devices and apps.

Paraphrasing Mr. Murrow, “These forms of entertainment we care about so much do NOT care about us. We need someBODY to care about us.” Let’s translate that into modern language. These programs and apps we care so much about—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Snapchat, Instagram, and more—do NOT care about US. We need someBODY to care about us.” And that is where we, PARENTS, are utterly indispensable. We HAVE to step up and take that role.

The subjects of anger and addictions to smartphones, television, and other devices bring us logically to our next subject, which is also an addiction, and one that is changing the overall picture and tenor of children, parenting, education, and the workplace.

ENTITLEMENT

I speak of ENTITLEMENT. This condition has become so widespread that not long ago, a cover article in Time Magazine referred to our day as the Age of Entitlement.

Entitlement is the belief that I can have WHATEVER I want WHENEVER I want it. This belief is founded on a self-defined and uncontestable right to satisfy my own needs.

From where does this incredibly selfish, even arrogant, belief spring? Pain. If I’m in pain, and if you’re close to me—physically or emotionally—then you MUST do something about it. If I’m in pain (which includes any small desire that is unfulfilled), I believe—and that’s the only belief that counts in entitlement—that you HAVE to do what I want to decrease my pain, however slight. And if you don’t do what I want, my expectations, disappointment, anger, justifications, and demands become explosive.

The entitlement of children is truly exploding. I see it everywhere. They feel entitled to attention, phones, free time, lack of responsibility, their anger, their demands, their attitude, toys of every kind, and more.

Why? We’ve listed these reasons in various ways before:

They feel entitled (to screens, for just one example) because, well, everybody else is.

They feel entitled to be SERVED by their parents, because they see their friends bark at their parents, who take them everywhere they want, buy them what they want, and literally serve them food and drink, make their beds, and on and on.

They feel entitled because they’re in PAIN, which we just explained.

They feel entitled because we don’t love and teach them. In the absence of what they really need, little wonder that they become demanding for substitutes for love, for Imitation Love, for any distraction from their pain (again, screens being just one example).

They feel entitled because we ENABLE them. We give them what they want to avoid disapproval, which we’ve discussed and couldn’t emphasize too much.

Let’s look at each of the Common Behavior Problems in terms of entitlement:

All of these behaviors are indications of my entitlement to MY anger, MY depression, MY ADHD, MY gaming, MY porn, and, basically, MY way.

Let’s look at how entitlement plays out in daily life:

You’re getting ready for (school, family outing, whatever).

Many parents describe leaving the house as a never-ending nightmare, over and over.

Children tend to do what they feel like doing. How do I know? Listen to the parents nag—hurry up, put on your coat, we’re late—proving that the kids HAVE to be nagged.

Why? Because they’re slow and late, they make everybody else wait.

But again, WHY? Because they feel ENTITLED to do whatever they want, because they’re demands and resistance and shining have SUCCEEDED in getting them what they want. So they keep doing it. We enabled them to feel entitled and do what they want when they want. Kids being late out the door is a horrifying sign of entitlement, not a “being late” problem.

They like being in charge of what they do, without consequences. They have no sense of responsibility.

Solution? You MAKE them responsible, or at least you make them pay the price of their choices,

Pay attention here, because this is always about lovingandteaching, not forcing children to do something, which never works. Oh, and forcing goodness was the plan we voted on in the premortal life, remember? The plan we voted NO to?

So when I say “make them responsible,” I’m always talking about HOW you will be loving and teaching them. Making them responsible is simply YOU refusing to take responsibility for their choices anymore. You carefully explain what you’re going to do if they fail to prepare in the morning.

When it’s time to leave for an event, you leave on time. PERIOD. Depending on the age of the children, that’s going to take a lot of flexibility:

• If my children were late, they had to take a cab to school or wherever, using their own money. That happened exactly ONE time for ONE child, after which that child and all the others got the point. Until you are serious about them taking responsibility for their choices—until they feel the weight of making stupid ones—they WILL IGNORE you.
• With a young child, you might take them to the mall in diapers. Or a child might go to their second-grade class in pajamas. They’ll remember that, I promise, and you will have taught responsibility FAR more powerfully than simply using your words over and over.

Yes, teaching responsibility takes faith and courage and real planning, but what’s the alternative? A crippled child.

Dinner time. Again, like herding cats, with each child doing whatever they want. Entitled.

They’ve always been nagged, but they figure—unconsciously—so what? In the end, they show up when they want. (entitled)

Nagging doesn’t bother them enough to change their behavior, so what can you do?

You start dinner On TIME. You NAME the time and make it clear.

What if a child is late? Love and teach. You teach responsibility and punctuality, principles they’ll use all their lives. This stuff MATTERS.

And then what if a child is late, even by ONE second (if you’re flexible, you’re dead, because they’ll push how late they can be forever)?

ONE solution, take the phone for the rest of the day. Young child without a phone? No dessert (you’ll figure out something they hate)

What if they’re late a second time? Not just second time in a row, but second time EVER? (actually in our family, we imposed this one the first time a child was late.)

Lose phone AND lose dinner.

No feeling bad about the child losing dinner. You just casually say, “Huh, I thought you’d want to eat dinner, but apparently I was wrong. I hope you make it tomorrow.” (NO food later. No snacking in the pantry later. Sometimes the only way to make this possible is to send them to their room (or appoint another child to make sure the consequence happens—the sheriff, a job they love)

What happens if you do nothing about entitlement?

I knew a man who was a nationally recognized surgeon. He was a biomedical researcher and highly educated. But he knew NOTHING about parenting or being a partner.

He learned early that when he gave his 2 kids “things,” they liked it—of course. They smiled at him and indicated that they LIKED WHAT he gave them, which he interpreted as their LOVING him. They trained him to bribe them, and with his bribes, he trained them to like him. They LEARNED to be entitled, that with demanding and disapproval, and begging they could get anything they wanted.

So they had everything: the latest phones, clothing, and games. Private prep schools. Expensive and prestigious colleges. She majored in ancient Greek literature, he in philosophy.

Interesting subjects, but the practical application is difficult, and finding jobs is VERY difficult.

All during prep school, the kids got cars, expense money, and credit cards.

If they didn’t get what they wanted, she screamed that she hated him, and the boy actually hit his father when the father didn’t obey him quickly enough. (Yes, true story, and not terribly unlike most families if you subtract the hitting.)

So, to summarize, he gave them EVERYTHING they wanted. Surely all that giving IS love, right? NO. It was the only kind of “love” he knew, but NO.

What kind of people do you think his children turned out to be?

She was a spoiled, angry, entitled brat when I met her in her 20s. She put off a cloud of arrogance, entitlement, and selfishness. The son was just angry at everything.

For years, I tried to teach dad that he wasn’t teaching them the LIFE course they NEEDED. 

INSTEAD, he FUNDED their own course in LIFE, which was taught by whom? Who are the professors?

THEM: two kids with no experience in life, success, whatever.

AND

The other professors were Facebook, porn, YouTube, their peers, and every stranger who wandered onto their screen. They chose to attend a Life school of emotional death, while he paid their tuition. He paid them to attend private schools, live on the Internet, and do pretty much whatever they wanted. By funding their choices, he was unintentionally approving their behavior and telling them that being their own teachers and hiring their own teachers was acceptable.

Neither of his children is happy in the least; neither child can be a real partner (both failed many times), and they both want to be parents, but they haven’t the slightest idea how they would do that. They simply did not get the Life Course needed to successfully accomplish their central life goals.

THAT is one way that untreated entitlement ends up—one of many horrifying stories I could tell. This is what happens when you don’t teach kids to be genuinely happy, when you just put them out to pasture, hoping it will all turn out well, where the likelihood is very high that they will become entitled. Parents tend to raise children in a way comparable to throwing seeds out into a field of weeds and hoping that somehow the seeds will survive and not be choked out by the competing plants. Not likely.

Do NOT close your ears to this story because these kids had access to more money than most. Kids from lower-income homes can be JUST as entitled, but instead of cars and private schools, they use being right, angry, acting like victims, drugs, sex, whatever. Rich or poor, entitlement is nearly identical.

With entitled kids, their IDENTITY comes from what they CONTROL. It’s a TERRIBLE lesson to learn.

ADHD

A couple of years ago, I was visiting a friend when a tall, animated young man crossed the room and lifted me off the ground with an energetic hug. “Thank you,” he said. I didn’t recognize him, but after learning his name, I did remember his story.

I first met Damien when he was about six years old, when his mother brought him to see me. He was in a special school for children with behavioral problems, he was taking multiple medications, and had been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), and more. He was, in the words of every adult who cared for him, “a handful.” It appeared that he was destined to be shuffled from one special school to another. A great many of these kids grow up feeling defective and miserable and—not infrequently—acquire a diagnosis of schizophrenia, manic-depression, and other mental health disorders. That’s pretty bad stuff for a kid, and countless millions of children have a future that will involve some or all of this.

Within a few minutes of our first meeting, it became obvious that Damien had learned to get what he wanted by screaming, hitting, lying on the floor while he pounded it with his fists, and so on. Within fifteen minutes, he wasn’t doing that with me at all, and his mother was stunned. She’d never seen him behave so calmly. It was not complicated: I loved and taught him, with no regard whatever for his supposed diagnoses.

Over a period of several months, I taught his Mother how to love and teach Damien, using the principles in this Training. Within a year, Damien was taking no medications, he was attending a “normal” school, and he had no behavioral diagnoses. His therapists were freaked out at the changes in him.

When he hugged me as a young man all those years later, it was to express gratitude for his life and to tell me that he was on his way to officer training for the U.S. Marines. Think of it: this kid was doomed to a life of medication and feeling separated from everyone else, and now he’s an officer in the Marine Corps.

I am not suggesting that all children with behavioral disorders would respond as well as Damien did to Real Love. I’m not telling you that the transformation is easy, but it IS easier than the long line of medications and special schools and therapists and doctors—not to mention a child who is crippled emotionally. I’m not telling you that your child does or does not have ADHD, nor that all parents would be as diligent in loving and teaching as Damien’s mother was. I AM strongly stating two things about ADHD:

Quite a number of books have now been written on that subject.

I will speak primarily of ADHD—of which ADD is a subset—rather than try to address all the other possible childhood behavioral disorders. And much of what I say about ADHD will apply to the other disorders. Generally speaking, people are people, and pain is pain. We human beings are far more similar than we are different.

It is now estimated that as many as 15% of children will at some point be diagnosed with ADHD, with one estimate of 50% within the next twenty years. This is flabbergasting—and to me quite beyond believing. I do not mean “unbelievable”—as in WOW—but “not believable.” For the past 20 years or so, behavioral scientists have been sufficiently concerned with the possible overdiagnosis of ADHD that they did a meticulous study of thousands of children in the eastern part of the United States. They found that 1-2% of children had sufficient evidence—using the accepted criteria strictly—to warrant the diagnosis of ADHD, far below the incidence of 7-11% previously reported in those same children. Despite this study and other proof that we over-diagnose, there are counties in Virginia where as many as 35% of white male children within the usual ages of treatment are being medicated for ADHD. Yes, you heard me correctly.

It would appear that parents and practitioners are EAGER to make this diagnosis and to prescribe medications. I have seen many parents THRILLED that their child is diagnosed with ADHD. Why? Why would we WANT our children to have a “diagnosis?” Because it’s much easier to give a misbehaving child a pill than it is to find Real Love for ourselves, learn to be loving, and apply all the principles found in this Training. In vigorous defense of parents, there is no job on earth that is more important and challenging, and for which we receive less training, than parenting. In most states, training and certification are required to get a hunting license, while nothing at all is required for two people to bring another human being into the world and completely distort the rest of his life.

Entire books and articles now say this: ADHD is not a real disease. One pediatric neuroscientist spoke strongly against treatment with medication when he said, “If you give psychostimulants to animals when they are young, their reward systems change. They require much more stimulation to get the same level of pleasure. This is not a thing to be taken lightly.” There is much to suggest that it is the same for human children.

What do these experts propose instead? One well-respected expert recommended “non‑pharmacological therapies which involve helping the ADULTS that are around children.” In other words, he recommended that adults support the kids and guide them. He didn’t know the term loveandteach, but that’s what he was talking about.

Another expert said, “Part of what happens is that you have an anxious, overwhelmed PARENT, which is contagious. When adults are struggling, the child struggles, and for an adult already overwhelmed, that struggling child leads to even more pain and struggle on the part of the adult. It’s a vicious cycle, one that quickly escalates out of control.”

Increasingly, experts are saying that we need to teach ADULTS how to behave, and how to love and teach their children.

Another expert in ADHD, Dr. Brown, observed the results of a large group of “ADHD” children in a study and said, “These children lived in households and neighborhoods where violence and relentless stress prevailed. Their parents found them hard to manage, and teachers described them as disruptive or inattentive.” She knew these behaviors as classic symptoms of ADHD, a brain disorder characterized by impulsivity, hyperactivity, and an inability to focus.

When Dr. Brown looked closely, though, she saw something else: trauma. She said that the symptoms of PTSD could easily be mistaken for inattention. She said ADHD symptoms could be brought on by a stress response in overdrive. She treated her patients according to guidelines for ADHD and said, “Despite our best efforts with medication and therapy, it was hard to get the symptoms under control. I began hypothesizing that perhaps a lot of behavior we were seeing was more a result of family dysfunction or other traumatic experience (NOT ADHD).”

This is exactly what I’ve been saying about over-diagnosis of ADHD and the need for unconditional love in parenting.

Yet another expert, Dr. Forkey, says children are often inappropriately diagnosed with ADHD, when the truth is that they are simply traumatized and responding to stress and fear with behavior designed for survival, not cooperation and thriving. She is describing Post-Childhood Stress Disorder, which we have discussed many times, beginning in Chapter Three. She asks, “What does that look like when you put that kid in a classroom?” She answers that when a child is responding to chronic stress, “it looks a lot like ADHD.”

Remember that the first thing I said about ADHD was that we diagnose it far too often. Second thing to remember about ADHD?

But we don’t assess whether children have been sufficiently loved and taught because almost none of us ever WAS unconditionally loved and taught, so how would we know to assess whether it is deficient in a child? And how many health care professionals know what unconditional love is? Having been one, I can tell you that the number is infinitesimally small

One pediatrician specializing in ADHD wrote an entire book maintaining that ADHD kids were not behaving abnormally at all, but were responding normally to abnormal environments—primarily at home. At one place in the book, he listed on the left page all the behaviors of a child in pain, physical or emotional. On the opposite pag,e he listed all the behaviors exhibited by a child with ADHD. The two lists were identical.

I did a similar process with YOU in Chapter Two when I described the symptoms of kids who become tired of earning praise and approval. If you list these symptoms and compare them to the criteria listed by the American Pediatric Association for making the diagnosis of ADHD, you find that the two lists of symptoms are the same. Again, the symptoms of emotional pain are the SAME as the symptoms of ADHD, so until a child feels unconditionally loved, how could we possibly know if he or she has a diagnosis of ANY behavioral disorder?

As we eliminate the emotional pain of children through loving and teaching, their symptoms decrease and usually disappear. Many of these children would have been—or were—diagnosed with ADHD, so we MUST love and teach children properly and sufficiently, treating their PCSD first, before we can sensibly consider this particular diagnosis—ADHD—or any of a great many other mental health diagnoses. Previously, I told you about the child whose “ADHD” and even “autism” were cured by the pure love of Christ, to the point where he became a completely functional man and officer in the Marine Corps.

Bottom line? The first step in diagnosing and solving ADHD is to love and teach our children in all the ways we’ve discussed to this point—like no more wounding. No anger, disappointment, or criticism. These parental behaviors are like Improvised Explosive Devices (roadside bombs) to kids, and they cause PCSD in children, at which point we can’t know anything about whether ADHD exists, nor can we feel justified in treating it with medication.

Children with ANY behavioral problems do NOT need a diagnosis. They need to be lovedandtaught, which involves the behaviors we’ve already listed:

Let’s get specific. In a moment, I’m going to talk about some of the behaviors of children with ADHD. Let’s talk about just some responses we might make—to the BEHAVIORS, not to the diagnosis

First behavior: A child often fails to pay close attention to details or makes careless mistakes.

How do we tend to respond? We tend to surrender and just allow them not to pay attention and to make careless mistakes. Consistent attention to anything outside ourselves takes a level of awareness that few people have because they are too consumed with their own problems. Closely paying attention to children is INCONVENIENT, and few of us have the patience, strength, and genuine caring for that.

OR

We become impatient with them, which makes their fear even worse, and their reactions to fear—inattention, mistakes, and more—worsen. So our impatience worsens the very problem we think we’re addressing.

OR

We simply give them a diagnosis and a pill. Sometimes that APPEARS to temporarily improve their behavior. Well, duh. Drugs do alter mental function, but we don’t pay attention to the many side effects—emotional flatness, not being entirely present emotionally, altered personality, and many other side effects not even studied at this point—because all we care about is MANAGING SYMPTOMS that bother US. It’s quite short-sighted and uncaring on our part.

What COULD we do instead? Love and teach, of course.

Let’s suppose that a child is inattentive with his homework and makes lots of mistakes. Instead of the three responses we just named, we can LOVE the child. No negative emotional reaction from us. No disappointment, certainly no irritation. Calmly, with looking, touching, obvious, genuine affection, we keep practicing with our child, repeatedly helping them find ways that work without using words like “No” or “Not,” and certainly without sighing, frowning, and using that unmistakable and harmful tone of voice we all know well.

Second Behavior: A child has no self-control when it comes to getting what they want immediately. 

This is another form of inattention and causes real problems when the insistent demands escalate.

What do we do? We tend to give in and give them what they want because we are intimidated by their fussing and their “diagnosis.” OR we become impatient with their whining.

Better response? Exactly what we have talked about many times now as a response to whining, beginning way back in Chapter One. We calmly, casually require that they ask without whining. We present other choices. But we NEVER give a child what they whine for. It enables them and trains them to whine again. But our words matter little unless we remember that we must NEVER become impatient or irritated, which is the real reason they were whining in the first place. ZERO impatience and anger, as always.

A few additional tips here:

Initially, don’t push them to pay attention to the THING they want or the TASK you want done.

Instead, pay attention to THEM, and have them focus on YOU. It is, after all, YOUR love that they want. For example, you might say, “Look at me.” Calmly, confidently. If you are confident in loving them, they WILL look at you. Your attention is what they really want and need.

To be specific, let’s say a child wants ice cream. NOW. He appears to be impossibly insistent about this, typical of many “ADHD” kids.

At this point, you’ve changed the focus from the ICE CREAM to loving THEM. Then say, “You CAN have some ice cream, at six o’clock after dinner. Right now, we get to have fun together.”  It’s LOVE the child really needs, not ice cream.

Third Behavior: A child often does not seem to listen when spoken to.

Of course, they don’t listen. (1) They don’t feel loved by you, so why should they listen?

AND (2) you let them get away with not listening, or you get irritated, repeating yourself with increasing volume and impatience. Either way, you have failed to give them a reason to listen.

What can you do? Exactly what we’ve talked about for every child: Touch, look. Say, “Look at me,” and then say something affectionate, like the example we just discussed.

Fourth Behavior: A child often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish projects.

Solutions? No impatience. Help them (but not too much, no rescuing)

Work with them, or give directions, until it’s done.

As you have more experience, just leave them with the project.

Then come back, simply recheck work, and have THEM tell you what’s not done.

We’ve already talked about this approach in an earlier chapter, and it had nothing to do with ADHD

Fifth Behavior: A child often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities. Like bedtime.

We’ve talked about how to handle that extensively, at the end of Chapter Nine—again, nothing to do with ADHD. With rare exceptions, our children are to be LOVED and TAUGHT, not diagnosed and medicated.

A Real-Life Example

Now, a real-life example of a kid doing all this stuff we just talked about: No delayed gratification, not listening, demanding instant results, and no attention span.

I’m talking about Damien, the 6-year-old we talked about earlier, who later became a Marine officer. At age 6, he didn’t listen, wouldn’t engage in tasks that required any effort, was very defiant, had a short attention span, and demanded whatever he wanted RIGHT NOW. I first met them when he and his mother came to my house.

I was talking to his mother when Damien barked, “I want some ice cream.” There was no preliminary ASKING at all. Of course not, since his mother had unconsciously trained him to scream his demands.

I was talking to Mom, and I was not interested in interrupting our conversation to satisfy a demand that did not NEED to be met. I said, “Come here.”

He did, because he could sense something in my tone of voice that he hadn’t heard before. I was loving him. Then I put my hand gently on his shoulder. “There is no ice cream for you right now, but oh my, you CAN have a banana. So you get to choose: a banana, or nothing.”

He hadn’t delayed his own gratification in years, nor engaged in a loving conversation to work anything out, so he fell to the floor, crying, kicking, and screaming. His mother was about to get up from her chair to soothe him or get him something, and I indicated with a glance that she was not to move from her chair. 

I lay on the ground facing him and said, “I can’t understand you.”

He continued to scream.

Me: “I’d be happy to listen if you speak. This is not speaking.” I did NOT raise my voice so he could more easily hear through the screaming. The more I spoke at a normal volume, the more he had to lower his volume in order to hear. He continued to pound the floor and demand ice cream.

I motioned for Mom to come with me to the next room, and on our way out, I said to Damien, “We’ll be back.” We left the room and shut the door.

I’ve said this before, and you’re seeing an example here. Like trained seals, kids don’t do something unless they get rewarded for it. They don’t kick up a fuss for long if they’re doing it by themselves in a room alone. So, within two minutes, he came into the next room—where we were—lay down on the floor, and screamed again.

We left and went back to the room where we had started. He came in again and dramatically fell to the floor, crying. I lay down next to him and said, “If you decide to speak to me, I’d love to listen.”

He DID. He began to speak to me. Still sobbing—but now quietly—he chose to have a banana. He and I played a game around how to peel a banana, put it back together perfectly, and peel it again.

With him in the room, I talked to Mom as you and I spoke in Chapter One, about Zero Tolerance for whining: ONLY respond when he speaks in English. Don’t baby him. Don’t rescue him. Just loveandteach him.

She studied the Parenting Training. He learned to be a human.

Other characteristics of ADHD:

A child often loses things necessary for tasks/activities.

Example: It’s time to go to school, but your child can’t find “any clothes.”

Take the child to school as is—in a bathrobe. Do NOT find the clothes. He’s capable of finding anything he really wants—like ice cream—so he can learn to find his clothes. His experiences at school will motivate him to find his clothes earlier next time.

Another characteristic of ADHD, which is almost always just a response to pain: often easily distracted.

As we’ve illustrated: Speak the child’s name, touch, look, require looking at you. NO anger

Another characteristic: Is often forgetful in daily activities

Silly: They remember their birthday, or what’s for dessert, but suddenly become forgetful about tasks they don’t enjoy? Nah, they don’t forget. They just don’t WANT to do the task, and you’ve let them get away with the lame “I forgot” trick.

Instead, call them on their deceptions. When they say, “I forgot,” you say, “Really? You remembered to eat this morning. You remember how to play your video games every day. You remember your favorite dessert. So your memory seems to work.” Smiling gently and sincerely, “No, you didn’t forget. You just didn’t want to do it. Go do it now, and then come to tell me about it as I kiss your face.”

Continue to review the Training, all the chapters. The answers to ADHD-like behaviors are already in there. You will see a difference without having to treat your child like he or she has a disease.

RESPONSIBILITY

We all know that children should be responsible, and we’ve been talking about responsibility throughout the training. We know that responsibility is one of the three legs of the stool of happiness—along with feeling loved and being loving. With our behavior, however, we often confuse our children about the purpose of their becoming responsible. The confusion arises because when they don’t act responsibly, we so often respond with impatience and irritation.

When we do that, we’re screaming with our behavior that we’re primarily interested in our convenience, not in their happiness, OR in teaching them responsibility for their benefit. In short, we SAY we’re teaching responsibility, but our behavior says we’re teaching them to be good servants for US. Under those conditions, it’s no wonder that so many of our children resent our attempts to teach them lessons in responsibility.

The purpose of life is to be happy—without that, every other success is meaningless—and we make genuine happiness possible for our children only as we fill their lives with Real Love. I repeat: LOVE makes our children happy. In order to help your children be happy, you do not have to give them everything they want. Your responsibility is only to love them and teach them how to be responsible, loving, and happy.

Responsibility means that children take ownership of their own decisions, and they make decisions that will lead to happiness for themselves and others. Responsible children are aware of making their own choices. They exercise true agency. They choose to be responsible for tasks and for their own feelings, instead of blaming others for how they feel. They do not claim to be helpless victims.

Responsibility makes us happy. Work makes us happy. It gives us confidence. It allows us to make choices that facilitate our own sense of fulfillment and contribute to the happiness of others. Responsibility allows us to express and develop the gifts we talked about earlier.

Responsibility tends to be a natural result of a sense of worth. Most of us tend to have that completely backward. We believe that we have to DO lots of things—good things, responsible things—in order to feel worthwhile. Wrong.

We’re already worthwhile. We’re precious beyond speech, lovable beyond words, filled with divine potential and divine gifts. How do I know? Because God is our Father, and He has told us that we are all of great worth in his sight (D&C 18:10), and that his very reason to BE is to help us move toward immortality and eternal life (Moses 1:39). In other words, we’re already worthwhile, and our responsible and good behaviors naturally proceed from that divine and inherent worth, magnified by our gifts and lots of practice.

Responsibility is not a burden, as we are often taught. Responsibility is NOT spoken with a tone, like this:

“You need to be more responsible.”

“You’re just not responsible.”

No, responsibility is an opportunity for our children to practice being their true and divine selves in a way that will yield the greatest joy for them and contribute to the happiness of others. You’ve seen examples of teaching responsibility throughout the Training, though you may not have noticed them. You’ll see more of them the second time you go through it.

In Chapter Nine, we talked about Tandy, who was utterly enabled and spoiled, in great part because Mom taught her NOTHING about responsibility. We talked about the results: she was having indiscriminate and unsafe sex, had an abortion by age 15, and was expelled from school. She was breaking the law in multiple ways and was rapidly headed toward jail.

What I didn’t tell you was that although Mom had not taught Tandy responsibility—or much of anything else—her father, who had left her mother years before, finally took action. Dad and his wife began to loveandteach their daughter, pulling her out of the swamp of entitlement.

Tandy could see that what her mother had previously taught her about LIFE was wrong. How did she learn this? By reading a book? No, she learned because Dad and his wife began to live differently. They adopted a Zero Tolerance for anger, whining, and all selfish behaviors for THEMSELVES. As they did, they became HAPPY, and Tandy could see that by comparison her mother was very much NOT happy. She wanted to be around what her father was SHOWING her with his changed behavior. 

So, Tandy left her mother—where she had been living full-time—to live with her father. Oh, it was difficult in the beginning, learning this new way of living. At her mother’s house, she didn’t have to do a single thing: no cleaning, no food preparation, no responsibilities around the house. She was treated like a spoiled baby, which certainly has its attractions. Being waited on hand and foot, and getting everything she demanded, SEEMED fun in the short term. But Tandy sensed that she wanted to be more than just pampered, which is NOT the same as being loved.

Loving involves real caring about her happiness, which includes TEACHING her the principles of life that work. Mom was doing NONE of that invaluable teaching, and Tandy KNEW it, mostly because she could see the difference between Mom and Dad. With her father, she learned to be responsible, which she ENJOYED. Who knew? It turns out that children actually LIKE the confidence and independence that come with learning to be responsible. 

After a year with her father, he wrote to me and described how he was now living with a different human being—his daughter, Tandy. She did her chores without being asked, helped her brother with his homework, and overall was just pleasant to be around.

One week, Tandy didn’t do her chores very well, despite being loved and taught, so Dad suggested that SHE needed to think of a consequence. Tandy called me and asked for an idea of a consequence for her. I suggested that maybe she could write an essay about what she’d learned from the experience. As we’ve discussed before, CHILDREN need to tell the truth about their behavior and about what they’ve learned, because it makes a much greater impression than our words simply dumped on their heads.

HER ESSAY:

“This essay has three parts. First, why I was irresponsible in not doing my chores. I said I would do my chores, and I didn’t. That is simply not responsible. I had excuses, but the truth is, I just didn’t care enough to do them. They take about 20 minutes each day to complete, and I’m happier every time I do them. I FEEL selfish when I don’t. And I certainly get far more from my parents who take care of me than I give them with my puny 20 mins.”

Are you listening to this? This is a parent’s dream. It’s the result of lovingandteaching.

She continues: “The second part is what I learned from not doing my chores. I felt disconnected and unhappy. Sometimes when I don’t do what I promised, it feels like a little victory—like I got away from something—but it’s not. Each time I fail to live up to a promise, I lose a sense of connection and fulfillment and accomplishment, and I’m being very inconsiderate to my family.”

“Third part: How does doing chores prepare me for life? They teach me to be responsible, which I’m going to need to study in college, to get a job, to own a car, and to pay for housing. Irresponsible people paint themselves into a corner, where they have no choices left. My whole future is affected by the simple act of doing chores. Instead of dragging my feet when my parents tell me to do something, I should be thanking them. They are helping me learn skills that will make me happy and successful all my life. One day, I’ll look with satisfaction at all I’ve done and who I am, and I’ll remember that it started by doing 20 minutes of chores a day. I’m glad someone cares enough to help me with this.”

I did not make up this essay. 15-year-old child. 

We discussed another example of teaching responsibility in Chapter Nine, where your son, Shawn, was angry at his sister, Stephanie, for leaving his bicycle out in the wrong place. First, we taught Shawn to be RESPONSIBLE for his own anger, rather than blame it on his sister. That’s the responsibility for FEELINGS. Then we taught Stephanie responsibility for her BEHAVIOR.

Let’s look at another practical lesson in responsibility:

DAVID is talking with his 10-year-old son, Brian. This conversation will teach you a lot if you have a 4-year-old. or a 16-year-old. 16-year-olds are just cleverer at fighting, arguing, and defending.

Several times, David had told Brian—in a loving way—that he couldn’t just dump his football gear anywhere in the house after the team practice. He was told to leave his shoes and pads in his own bedroom and then launder the jersey, pants, socks, and underwear himself. But—surprise!—Brian didn’t do it, for like the 12^th time, despite being loved and taught many times. David reminded him, “Your football stuff is in the living room on the floor.”

If kids haven’t been loved sufficiently, they hate being taught, so it was understandable that Brian said, “You treat me like I’m four years old.”

David is not distracted by the attack. Just because somebody invites you to a perfectly good fight does not mean you have to accept the invitation. So David said, “What did I tell you just now?”

Brian huffed and puffed a little before he said, “You said my stuff was in the living room.”

They were not being laundered, of course, just lying there on the floor, where Brian hoped they’d wash themselves. Kids love to report the tiny part of a task they DID, rather than address the unfinished task. Understandable, because we haven’t taught them responsibility before, and we’ve been angry when we’ve talked about full responsibility.

Remember that for your child, this situation could be about mowing the lawn or whatever. Children tend to convince themselves that if they do PART of something, they’ve done the job.

Brian: “You nag me about stuff all the time. Like I was four.”

You need to know that Brian was the school quarterback and was proud of his skills. But he couldn’t remember where to put his clothes? Kind of laughable.

If you back off when your children attack you or try to change the subject, or both, you lose. If you’re angry, you lose.

Brian stomped off toward the living room, huffing and puffing.

With no tone, interested only in lovingandteaching, David said, “Where are you going?”

Brian: to get my stuff.

Remember that we teach children PRINCIPLES, not just to be mindless servants who complete tasks. David remembered that and said without any tone of criticism, “Nope, too late for that. I’ve told you about washing your clothes many times, so now you need to learn more about responsibility, not just about washing clothes.

Brian said, “What?!” He acted shocked at this different approach, but his attitude was less defiant.

How am I doing? Am I missing anything you don’t like?

David is brilliant in pointing out the truth that what Brian doesn’t like is the price of HIS choices, not what David’s doing. Brian claiming he’s angry at his father’s nagging is an unconscious attempt—common to human beings, not just children—to change the subject from his own responsibility to something else.

Brian did not answer. It was embarrassing for him to see how ridiculous he was to blame his father for nagging when HE (Brian) had made the nagging necessary.

Another practical lesson in responsibility:

One of my sons, Mike, is a professor of business at a major university. Often, he teaches Ph.D. students and sometimes managers of major corporations. One class it for mid-level managers, teaching them how to get along with their bosses, who can be difficult.

Mike tells his audience a story of his first job—in construction—with a boss who was demanding, unfeeling, and uncaring. One day, Mike was using a nail gun and shot a big nail through his finger. He showed it to his boss, who told him to put duct tape on it to stop the bleeding and to get back to work.

Mike called me and told me the story.

When he had finished, I said, “You want to quit?”

He said, No.

Me: “Then stop whining and figure it out.” (No tone, no criticism, simply a lesson in responsibility)

So, at some point during his lecture to managers, he talks about the endless whining people do at work about their bosses, and then he puts up a slide that says, “Stop whining and figure it out.” Underneath the quote, the slide says, “Dad”

Then he explains what real responsibility is, and how managers who understand it can really be an asset to their bosses.

Mike had paid attention in family meetings to the lessons we’re learning right here, right now.

No whining. No denial or evasion of responsibility. Just figure it out and DO IT.

I can’t resist one more story about responsibility, because without it, children CANNOT be happy:

Daniel was camping with his eight-year-old son, Bryce, who was shooting at targets with his Airsoft gun, a device that propels soft spheres by way of compressed air or springs or both. Such projectiles have a lower velocity than bullets and gunpowder. Bryce knew gun safety, which applied here, even though Airsoft guns are less dangerous than traditional firearms.

When Daniel looked out the window of the cabin, he saw Bryce sucking on the end of the gun barrel—not kidding. And yes, that’s as foolish as it sounds. Just to complete the folly, Bryce even looked down the barrel of the gun. Every gun owner hearing this is cringing to their toes.

At this point, most parents would leap through the glass window, snatch the gun from the child, jerk the child off the ground by the hair, and administer any number of punishments. Daniel did none of that. He calmly excused himself from his conversation in the cabin and went outside to talk to Bryce.

“Bryce,” he said, “what do I love more, you or your eyes?”

Bryce knew what was happening, so with nearly equal calm—and a wry smile—he replied, “Me.”

Love and teach. Often not with consequences. Daniel did that beautifully, and in the process, he spread love and wisdom to three generations—including himself.

Teaching responsibility is critical, but you really won’t like it if you teach responsibility without the loving. Loveandteach.

I have a friend, Steven, who raised his kids firmly. They attended Church meetings faithfully, his sons were responsible—Eagle Scouts, priesthood leadership, and so on. But the father had no idea what unconditional love looked or felt like.

Steven’s boys went on missions, but then left the church, left the family. One son has children whom Steven has never seen, and the son won’t speak to his parents.

Steven called me about the boy who wouldn’t speak to them and asked what he could do.

Me: “You really want to have a relationship with your son?”

“Yes.”

“Then knock on his door, go back down the sidewalk a ways, and crawl up the walk on your hands and knees to apologize for being so harsh with them.” (I was being mostly figurative about the crawling, but not about the humble attitude.)

Steven refused. A year later, he was actually HAPPY to learn that his son had been an alcoholic for some time. Why? Because that “diagnosis” let the DAD off the hook. Now he could blame his son’s behavior on the SON, instead of the dad taking responsibility for not unconditionally loving him, which would have required repentance from the dad. And this is exactly what we do with the diagnosis of ADHD. We rejoice that it’s not OUR fault, so now we don’t have to change.

Back to the REASON for responsibility—the real reason to do chores, schoolwork, and more.

Being responsible is an EXPRESSION of who we are—our gifts and all—AND a way to DEVELOP ourselves. Same for our children. Without opportunities to work and be slightly stressed, how can our children know who they are? How can an athlete discover what he can do unless he’s pushing against his limits? How do our children practice being themselves and magnifying their gifts without opportunities to shoulder a load? How do they know if they’re anything at all? How can they truly know their gifts if they’re doing nothing? 

Without responsibility, you get children who don’t learn who they are. They just become angry, selfish, enabled, entitled, manic-depressive, schizophrenic, whatever.

I worked with a schizophrenic man who was in his mid-30s. He was on serious anti-psychotic medications, which have big-time mind-altering side effects. It made school and a career impossible. He had no sense of responsibility, no confidence, and no sense of who he was. Working with his psychiatrist and explaining what we were doing, I loved and taught him, and we tapered him off all his medications. He got a job, went to college. He was exercising more responsibility than he ever had in his life.

One day, he said, “I’m so happy I don’t know what to do with myself.”

I see such responses commonly.

More addictions

For some time now, we’ve been discussing what we as parents can do about problems, like these:

Yet again, unless we understand loving and teaching, no amount of guidance and information about parenting will make a difference, because all these “problems” are nothing more than symptoms of the pain of a child who feels unloved, alone, not understood, and afraid.

We are learning a lot here: about our children, their pain, their needs, and how to approach some specific behaviors.

We’ll address a few more here:

• The incidence of illicit drug use is almost impossible to determine accurately, but somewhere between 10-20% of us regularly use drugs in a way that is not prescribed.
• Drug use costs the country about $300 billion (half the U.S. defense budget, half the education budget)
• Alcohol use costs us another $300 billion
• Another $300 billion for tobacco (just another drug)
• 480,000 die each year from tobacco

What are we doing about all this? Essentially NOTHING, even though we did a LOT about COVID-19 and responding to the attacks of 9/11, just to cite a couple of examples. We do nothing about alcohol and drugs because WE CHOOSE to use these things.

Oh, but everything is entirely different if somebody does something TO US. (Because then we get to be self-righteous victims). For example, after 911, when fewer than 3000 people died, we went crazy, spending trillions and mobilizing the country. Obviously, I’m not minimizing any of those deaths, but the total was only a bit more than the deaths from TWO DAYS of tobacco deaths—and those continue to this moment. There is something seriously wrong with our choices and sense of responsibility when we feel victimized by the choices of others but not our own.

Alcohol and drugs are so common that we’re afraid to rock the boat too much with the users, their families, OURSELVES, the drug companies, Big Tobacco, and on and on. And we have no justifiable victimhood to motivate us. It’s much easier to muster the motivation to combat a virus or a foreign country.

The real point of alcohol and drugs is not the physical addiction or even deaths. The real point is that these drugs all alter your MIND, so you’re NOT HERE. Your child is not present in the world while using drugs of any kind, which includes alcohol. Think of the tragedy. In the premortal life, we chose to COME to this life, and then with drugs and alcohol, we change our minds and OPT OUT of actually experiencing life.

Marijuana has largely been legalized everywhere. People justified legalization—and continue to justify its use—on the basis of a lack of severe health effects. The common refrain is, “Well, it’s no worse than alcohol.” Yes, and look at how well alcohol has worked out for us. Again, the real point with marijuana is that you’re NOT HERE. Nor are your children. In a given dose of marijuana, there are between 2 and 400 cannabinoids, all capable of altering our brain function and therefore limiting our agency. Are we really willing to do that? Or allow our children to do that? And yet we do.

Marijuana has been proven to cause an increasing number of psychiatric problems now and later in life—including serious problems like schizophrenia and suicide. Marijuana increases motor vehicle accidents and deaths. It increases violence and antisocial behavior.

It’s KILLING us and our kids, and we say, “But it’s legal.”

Yes. So is anger, and whining, and victimhood, but they’re also all deadly emotionally and spiritually. “Legal” is a very low standard for acceptability. Jumping off a cliff is legal, but will you use that excuse to jump off a cliff?

Drugs are KILLING our children, physically and emotionally. When will we care?

How can we say that we are loving and teaching when we don’t pay rigorous attention to this?

So what can we do?

With tobacco—as one example of a drug—what we have tended to do is cite statistics, show pictures of black lungs from smoking. Kids do NOT CARE. They don’t look thirty years into the future, and tobacco use has actually been shown to increase with negative advertising.

So, again, What CAN we do?

Loveandteach. Children who feel LOVED DON’T USE—anything. (THAT is the most important thing I could say about alcohol or drugs)

PREVENTion—with loving and teaching—is much easier than treatment

What teaching could you do?

Minutes ago, we discussed how to use examples from behaviors in movies to teach our children about the consequences of choices and options. There is plenty of alcohol and drug use in movies and other media that we could use for teaching. You need to watch some movies with drug use—alcohol being no more than one drug—specifically, so you can discuss what you see.

Some parents might object to their children seeing even the images of drug use. Wake up, folks. Your children have already seen and heard a great deal about drugs, and that was without you being there to teach them. Now they need your guidance about what they are seeing—about what they’re seeing while you’re watching with them, and about the alcohol and drug use they’re seeing or hearing while you’re not there.

Brigham Young said, “Upon the stage of a theatre (movies are the stage of today) evil can be shown, with its consequences ... [along with] the weakness and the follies of man. The stage can be made to aid the pulpit in impressing upon the minds of a community an enlightened sense of a virtuous life, also a proper horror of the enormity of sin and a just dread of its consequences. The path of sin with its thorns and pitfalls ... can be revealed, and how to shun it.” (Discourses of Brigham Young, p.243)

You can point out how happy your children are when they feel loved, and how that is ruined by ANYTHING that is not the pure love of Christ—like anger, complaining, drugs, alcohol, or victimhood. Then, while watching a movie, you see a character who is drunk. What a great opportunity to pause the movie and ask, “Do they look happy to you?”

You point out every time you see an example of drugs stealing happiness—in movies, in conversations about their friends and other families, and more. Not to criticize others but to highlight the unhappiness caused by substances and other behaviors.

You can tell them that 50% of people in prison were convicted of drug-related offenses, and not one of them planned to get caught and imprisoned. And talk about how addiction is a deadly condition that sneaks up on people and cleverly forges a chain of death around them, link by link.

Teaching opportunities are everywhere, as we said when discussing screen time addiction

In addition to teaching your children ABOUT drugs and alcohol, you have a responsibility to know WHETHER they are using. We all need to be observant of our children’s behaviors, including looking for signs of drug use. You can look those up on a great many websites, using search engines. Look up “signs of drug use.”

If you see any signs, or you have just a feeling that there might be a problem, TEST them. Test their urine, just like athletes or people in drug rehab are tested. I mean it. I do this a LOT with parents and children I work with. Get a whole package of drug testing strips for urine. One site where these can be purchased is http://www.drugtestyourteen.com. I have no affiliation with them, just giving you an example of a resource. Parents are SO afraid to do this. Random drug testing is very effective in discovering and preventing drug and alcohol use. You do it without any warning—hence the word “random.” If there is doubt in your mind and heart about your child’s drug use (including alcohol and tobacco), do the testing randomly over a period of months.

At this point, your children will almost certainly scream two things: One is privacy. Nope, we talked about that around screen use. They’re lives are too important to be conducted in private while they are under your divinely-appointed care and supervision. It’s your job to check on them.

The second scream you’ll hear is, “You don’t trust me.”

What can you say to that accusation, which usually stops parents in their tracks? You say, “I’m not here to trust you about a subject that could kill you. I’m here to love and teach you.”

You don’t “trust them” to drive a car without education, practice, and certification. It would be improper TO trust them. With drugs and alcohol, the price is also too high to trust them. I can’t tell you how often parents HAVE randomly tested children they were CERTAIN could be trusted, only to find out that the kids had been using drugs for some time. You need to know.

Most of this has been about PREVENTING alcohol and drug use. What can you do if you learn that your child IS using alcohol or drugs? Mostly, it depends on how long they’ve been using it. If they claim they’re just used a few times, they might just be experimenting or exploring, so you might get away with this approach: 

• Get details of use, to learn if there are any questions about your child being dependent on the substance. Using it only a few times is generally just an experiment, but more than that tends to lead to much greater dangers.
• Talk to them about love in the ways you’ve been learning in the Parenting Training to this point. Do that until THEY can identify and express that they used alcohol or drugs only to numb their emotional pain—emotional pain caused by a lack of love from YOU. That’s it. No lecture. Express your love for them, and express your confidence that as they feel loved, their need for substances will decrease.
• Set up a time to talk again in a week, similar to what we’ve said so far. If they feel your love, they will use less.

But what if they keep using? Call a professional hotline to get an assessment of how dependent your child is. If you Google “what can I do about drug use in my child” online, you’ll tend to find sponsored sites—advertisements—for treatment centers that tend to immediately recommend expensive inpatient treatment. So, I suggest that you might look for free sites not connected to paid centers. For example, the national help line of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an offering from the U.S Department of Health and Human Services.

Call the hotline if you just have doubts.

Many children respond to loving and teaching by stopping their use of alcohol or drugs. There has to be no blaming or shaming from you, just love and support. If you have any doubts about their use, always randomly test, repeatedly, using drug and alcohol test kits that are available online.

And again, if you have any doubts, call a professional, either your doctor or a free helpline. Drug and alcohol has to stop immediately—right this second—because the possibility of death is so much more immediate than with other protective behaviors, like victimhood.

Whether health professionals get involved or not, even if your child becomes drug- or alcohol-free, you’ll need to use all the principles in this Training to help your child. You treat their anger, whining, withdrawal, and other behaviors in the SAME ways we’ve described thus far, with little regard for the “diagnosis” of substance abuse. The single biggest problem of drug treatment—and this is a HUGE problem with treatment centers and professionals—is that they don’t treat the underlying pain that CAUSES the substance abuse. You WILL. Loveandteach.

PORNOGRAPHY

All the statistics here were out of date the moment they were published, but everyone agrees that the numbers are all on the LOW side.

Studies vary, but it’s estimated that about 80% of men have some level of porn addiction. That’s just a bit staggering but—in my experience—not surprising. It’s an abundant distraction from the pain of life. I believe the number to be low.

• The average age when porn addiction begins is now 11, and going down.
• ONE porn site had 100 billion views last year. That’s 14 views per man, woman, child on EARTH.
• 30% of traffic on the Internet is porn.
• 90% of porn contains sexual violence
• Divorce lawyers are saying that porn addiction contributes to more than half of divorces.

It’s EVERYWHERE, and if anything, we just excuse it more and more as a natural need.

Don’t need more stats. It’s enough to know that your child is VERY likely to become addicted, or already is. Do NOT think, “But he/she is only 10.” Check their Internet history after creating no possibility of deletions, as we talked about with device use in general.

Effects of porn 

There are a great many, but experts pretty much agree that:

• Porn celebrates the degradation of women and creates even more disrespect among men for women.
• It also creates more disrespect among women for women.
• Normalizes sexual aggression and violence.
• The combination of computer access, sexual pleasure, and the brain’s mechanisms for learning leads to almost inevitable formation of a habit, then addiction. Porn sites use learning psychologists, like video games do. They work to establish a pattern of increasing rewards, escalating excitement, more frequent use, and content that is more violent or different in some way. It is DESIGNED to addict.
• Guys, learn to expect women to look and perform like porn stars. The pressure on women is incredible. Look at Facebook at how often women and even young girls try to look sexually appealing. Not just cute or pretty, but sexually attractive. Make it simple: in any given picture of men and women, compare the necklines ot the men to those of the women. Compare the square inches of skin exposure.
• The sexualization of women is now so normal that even women call it “cute” or attractive. Mothers encourage their girls to dress in sexually attractive ways. 

Porn is finally characterized by some health organizations as a major health crisis, and by several states.

Well, they should, since studies prove that people addicted to porn:

• Become more angry
• Become less peaceful
• Become less involved in their relationships at home and elsewhere
• Objectify both men and women
• Become more isolated (Real people become less real)
• Become more accusatory toward everyone who doesn’t agree with their addiction
• Become less interested in sex, actual sex, with their partners
• Become more demanding of their partner, so that they become more “interesting,” which means that they want their partners to become more controllable and look like and behave like the characters in their porn videos
• Become more emotionally dead, as they depersonalize everything in real life
• Become more like robots, living in a virtual world they control. This might be the worst effect of porn, not the sexual part. Porn users experience depersonalization and imprisonment in a VIRTUAL world, as I mentioned earlier in this chapter. I have NEVER met a porn addict who had normal relationships. Zero. It destroys marriages and children. Addicts enter a cycle: distraction, virtuality, and isolation, much worse relationships, more pain, and then more need for the distraction and pain reduction of porn use, and on it goes.
•  A relatively new finding is that porn addicts become less physically ABLE to have sex with their partners.

APPROACH to Porn

Do you wonder if your children are addicted? I hope you at least wonder. If they’ve SEEN it more than once, and they have continued access, it becomes highly likely that they will become addicted. If you believe that, you won’t go far wrong. It’s a prudent approach.

Porn is as addictive as cocaine. I’ve known many men who have been addicted to both—some consecutively and others simultaneously, and they say that porn is harder to quit. Why? Lots of reasons, but one is that in order to get cocaine, you have to get off the couch, find a dealer, and purchase it with real money. And you take the chance you could get caught by law enforcement. But with porn, you don’t have to go anywhere, and there is enough free porn out there to keep you entertained and addicted for a lifetime.

One man told me, “ONE hit of cocaine, and I was doomed. And it was the same with porn, starting when I was 12.” One set of parents contacted me asking for help with their 12-year-old son, who had been addicted to porn for four years already, and he didn’t go to school, never listened to anything his parents said, didn’t attend meals, and had become a virtual zombie. I couldn’t make up stories this bizarre.

Solution? Lectures, blocking programs on the computer, yelling? Nah.

If you haven’t given them the feel of LOVE, however, they will look for something else—including porn, no matter how “bad” you tell them it is for them.

Solution? Loveandteach.

Kids who feel loved can FEEL the difference between unconditional love and the superficial excitement of porn. Really, they’re not stupid. Help them to become emotionally and morally strong by LOVING and teaching them (mostly loving). Then they can handle the burdens and surprises of life. You don’t train a child to handle one life obstacle or burden or threat, like a single addiction. I’ve been saying that all along, that we’re teaching the LIFE COURSE, not handling individual “problems.” Your job is to train them to be emotionally FIT (loved), to be informed (teaching), and strong enough (loving) to handle anything that comes along. Is that possible? Yes, it is.

While you love them and love them, also TALK to them.

Describe the effects we’ve talked about, not to scare them but to inform them.

Tell them that they CAN choose to use anything to numb their pain, including porn—in the end, you can’t utterly control that in most cases—but then they have to pay the price of detaching from reality, losing all chance of the happiness they want, and ruining any possibility of healthy relationships. The price is death.

Admit to them, is it using fun? YES, but do you want to live with the rest of the picture? Alone, addicted, and kind of pathetic-looking? Tell them the story of Mark in Chapter Two.

Every choice has a “rest of the story,” a price.

• You want to take an expensive car off the lot? You CAN, but you have to pay the price.
• You want to NOT study in school? No problem. But then you pay the price of no career and enslavement to hourly wages and market changes.
• You want to jump off a cliff? You CAN, and it WILL be fun all the way down. But then you hit the bottom. Just like with porn.
• You want to watch porn? Fine, but then you pay the price—for the rest of your life.

Let’s look at a real scenario:

You find porn somehow on a child’s computer. Or phone. If you have transparency with devices in your home, it won’t be hard to find something wrong if it’s being done.

You say, "Iain honey, you’re not in trouble. This is just a subject you need to learn about. It’s also a serious subject. This is what I've found on your phone."

Show him the site names, or—unforgettable—a picture or two that you’ve saved or forwarded to yourself.

Then what? Use the information we’ve talked about earlier in this chapter. In the training, I’ve given you at least a couple of stories of porn addicts, one about Mark in Chapter Two. (See the Support Subject, “Porn, Example” and follow that example.)

And summarize the effects of porn. No scary tone, just matter-of-fact: “This is just the price you’ll pay, and I love you too much to do nothing while you jump off a cliff. You’ll lose the possibility of a healthy, full relationship with a partner. You’ll become more isolated and angry. You really won’t like the price you’ll pay.”

OR

"I found pictures of naked women. It's not a small thing, because it really affects how you see the world and how you treat people. Your father was addicted to pictures like this (if you divorced because of this, for example), and it has really affected him negatively. (Or “I’ve known many other men who have ...” You might describe a family member who has been isolated from the family all their lives.

"When people look at pictures like this, they almost invariably become highly distracted and even addicted to the pleasure of looking at the pictures and addicted to touching themselves sexually (talk about masturbation, since they already know, or they’re going to know with or without you)."

If you don’t know how to explain masturbation, Google it (with the age of the child). Really, on occasion, there is good stuff out there to choose from. But you’re just teaching about what masturbation IS, so from the Internet, you will have to ignore the pervasive moral judgment that nothing is wrong with it, which is amazing considering the addictive properties of this behavior.

Ask if they masturbate and describe the effects of the addiction. As with every addiction, they have to have more, and eventually, they can’t do without it, and finally, no amount of addictive behavior is satisfying.

Your child needs to feel loved, over and over, especially while they’re in pain and using porn—or anything else—to diminish their pain. As they feel unconditionally loved, their need to use porn simply decreases and eventually disappears. I have seen this happen over and over.

As I said in Chapter One:

When children feel loved in this way and learn to love others, they have that which is “most joyous to the soul” (1 Nephi 11) and thirst to stay close by the nourishment, the light, and the protection of the tree of life.

Such children, who have no need or desire to wander from the light, are simply happy. The natural product of removing pain and fear is happiness (man is that he might have joy). These children are not in emotional or spiritual pain, so they have NO NEED to act out in ways that express their pain or diminish it. They have no NEED to whine, argue, fight, withdraw, be irresponsible, be defiant, become depressed or suicidal, or to become addicted to phones, gaming, pornography, alcohol, drugs, and more. Controlling children to keep the commandments doesn’t work. In the premortal life, we already voted No on that approach, didn’t we? But a happy child WANTS to keep the commandments and has no desire to break them.  

SEX

Over the years, I have said the following sentence to hundreds of audiences, including large numbers of singles and people from all kinds of religious backgrounds, including no belief in God at all:

At that point, almost everybody either (1) nods their heads in agreement, usually because they were taught this by their religion or culture or family, or all three, or (2) they shake their head violently in protest, an indication of “You can’t tell me what to do.”

Let’s talk about those two responses:

1. Agreement that sex before marriage is not a good idea. There is zero confusion about God’s position on this subject, and the references would fill a book.

This same position is generally held by most major religions, and yet it has been demonstrated statistically that people who profess a religious affiliation do NOT have unmarried sex less. This is understandable because if a child feels unloved, ANYTHING that makes the pain less is almost irresistibly attractive: anger, withdrawal, drugs, alcohol, porn, SEX. If you tell a kid in pain that he can’t seek relief for his pain, however temporary, he will strongly tend to IGNORE YOU—and God. He has an emotional truck parked on his foot, and he’s in agony, and you’re telling him not to move the truck or his foot, but instead to just put up with the pain.

Not likely, or if he does comply, generally it doesn’t last long. In fact, if you tell him “no sex” often enough, and he’s in pain, he’s eventually going have some variation on this thought: “You know, I’ve come to resent everything else these controlling, unloving people have told me, and it hasn’t made me happy, so if THEY don’t like it, this ‘sex’ thing can’t be all bad. I’ll have to give it a try.”

A large study was done of kids who signed pledges sponsored by religious organizations, where they promised not to have pre-marital sex—thousands of kids. Years later, they were found to be MORE likely to have pre-marital sex than kids who didn’t sign a pledge. Moral prohibition alone simply is not effective.

2. Now the SECOND response to my recommendation of no sex before marriage: the headshakers. In my presentations, I say, “So, let’s ignore what I just recommended. Let’s have no prohibitions about sex. You go ahead and do it whenever you want, with whomever you wish. Don’t be shy. What are the KNOWN results of this approach?

First, if unmarried sex were a real solution to pain—and essentially every child is in pain—then sex addicts would be the happiest people on the planet. Ah, but they’re NOT. They’re miserable, just like every other addict.

And I’ve spoken to singles conferences, bunches of them, in and out of the Church. Thousands of single people. On one occasion, about 1000 people were present—all NOT members of the Church—when I said, “No sex before marriage.”

Groans rippled throughout the audience, with some audible protests.

I said, “Raise your hand if you’ve ever had great sex.”

Almost everybody raised their hand.

Me: Can anybody here say that the initial great sex EVER led to a lasting, fulfilling relationship? NOT A SINGLE HAND RAISED. And this from people who had NOT embraced the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Sex does not create happy relationships, and one large study demonstrated that people who live together before marriage get divorced at a rate higher than those who wait to have sex until after they are married.

Sex does NOT create great relationships. It can CONTRIBUTE to the GREATER happiness of a marriage founded on the principles of the gospel—including Real Love—between two people who are already happy. But if sex is used to diminish pain, as it always is in the absence of Real Love, it becomes Imitation love and a great distraction FROM finding Real Love and a genuinely fulfilling relationship.

All THAT is what you teach your kids. You WANT them to have sex, but you want them to enjoy it in circumstances where it will fulfill God’s Plan of Happiness, not in a way that would diminish both the sex and their happiness. You tell them that:

• Sex in marriage is great fun with people who are genuinely loving each other.
• Sex outside marriage immediately puts us outside the flow of the Spirit of God and outside that connection with everything good in the universe, leaving us far more unhappy than they can imagine at this point.
• Sex without love, and without the covenants of the temple, has a VERY STRONG tendency to become addictive, just like anything else used to fill an emotional and spiritual emptiness.

You are NOT trying to keep them from having fun. You’re teaching them that if we don’t keep the laws that govern the use of all principles and behaviors, we cannot then choose the happiness that is governed by those same laws.

Our children will learn these lessons nowhere else. Only from us. Increasingly, the world at large has adopted standards around sex that could be called “no standards.” The technical term is “Do Whatever You Want, just don’t break the law.” Sex is natural, the world says, so it must be all right. They believe that if they protect children from being violated, that is a sufficient safeguard, but that’s like protecting everybody from guns by putting them on a shelf high enough to make it difficult for a child to reach. The gun is still there, and an industrious child will reach it.

It’s OUR job as parents to teach our children LIFE, the Course in Life, the Plan of Happiness. WE hold the primary responsibility to loveandteach. Numerous studies have proven that WE are the greatest influence in our children’s lives—with sex, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and more. No government program will solve any of these problems. It’s YOU. It’s US.

As you talk to your children about sex, be aware that unconsciously, your recommendations could be felt as counterintuitive to them. So many of our children feel unloved, alone, powerless, helpless, controlled, criticized, miserable, maybe bullied. Then he/she has sex first time, or uses porn. WOW!! For a moment, it’s like, Are you kidding? This is heaven, Nirvana, and Valhalla all rolled into one. Suddenly, there is no pain—for at least a moment. Natural conclusion? Do it again. And again.

Then you come along and tell a child who has finally found profound pain relief NOT to have sex? Or use phones addictively, or whatever else? This does NOT make emotional sense to the child. Hence their frequent resistance to being told what not to do.

OR

You could tell a child to go ahead and have sex whenever and with whoever.

NO, that doesn’t work either.

So what is the solution? You can’t be surprised: LoveandTEACH.

So let’s teach a kid. You can take these instructions either way: that I’m teaching YOU about sex, or teaching you how to teach your child.

Sex is such a powerful source of Imitation Love—using all the physical senses wrapped up in an explosion—that once you’ve had sex, it changes how you see the other person forever after. This is a fact regardless of whether you agree with the concept of no sex outside marriage.

Once a guy has had sex with a woman, he CANNOT—not in the near future—see her as a partner, as someone to unconditionally love. He sees her as a source of pleasure, power, and praise—all from sex. It’s fireworks and Christmas all together. He’s using her, and she is both being used and using him right back—for acceptance, power, praise (LOT of it, more than she’s ever had). I realize that this is generalizing the male-female stereotype, but there’s a reason something is a stereotype: it’s most commonly true.

If you have ANY doubt about this almost universal generalization, let’s look:

Women dress, wear makeup, go to the gym, starve themselves, put themselves on Facebook, look at each other on Facebook, and on and on to be seen as attractive. In their defense, often they truly believe they’re doing it to be cute or socially connected. But with rare exceptions, all those efforts are designed to sexually attract guys, and THAT is what men are attracted to.

I’ve talked with thousands and thousands of men and women about this subject, from every imaginable angle. I generalize here, but the generalization is usually true:

• Men think, “I’d have sex with her, not her, her yes, not her.” Unbelievably, women do NOT understand how true this generally is.
• Women think, “I’d be in a relationship with him, not him, him yes. And I’d use sex to attract him, because that’s what works.” Generally speaking, men don’t realize that women are thinking this about them.

The real point is, two people with different agendas get together and hope things will somehow just turn out. No. And once you’ve had sex, you’re absolutely distracted from what your relationship really is. Two metaphors might help:

First: You and I are friends at work. Every time I see you, I give you $100. Would you like me? Oh yes, you would—you’d go out of your way to encounter me—but WHY would you like me? Once you’ve accepted the money, you can’t be sure whether your liking me is pure, or whether it’s tainted by the money I give you.

Second metaphor: Pavlov’s dog. Pavlov was a scientist who discovered that when he put meat in front of a dog, the dog salivated BEFORE eating the meat. Just the sight of it was enough to provoke salivation. Then Pavlov rang a bell each time he gave the dogs meat. Again, they salivated—obviously. But after a period of regular feeding and bell ringing, he just rang the bell, without the meat, and he discovered that the dogs salivated anyway. They had associated the bell with the meat.

Did the dog LIKE the bell? YES, but why? Because if was followed by MEAT. We humans think we’re pretty evolved, but I can train you to like me by paying you $100 every time I see you, just as Pavlov trained the dog.

And that brings us to men and sex. (This can be true with some women too, but we’ll stick with the generalization about men for a bit to make the point.) Men may like the particular ring of your bell—your personality, intelligence, talents, and more, just like dogs learned to like the pitch and tonality of a real bell—but once you associate sex with your relationship with a guy, you do NOT know if he likes the ring of your bell—who you are—or just the possibility of sex you offer. You CAN’T know. Men will associate sex with just seeing you. If you actually offer sex, the association is profound.

We must teach our sons and daughters this: that sex confuses a relationship entirely. Two people having sex REALLY DO have powerful feelings toward each other. Such couples tell me fervently and sincerely, “But we’re in love.” Yes, they are—the feelings are REAL—but are those feelings genuine HAPPINESS? NO, and that is the grand deception. Sex makes it impossible to know whether two people could have a real relationship. Having sex with somebody before marriage is like playing Russian roulette with FIVE bullets in the gun, not one. Who would be stupid enough to play with ONE bullet? But FIVE? Our children need to understand that having sex outside marriage is seriously risky gambling, a gamble they cannot afford.

What is the solution? Don’t offer or take the $100. Don’t serve up meat at a musical event (the ringing of a bell). We have to teach our children this.

Another disadvantage of sex before marriage:

Sex is conditional. You SELL yourself. That’s the nature of conditionality: IF. IF you give me this, I’ll give you that. It’s a trade. It’s a sale. Wal-Mart gives me things if I give them something of relatively equal value (money). It’s a trade, it’s conditional, but it’s also acceptable because everybody knows it’s a trade, and they agree to it.

The problem with sex is that nobody really KNOWS the nature of the trade, so deception and subsequent severe disappointment are guaranteed. Sure, we know that sexual attraction is part of the picture when single men and women interact, but neither party understands the real nature of the trade.

Men really don’t know ahead of time how insane they become when sexually intoxicated. They do NOT know what unconditional love is like either, nor do they know that they are utterly incapable of giving it. They don’t know that the intoxication of sex WILL wear off, leaving them totally unequipped to participate in a mutually and unconditionally loving relationship. They don’t know much of anything clearly while they’re drunk with all the attraction and the praise and power of romance and sex, so the trade is a mystery and a deception.

And women really don’t know how much they sell their bodies and their agency for some approval, power, and pleasure (in roughly that order).

And men also sell their agency for sex, approval, and power.

Everybody is drunk on multiple forms of whatever makes them feel good, but that feeling CANNOT last, and the result is a GUARANTEE of disappointment, expectations, complaining, and disillusionment.

I read an article where a man said, “If you're female and you don't relish the idea of being alone, then... throw every last dollar you have and all your energy into your physical appearance. I'm serious. Get a personal trainer, porcelain veneers, expensive clothing, great skin, and high‑end plastic surgery. Get scared and get it done.” This seems a little shocking, but he just had the courage to say what most people are already thinking. Essentially, he said to women, SELL yourself, and men will buy it. And, with some exceptions, he’s right.

And men sell themselves too, and in the drunken craziness, everybody loses their agency. When we’re intoxicated, we lose the ability to choose, and that is losing our agency. As I’ve explained in Chapter Three, even if we theoretically have the RIGHT to choose, if we lose the ABILITY to choose through any kind of impairment—and sex is one of those distractions—we lose our agency, as Elder Ballard said about all addictions.

We sell ourselves cheap. The thrill, the physical pleasure, the praise of sex outside marriage IS exciting—precisely why people do it—but then what? Then you have to do it again, and again, and before long, you don’t know how to do anything else—just like with any other addiction. And you don’t have anything—no love, no joy, no pain relief.

And if you don’t teach your children about sex, they’re likely to fall for this pattern.

Sex is so pleasurable—or at least successful in eliminating pain—that expectations go through the roof. “It must be love,” people say. Best experience ever. “It must be happiness.”

But then comes the crash, and there is nothing worse than disappointment and betrayal—worse than having nothing to start with. This has been proven with studies: Pain is much worse if people are promised a reward and lose it than if they were never promised anything and don’t get it.

Last:

That’s the kiss of death.

It substitutes for the real thing, distracting us, making us lose our focus. We can’t do both:

We have to teach our children so they have enough information to choose, to enjoy full agency.

We have to loveandteach our kids so they can make a real choice, instead of letting the distractions of the world choose for them.

To guys, I say: Do you want a woman to really love and support you? Such a woman will know whether you genuinely respect women. THAT is the woman who won’t cheaply and prematurely have sex with you. The woman who can truly love you won’t sell herself to you. In short, any woman who would easily have sex with you is NOT likely the one who wants to be a partner for the rest of your life—although she might be the one you deserve.

To girls: You want a guy to respect you and be your partner for the rest of your life? Then being loose with yourself isn’t the way. Guys don’t go looking for partners on the street corner.

A specific example of teaching children the consequences of early sex:

My daughters occasionally wanted to dress like their friends—of course. On those occasions, I would stop them on their way out the door and say, “You’re kidding me, right?” No lecture. Just a simple question, no critical tone.

“But everybody dresses like this.”

Me: “Probably. Bring me ONE friend who is dressed like that and is happy in a relationship after three weeks. Bring me ONE who has attracted a guy you’d want to be your eternal partner or help raise your children.”

They changed clothes.

Ask your children, "With your choice of clothes and behavior, what kind of partner will you attract?"

There is no end to the Course of Life. We’ve covered a number of subjects. There will be more.