No Screens at Church

Years ago, my husband and I taught the five- and six-year-olds at church. This was back in the days when church was three hours long. I will always remember one of the young boys we taught sitting in his little chair, twirling his tie, and glancing desperately up at the clock for the dozenth time, asking in a plaintive voice, “How much longer?” When I told him how many more minutes (which, unfortunately for him, was still a lot), his face fell. He was despondent. In his sweet little voice, he moaned, “Church is a really long time.” Amen, little brother! Amen!

Things get harder in the general meeting where everyone worships together. Depending on the skill and preparation of the speakers (we are an all-volunteer congregation, so everybody eventually gets a turn to give a talk, whether they like to or not), the meeting can either fly by or drag on. Families with young children face the extra and exhausting task of helping the little ones (or themselves) make it through the meeting without melting down or spiraling out of control. It’s an old problem though, and people have had generations to solve it. They’ve done a brilliant job—a piece of paper and a pencil, cut-out felt figures, or even just a pair of hands can be the difference between quiet contentment or wriggling disaster.

In the span of a few years though, those games that everyone used to know are mostly forgotten. People hardly even think to play tic-tac-toe anymore. Nowadays, people usually forgo the hand games and things that require adult participation, instead relying heavily on snacks, toys, and, of course, screens. Screens are very effective babysitters. Even little ones whose real problem is that they are desperately in need of a nap or a diaper change will shut up for them, albeit sometimes only briefly. Even when young parents try valiantly to keep baby happy without screens, well-meaning neighbors in the pews offer to take baby, and what do they do? Pull out their phones! Even adults who grew up without them seem unable to even imagine any other way to pacify children. Adults have clearly found screens indispensable.

Children spend a lot of time on screens at church. At some level, it even seems more reverent to give them a screen than to have them scribble or play “I spy with my little eye.” There’s no noise, no movement. When they get tired of one thing, they don’t have to rummage through the Sunday bag, crinkling papers, rustling bags, taking things out and throwing them at their siblings. They won’t hang on your arm with a desperate, restless face or crawl under the pews to say hi to the neighbors. They can flip to the next app. Screens keep children quiet and contained. So does it matter if parents use screens to pacify their children for church? It’s not like the kid is paying attention to the meeting anyway. What’s the harm in plugging them in, especially if it’s just fifteen minutes at the end?

That’s the wrong question to ask. It’s not the time that matters; it’s the patterns you are creating. You are instilling habits for the screenified child that she will carry for the rest of her life, barring some herculean effort on her part. She’s going to be stuck with the thought and attention patterns that screens engrain. You are sending her messages about what to value, whether you mean to or not. And you are setting patterns for yourself.

If you plop a screen in front of a child, it requires nothing of you other than handing over the device. The child now sits quietly slouched in her seat or sprawled on the floor, popping digital balloons, watching videos of bubbles floating across the sky, dragging her finger across the screen to “color” a picture, flipping through pictures of Jesus or family vacations. You can now sit and listen to the meeting without interruptions (although given the number of adults on their own screens, I’m not sure that’s the primary motivation).

In contrast, old-timey child pacification techniques demand your participation. Take a longtime family favorite of ours: Finger Snatcher. You make an O-shaped hole with your fingers and thumb, and the child tries to put a finger in the hole without you closing your fingers and catching him. That’s it. Sometimes you close your fist quickly, sometimes slowly. Sometimes you do nothing at all, and the child pokes his finger in more and more recklessly until, snap, you’ve caught him fast. He looks up at you in surprise with big, shining eyes, and you grin at him, and then you play again until you or he gets tired of it. Then you have to find a new game to play or maybe leave and go wander the halls together for a bit. Maybe you call it a day and go home for a nap.

So many things are going on in this simple game: touch, proprioception, timing, risk-taking, strategy. Further, the child feels seen and cared for by a loving adult. These are just the kinds of things that young, growing brains crave. As the child looks up at your face and you smile at him, you share the good feeling of sitting together in a good place sharing a little game and the occasional giggle. You’re helping the child slowly build up the skills of attention and focus needed to attend to the world, and you’re building a relationship too. I can think back to sitting in church with my own father and playing Finger Snatcher. My children have those memories too. And now they play the same game when younger kids sit near us. You don’t have to remember to put this game in your bag and bring it to church; you don’t need a power source or an internet connection; no one is tracking how many times you play or hijacking your senses to compel you to keep playing. It’s simply there when you need it and gone when you don’t.

In contrast, the child on the screen needs nothing from you. There is no interaction, no relationship building, no real-world communication or touch. She doesn’t even get to practice coloring with real markers or a real piece of paper. For all intents and purposes, the child on a screen is no longer present at church, and it would probably take somebody pulling the fire alarm to get her to look up—and maybe not even then. The result is that she is missing out on the practice necessary to accurately read other people’s faces, movements, and voices. Instead of learning to tune in to her body and the world around her, a child on a screen learns to tune everything out.

Finger Snatcher and other quiet games are not as all-absorbing as screens. They require effort on the part of the grown-ups. They’re not always totally reverent. They fail sometimes. Despite their inevitable failures, these old games and tricks provide much better scaffolding for helping a child learn to actually tune in to other people. They aren’t foolproof because, ultimately, church is often not an ideal environment for little ones. The irony that the place we gather to remember Jesus is so unsuited to the needs of the little ones He insistently sets before us to emulate is a discussion for a different day. I mention it here only to acknowledge that any real solution to the wiggles at church must eventually tackle that thornier question. The old-timey child pacification techniques only get us so far.

In the meantime, these old ways are worth hanging on to. The medium is the message. Since there is no justifiable reason to hand a child a screen while you’re sitting together at church—you have nothing else to do and neither do most people around you—you’re teaching that child that she’s not worth your time or effort. You’re communicating that you don’t really care what she’s doing as long as she’s not bugging you. You’re teaching her that paying attention at church is optional. Big surprise if when she grows up, she decides her physical presence at church is also optional.

If you hand a screen off to a child at church, chances are extremely high that you do it in lots of other places too, so it’s actually not just fifteen minutes at the end of the meeting. It’s lots of minutes every day. And when you hand a child off to a screen, you’re essentially ignoring her nonverbal communication about the real reasons she’s restless—that she’s tired or hungry or needs to go potty. You’re training yourself not to be in tune. How we treat children at church ends up being how we treat them, period. This matters not just for the child but for you. Adults are missing critical developmental milestones. They are failing to learn how to engage children of various ages in a loving, positive, but firm manner and keep them directed toward constructive things. So many adults are now embarrassingly child-illiterate, including many, many parents. It’s painful to watch. These are crucial skills, ones every adult should master, but they’re vanishing, and you can’t relearn them by reading a book or watching a video on the internet. Well, you can try, but good luck. Nothing can capture the creativity and sensitivity of an adult in tune with children except real-time exposure. The interactions are too ephemeral, too subtle, too spontaneous. If you’re scrolling, you will miss out on watching the masters, and you are not practicing those skills yourself.

The child is also missing out on crucial developmental milestones. A young child doesn’t have the words necessary to explain what she needs or why, so it’s up to the adult to anticipate her needs and respond promptly and appropriately—to be in tune—and in so doing, the adult teaches that child the Golden Rule far more powerfully than any sermon ever preached over the pulpit. A child learns to treat others the way she would like to be treated because somebody has done that for her when she is little and vulnerable and utterly dependent on other people to help her make sense of the world around and within her. The child learns to trust; she can feel that “when I need help, you’ll be there.” By attending to a child’s needs, the adult teaches the child what her feelings mean and how to read those feelings in other people too; in other words, by responding to a child’s needs, you are teaching her how to be human.

The implications for the unattended, screenified child at church, then, are eternally consequential. The Golden Rule is livable only if people know both how they feel and how others feel too and also have the discipline to act on that knowledge. So much of spiritual strength comes through learning to interpret feelings, often very subtle feelings—warnings, guidance, comfort, inspiration—and then having the courage to follow through, to act. This is not easy to do. It requires a lifetime of practice. How ironic then, how tragically ironic, that church, of all places, becomes a place where children are robbed of that essential practice. Church should be a refuge. It should the place guaranteed that children will be safe from the soul- and mind-destroying plague of screens. People have worshipped the Almighty for almost all of human history without them. We don’t need them to find God. But we do need to help those tired, overwhelmed parents with their children at church. The burden of helping children get through the meeting (or life) should not fall solely on their shoulders. All of us can do our part to help. Without screens.

Image Credit: Norman Rockwell, “Lift Up Thine Eyes” (1965)