Raising rowdy boys into responsible men is difficult. Want to know one of the best things we can do for our sons?

Our children are growing up in a wired world. The Kaiser Family Foundation says children ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 6½ hours a day with media: television, radio, computers (not including schoolwork), music players and so on. That’s over 45 hours a week. Longer than the average workweek.

That’s also more time than they spend with their parents (less than 16 hours), in physical activity (10½ hours), or doing homework (just over 5 hours). Looking at those numbers alone, it’s not difficult to see a correlation between increased media use and family breakdown, childhood obesity, and declining academic performance.

Technology is a strong drug. It grabs young minds and dominates them. Boys in particular tend to love the stuff—especially video games.

Beyond the mere time issue, though, is the content of that media. Studies prove it’s hurting our boys. It is our duty as parents to intervene.

“As a pediatrician I can tell you that disconnecting, or strictly limiting and strictly supervising your son’s access to electronic media is one of the best things you can do for his emotional, mental and physical health,” wrote Meg Meeker in Boys Should Be Boys.

Such parental control has grown unpopular in our permissive age—and our children are suffering for it. Consider: Young people have no built-in sense of right and wrong—no natural means of distinguishing something acceptable from something destructive. Young people may know how to use a certain technology but be unaware of the risks it poses, making them particularly susceptible to its evil effects.

We as parents must be the gatekeepers of our children’s minds as we train them how to be responsible for their own minds. It takes time to teach right from wrong and to help them develop the character to hit the off switch or walk away from bad influences. So, in the meantime, we need to control the off switch.

Our vigilance in our sons’ media usage can help prevent a multitude of problems from taking root in their lives.

Boys tend to be drawn to media violence far more than girls, and there is plenty of media out there to inflame that appetite. But it is a trap we need to steer our sons away from.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has repeatedly warned that television violence hurts our children. It has found that boys who watch violent tv turn more aggressive—even with brief exposure, but much more with larger doses. Playing violent video games correlates to even worse anti-social aggression; Meeker cites studies showing that they “increase aggressive thoughts, can increase feelings of anger or hostility, and can raise a boy’s blood pressure and heart rate.”

Video games are increasingly graphic and realistic, and in many of them the object is to kill people. Prof. David Grossman, a 24-year Air Force veteran who testified before a senatorial committee on youth violence, says the parallels are strong with the techniques used by the military to prepare men for violent combat. Violent video games desensitize our boys to human suffering and actually condition them to kill.

Most media violence is not only glamorous, it is morally ambiguous or immoral. “When the images are bombarded on an 8-year-old brain, a boy can easily shift from believing that a man is supposed to be trustworthy and self-controlled (as you, his father, might have taught him) to believing that real men are cruel and aggressive,” Meeker says.

If the media’s depictions of masculinity are brutal and destructive on the one hand, they are childish and stupid on the other. The almost universally portrayed stereotype is one of a strong, competent female having to deal with a goofy, idiotic male. The roles between the sexes as God intended are flipped upside-down and twisted in knots—then steeped in plenty of vulgar, adolescent humor that mostly appeals to childish males.

The greater our sons’ exposure to that nonsense, the more ingrained in their thinking it will become.

Ensuring that our sons’ model of responsible masculine behavior remains balanced and realistic requires that we strive to limit those false images, and provide a good example and solid instruction in what is true and right.

Another stealth missile in the media aimed at our boys is sex. We must be defenders of our sons’ purity in a world where sexual impurity is everywhere.

Today, the average age of a boy’s first exposure to pornography is 11. And what is available on the Internet is far worse than at any time in the past—and far easier to access. Almost half of boys between grades 3 and 8 have visited “adult” websites.

“Porn and smut pose an awesome threat to your boys,” wrote James Dobson in Bringing Up Boys. “A single exposure to it by some 13-to-15-year-olds is all that is required to create an addiction that will hold them in bondage for a lifetime. It is more addictive than cocaine or heroin. That was one of the conclusions drawn during the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, on which I served. It is known by those of us in the field of child development that the focal point of sexual interest is not very well established among young adolescents. It can be redirected by an early sexual experience (wanted or unwanted) or by exposure to pornography.” In other words, that early exposure can distort the normal channels of stimulation by the opposite sex—which of themselves are designed by God and wholesome when used properly—into all manner of perversion. “Many men who have succumbed to these perverse sexual appetites have traced them to the dawn of their adolescence,” Dobson explained.

Pornography is horribly degrading to women especially. God intends your son to grow up to be a protector of and provider for women. If he becomes ensnared by lust, it takes his mind 180 degrees opposite his being able to successfully fulfill that calling.

Talk to your son. “[F]athers must assume that a difficult sexual struggle is occurring in their sons’ lives,” wrote Douglas Wilson in Future Men. “[A] father must talk to his son and teach him. The teaching must consist of more than, ‘Yeah, I had this problem when I was your age, too.’ The teaching must be grounded in the Word of God—what does the Bible teach about masturbation, lust, fantasy and so forth?

“A father should check with his son and not wait for his son to ask. Further, he should check periodically and regularly. Every son needs guidance and accountability from his father in this area.”

If we do our part, we can go a long way to giving our sons one of the most priceless gifts he could possess: a clean conscience.

The world is filled with dangers—and a great number of them come via the media. Our sons need a strong moral compass in order to navigate this crucial aspect of their lives and to make it to manhood as unscathed as possible. We want to facilitate any use of technology and media that is genuinely good for our boys—that builds right knowledge, cognitive development and character—while drawing firm lines on what will hurt them. Knowing where to draw the lines—both in quantity of use and in content—requires educating ourselves and asking God for wisdom and discernment.

Teach him right from wrong. Show him how a real man, like King David, says, “I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes” (Psalm 101:3). Provide a good example, and supplement that with plenty of instruction.

“An unsupervised kid can get into more mischief in a single day than his parents can straighten out in a year,” wrote Dobson. “Considering how the world has changed, it is doubly important to build relationships with boys from their earliest childhood. You can no longer rely on rules to get them past the predators in the wider world. It still makes sense to prohibit harmful or immoral behavior, but those prohibitions must be supplemented by an emotional closeness that makes children want to do what is right. They must know that you love them unconditionally and that everything you require of them is for their own good. … With all the temptations buzzing around our kids, simply saying no a thousand times creates a spirit of defiance. We have to build bridges to them from the ground up.”