There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
Coming from a teen, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that particular cliché or one of its associates: “You don’t get it”; “All my friends are doing it”; “I guess you don’t love me.” However, I have to admit that I was a bit shocked to hear them all coming out of my 9-year-old nephew’s mouth.
Why was my nephew so bent out of shape? Because his mom had done something that, in his mind, was unforgiveable: She had told him to stop playing on his tablet.
If you’re a parent, you might be familiar with that screentime battle. Or perhaps you’ve been frustrated by the one that frequently follows: “What should I do now? I’m bored.”
When it comes to technology, parents can sometimes feel out of their depth. Even if you grew up with a smartphone in hand (if the first iPhone was a person, it’d be old enough to vote), it can be a challenge to figure out the “right” way to guide your family through this ever-changing technological landscape.
Luckily—or perhaps, unluckily, depending on how you look at it—you’re not alone.
When we at Plugged In saw that report, it got us thinking: How can we help parents to navigate technology, protecting their children from harm while also teaching them good screentime habits, in practical and biblical ways?
In this tech guide, we’ll walk you through those parental pain points mentioned above (as well as some others we identified, such as pornography and artificial intelligence). Each article will unpack a different technology-related issue. We’ll give you stats and information from various researchers and scientific studies. But, most importantly, we’ll also provide you with pragmatic, actionable advice for dealing with those specific problems.
And don’t worry, we don’t expect you to read it all in one go (it’s 125 pages). The Parents’ Guide to Technology is organized so that you can bounce around from article to article, cherry-picking the topics that are closest to your family.
Oh, and did I mention? It’s completely free.
That’s right, we’re not asking you to hand over your credit cards or to pay for a membership or subscription. If you want a copy of the Parents’ Guide to Technology, it’s yours. Just head over to pluggedin.com/tech-guide to download your copy.
What’s more is that we’ll be updating the guide every year. (I did say that the technological landscape is ever-changing, after all.) So let us know what you think! How did we do? Are there issues you’d like us to cover in the future? Do you want more information about a specific topic?
Contact us on Facebook or Instagram. Send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com. Head over to YouTube and leave us a message there. Or, simply, leave a comment below. We always love to hear from you.
Parents who want to keep pornography away from their family received a gift early this year. John-Michael Bout and Jacob Valk have produced two new series of videos to do exactly that.
Under the banner of their Into the Light ministry, their nine-episode Parenting & Pornography series helps parents talk to their children about sexuality and pornography from a biblical perspective. As the group shared on their website:
“You may feel nervous, ashamed, scared, or like it’s too late when you approach this topic. Don’t count yourself out. This series is for you.”
And realizing the frustration that many families encounter when trying to take steps to block porn, the group also produced a practical series called TechSafe, featuring tutorials to “equip you to safely live with and enjoy your technology to the glory of God.”
Bout and Valk, both Canadians, previously teamed up to produce the Into the Light documentary, and shared their story on RP’s Real Talk podcast. Both men are currently pursuing higher education at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
To access both series for free, all you’ll need to do is provide them with your name and email at www.intothelightministries.ca. You can watch the trailer below.
Whenever you want to dehumanise and control groups of people, a major tactic is to get them out of sight and out of mind. Make them invisible, in other words. We have certainly done that with the unborn as we kill them in the millions.
We have done it with Blacks in the past. More recently we do it with groups that we want to pretend just don’t exist. Ex-homosexuals is a classic case in point. And now, hot on their heels, ex-trans people (detransitioners) is the latest group that we want to keep invisible.
So many of our progressive elites, politicians, media outlets, academics and others want to pretend that there is no such thing as a person who once transitioned but now deeply regrets it. The mantra of our leftist overlords is that transition is always good, and there can be no other direction to take. They have fully bought the lies of the trans lobby, and countless people are now suffering as a result, including so many grieving mothers and fathers.
The truth is, de-transitioning is now a major growth area. More and more people who first thought that the trans agenda would solve all their problems are realising that it was all an appalling lie, and it simply has made matters worse.
But still, countless kids are being led down this garden path, a one-way-ticket to a life of turmoil and misery – for child and parent alike. One of the latest resources discussing all this is the new book edited by Kirralie Smith, Devastated: How Gender Ideology is Tearing Australian Families Apart (Gender Awareness Australia, 2024).
Smith heads up Binary, an Australian-based ministry devoted to taking on the trans behemoth and helping people who are being harmed by it. The book features nine moving personal stories of those who have been so very badly damaged by trans ideology.
She introduces the issue, presents the stories, and then offers some concluding chapters. A slim book – just 164 pages – it packs a punch. Because most our leaders and elites, along with most of the mainstream media, do not want you to hear stories like this, it is so very important that Kirralie has put this book together.
As she says in the Introduction:
Already transgender regret is a growing phenomenon. As children captured by the ideology become adults they realise how deficient they are due to medicalized interventions that have stunted their growth and left them scarred and life-long medical dependents.
It is criminal and sad beyond words.
The growing number of devastated and abandoned young adults must cause us to sit up and take notice. There will only be more as the years pass and more children reach adulthood.
Lying to children or to anyone in fact, is not kind. It is cruel to deceive already confused people into believing they can achieve the impossible. Pronouns and name changes will not change a person’s sex. Costumes, makeup and hairstyles are simply appropriations of stereotypes. Becoming a lifelong medical patient, reliance on drugs and very risky surgical procedures will not turn the male into a female or a female into a male.
It is devastating to families and children that activists have succeeded in convincing legislators that these lies will result in freedom. They never will. Only the truth will set them free. (p. 10)
Devastated, How gender ideology is tearing Australian families apart by Smith, Kirralie (Author)
The stories she shares are utterly heartbreaking. How we as a society could have allowed our children to be abused and harmed for life is something we should never have allowed.
Tara’s story is representative of so many devastated parents. She says, “both my daughters have fallen victim to the modern mania of transgenderism. The last three years have been a plodding kind of hell lit by spotlights of hope.” (p. 63)
She also writes:
Scared and confused though we were, my husband and I did our best to keep our heads and to be supportive. In the privacy of our bedroom, we held each other and whispered our confused theories. What was happening to Grace? A lovely young girl who had been luxuriating in the sun in a gingham one-piece bathing suit only a few months earlier.
Grace shaved off her long blonde hair and adopted a skater-boi style. She tore everything out of her room and threw away almost all records of herself as a child. She sought to lay a fresh path in the future by destroying evidence of her past. She declared her birth name to be a ‘dead name’. She threw out all her clothes and replaced them with men’s clothes. She adopted a deep voice and would swagger about. She would man-spread when she sat down…. (p. 66)
She concludes her piece this way:
Activists are pushing a narrative that failing to affirm a child’s brand-new gender identity constitutes child abuse. This narrative is being used as grounds by trans-activists (who have infiltrated Social Services) to seize confused children from loving homes.
And so, unfortunately, you must minimally affirm your daughter lest you lose her entirely.
I use my daughters’ chosen names when addressing them and do my best with the linguistic gymnastics that are their chosen pronouns. In return, my daughters have agreed not to pursue chemical or surgical gender transition while living at home.
These boundaries take away the grounds for the State to seize them. They concede enough ground to my daughters to keep them safe, and give them time to think.
Once again, self-appointed experts working for the State are deeming mothers ‘unfit’ and seizing their children.
Please help us keep our kids safe from harm. Radical gender theory confers no benefits on vulnerable children and poses huge risks to their mental health. (p. 71)
The first story found in the book, and the longest, involves someone I happen to know. Her story has been featured elsewhere, and what she says needs to be heard. Tess and her husband lived a normal life with their daughter and son, but things went off the rails early on in the daughter’s teen years.
First, she revealed that she had been raped by a boy she was hanging around with; then she announced that she was a lesbian; and then she declared that she was really a boy, not a girl, and transitioning was the way forward. All this occurred in a relatively short period of time.
You really have to read the entire 44-page story. The hell this family has been through seems unimaginable to most of us. The entire family was turned upside down. And then there were the police and other authorities continuously siding with the confused daughter against the parents.
At one point the police confiscated the daughter’s diary which described the initial rape, and when the father tried to get it back, he was told it was destroyed! Just one brief quote from Tess: “I couldn’t believe what he was telling me! How could the police destroy evidence into the rape of a minor…? A wave of emotions coursed through me that I just couldn’t control. I started sobbing…” (p. 41)
The whole thing was an utter nightmare, with tears and anguish almost a daily outcome of this diabolical situation. The chapter ends with these tragic words:
It’s been almost 4 years since I spoke to my daughter. I miss her every day. I missed the person she was and the relationship we had. I mourn for the loss of the relationship with her sibling, I mourn for the experiences she has missed and will never get back and I worry constantly for her health and mental wellbeing. I ache to hug her. I ache to listen to her laugh. Parenting was never meant to be this difficult or this crazy. What I do know is that I’ll never stop fighting to protect all the people being harmed by this dreadful agenda. What the professionals, activists, and the children themselves forget is to never get between a mother and her young (regardless of age, our protective instincts will always be there), and that when hopefully these lost youth realise they’ve made a massive mistake, it won’t be the medical professionals or the activists or their glitter families that will be there to help them. It will be the mums and dads waiting to help them heal. (pp. 60-61)
Closing chapters written by Kirralie examine various issues, including how so much of the media is complicit in pushing radical trans activism. The penultimate chapter speaks about “Resources for families”. In it she says this:
Despite the pressure and misinformation, its vital parents understand that having compassion doesn’t have to mean 100 per cent agreeing with their beliefs, or condoning their behaviour.
Many de-transitioners (former trans-identifying people) caution parents of gender dysphoric children against simply presenting scientific facts and arguments about biological sex. While truth is certainly on your side, there are complex layers underlying the gender issue meaning a guns-blazing approach is likely to drive them further down the ideological hole.
It’s important to prioritise building a quality relationship with your child and moving the conversation away from gender and transitioning as much as it’s possible. Remember that studies show around 90 per cent of children will grow out of their gender dysphoria if left to go through normal puberty.
Many young women who were caught up in the transgender craze in their teenage years describe body image issues, unrealistic expectations of womanhood, and the hypersexualized culture as contributing factors that led to their trans identity. Parents play an important role in combating these negative cultural messages and engaging in constructive conversations around some of these damaging lies they may be believing. Flaunting your body and liking ‘girly things’ do not make a woman, nor do muscles and cars make a man. Gender ideology is purely based on stereotypes and denies the beautiful diversity of character and temperament of males and females. (pp. 153-154)
Her closing words in her final chapter are also worth sharing:
We must offer support, compassion and hope to those impacted by gender ideology. Nearly everyone has a story of someone they know who has been captured by gender ideology. So many sad stories based on false narratives and promises that cannot possibly be realised.
We can all be a part of the change and influence our culture for good. Anytime someone tries to silence you, remember these stories. Stand firm, speak up and speak loudly for those whose voice has been stolen from them.
Truth, reality and evidence-based science will prevail. It is just a matter of time and a commitment from each one of us to stay the course. (p. 164)
There are now many good books available on the trans delusion and deception. This is one of the newest and best, certainly dealing with the situation as found mainly in Australia. It needs to be widely read and shared.
Well done Kirralie for putting this very important volume together. Your work and this book certainly are and will be of help to so many people.
Don’t think the government will ever take your child? Think again. Laura Bryant Hanford, contributing writer to The Federalist, returns to the podcast to expose how the government is overriding your parental rights and harming children both mentally and physically in the name of “trans-rights”. Once you hear some of these heartbreaking horror stories happening in America (like Abigail Maritinez from California), you’ll be reminded of the importance of policy, and how Christians and all people should love their neighbors enough to prevent future generations from experiencing this madness!
During their discussion, Frank and Laura will address questions like:
How often and in what states are children being taken away from their parents?
What are some specific examples of this happening in the U.S.?
Why are some doctors hiding the most recent research data on the effects of “gender-affirming care” on children?
Where do the candidates stand on this issue?
Why is the Biden-Harris administration suing the state of Tennessee?
Who is advocating to lower the age of consent, and how would that change what’s taught in public schools?
How would the misnamed “Equality Act” impact our religious freedoms?
What kind of impact has the Biden-Harris administration made on the foster care system?
What can parents do if they find themselves in a situation where the government wants to take their child?
Please check out the references below for confirmation and details of what Frank and Laura discuss. Also, be sure to visit VoteYourFaith.net to access a digital voting guide for your address and other helpful resources so you can see where the candidates stand on important policy issues like this.
Did you enjoy this episode? HELP US SPREAD THE TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY BY SUPPORTING THE PODCAST HERE.
There’s great joy in children. Almighty God meant for children to be blessings, not burdens. They are our future. We invest in them everything we are and everything we have, and they carry into future generations who we are.
It isn’t true that when a person dies, he really dies, because he lives on—not only in the presence of the Lord if he is a Christian, but in the children who live after him. And if those children are born into the family of God, they will carry that influence with them throughout their lives and through their children’s lives after them.
God gives us children as blessings, as benedictions, and as graces to life. In fact, the more children you have, the more potential you have for happiness. I know some don’t believe that, but it’s true.
We need to remember that children are a gift from God. They are God’s blessing upon us. That’s the truth of the Word of Almighty God.1
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